Harvard East Asian Monographs, 346. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor] 2012. viii, 231 pp. (B&W illus.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-06571-0.
International historians of twentieth-century Japan have understood for a long time that liberals found ways to accommodate the colonialism and expansionism of Imperial Japan. This is usually portrayed as a reluctant compromise with ascendant authoritarian ideologies and behaviours. The contribution of Jung-Sun N. Han’s new work is the assertion that leading liberal political theorists, notably Yoshino Sakuzō, embraced the goal of Japanese expansion on the continent and advocated achieving this goal through liberal internationalism. Japanese imperialist stature abroad would enable at home a political life that met the needs of people regardless of pedigree.
An Imperial Path to Modernity fulfills two purposes. First, itis an intellectual biography of Yoshino. It treats Yoshino as a thinker while a student at Tokyo University and in Europe, as a Christian of Hongō Church and disciple of Ebina Danjō, as an on-site observer of the human and political realities in China and Korea, and as a scholar at Tōdai and a publicist for Chūō kōron and the Asahi newspaper. Han does not take the reader on excursions into Yoshino’s childhood, his family, his personal religious faith, or his final years. Second, it is an account of the journey of a set of notions, labeled variously by Han as “liberal imperialist expansion.” These concepts solidified in Yoshino’s mind during the Russo-Japanese War and the Great War, persisted through the Manchurian Incident in the hands of the Japanese Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, and culminated in the Shōwa Kenkyūkai ideology of the late 1930s. Despite the prewar timeframe of the narrative, these ideas are not posited as causes of war, but rather as considered responses to the continental violence, political chaos, economic change and big-power hegemony that confronted Japan.
Jung-Sun N. Han is on the faculty of International Studies at Korea University in Seoul. The present study is an outgrowth of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Washington. She utilizes a wide range of primary and secondary Japanese and English-language sources and conducted research at the Yoshino Sakuzō Memorial Museum in Miyagi.
Han reminds us that in the early twentieth century the notion of “ethical imperialism” was embraced by liberals throughout the world, including Yoshino and his associates Tokutomi Sohō and Ukita Kazutami. Yoshino’s education at Tokyo University grounded him in a Hegelian, nation-state-centred view of human progress in which government was the primary agent for betterment. Under the preaching of Pastor Ebina Danjō, Yoshino came to understand this as a secularized Christian cultural order. It was at Hongō Church where he listened to Shimada Saburō’s liberal rationale for colonization, wherein Korea could be lifted from its backward torpor and transformed by a rigorous and progressive Japan. Throughout his scholarly career ran a consistent commitment to the Meiji ethos of constitutional monarchy to which Yoshino applied the term minponshugi, or government in the interest of the people. He was a liberal in the sense that he wished to cleanse the Meiji spirit of the absolutist influences of bureaucracy and transcendental cabinets. After the First World War, Yoshino was drawn to the labour activism of Suzuki Bunji—also a Hongō congregant—as a means to spread economic benefits among the working classes and to the democratic socialist movement which called on the government to be the mover for economic reform and efficiency.
Drawing from the reports Yoshino sent back to Hongō Church, Han vividly depicts the field experience of Yoshino in China. The recent university graduate spent three years after the Russo-Japanese War in Tianjin as the private tutor of the son of Yuan Shikai. What he saw in China convinced him of the educational role Japan could play to bring China into modernity. When the Qing Dynasty abdicated in 1912, Yoshino was disappointed that China embraced the republicanism of America rather than the constitutional monarchy of Japan. In 1914 Yoshino supported Japan’s Twenty-one Demands, even the notorious Fifth Group of requests. Throughout his career Yoshino accepted the common wisdom that China was incapable of the polity and borders of a modern state. Nonetheless, he welcomed rising nationalism in both China and Korea as signs that, with patient guidance by Japan, these societies could be cleansed of repressive social institutions and throw off the shackles imposed by Western, and even Japanese, commercial exploitation.
Yoshino’s sensitivity to the interest of colonials increased noticeably after World War I. In his writings he enjoined a debate on the application of the Meiji Constitution in Korea and Taiwan, and was critical of condescending attitudes toward colonials among his compatriots. The Reimeikai—a liberal student organization he inspired—promoted yūwa (amalgamation) as a colonial policy alternative to dōka (assimilation). Yoshino believed that, in the postwar settlement and the founding of the League of Nations, the might-is-right ethic had been uprooted, and Japan should follow suit by eschewing naked militarism and selfish interest. By applying the new tenets of international morality, Japan could mount liberal internationalism to an elevated stature among nations. At the same time, he warned that the new world order was conservative in that the powers retained their dominant role.
In the final two chapters of the book, Han moves away from Yoshino to address how Yoshino’s brand of liberalism played out in the hands of others during and after the Manchurian Incident. Here the focus is upon the Japan Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, which wrestled in the IPR’s biennial conferences with Japan’s military action in Manchuria, the form of Japanese leadership in post-Mukden Manchuria, and an East Asian order to succeed the demise of League of Nations influence in the region. In his many references to the IPR, it is surprising that Han says nothing about Nitobe Inazō, chairman of the Japanese Council from 1928 until his death in 1933 and head of the delegations to the IPR conferences Han treats. Han does rightly focus on an intellectual, Rōyama Masamichi, who was Yoshino’s student and successor at Tōdai and a leading theorist and spokesman for Japan at IPR meetings. As a member of Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro’s brain trust, Rōyama after the opening of the China War laid the intellectual foundations for kyōdōtai, or “East Asian cooperative community,” which rationalized aggression. Here we see in full bloom what Eri Hotta terms meishuron Pan-Asianism, or East Asian integration under deliberate Japanese instigation.
Han’s work on Yoshino Sakuzō’s thought adds immeasurably to our understanding of early twentieth-century Japanese liberals and how their benevolent impulses were folded into the self-serving imperial project.
Thomas W. Burkman
University at Buffalo (SUNY), Buffalo, USA
pp. 860-863