Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. xviii, 317 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-1061-3.
Into the Field is a well-written, meticulously researched intellectual biography of anthropologist Izumi Seiichi (1915–1970). Second, it is a study of his transwar generation of human scientists, whom Kadia dubs the “men of one age” or “field generation.” Third, to contextualize Izumi’s career, it offers short introductions to topics including the Japanese puppet Mongol state of Mōkyō; the development of American studies in Japan and Japanese studies and area studies in the United States; the “Inca boom” in Japan; ethnic Japanese in Brazil; pre-Incan civilizations in Peru; student protests of 1968; and concepts including race, culture, objectivity, modernization, and Nihonjinron. Readers may be frustrated by shallow coverage of topics in their field while being inspired to learn more about others.
The structure is chronological, but Izumi’s varied career means each chapter focuses on a different topic. It begins with fieldwork in the empire. As an undergraduate at Keijō Imperial University in Japan’s colony Korea, Izumi was inspired by reading Malinowski to study “primitive” people. He joined an advisor on fieldwork sponsored by the Kwangtung Army in an Oroqen village near the Manchukuo-Soviet border, where he supplied subjects with opium in return for interviews. Izumi’s report was published in Minzokugaku kenkyū (Japanese Journal of Ethnology), and the next year he studied a different Tungusic group and published another article, all before he graduated.
We get little feel for Izumi as a person or a scholar here. Kadia describes his academic writings but rarely quotes from them or from his autobiography. Yet through these early experiences, Kadia describes characteristics of imperial human science: fieldwork in remote strategic locations, government or military sponsorship, newspaper publicity, “objectivity” and “scientific” knowledge as goals, a focus on minzoku (translated as race-nation) rather than simply race, and blaming signs of cultural and social decline such as opium use and language loss on Chinese influence while describing Japanese imperialism as benevolent.
After war began in 1937 one more feature was added: large group fieldwork. Izumi played a leading role in two expeditions, to Mōkyō in 1938 and to New Guinea in 1943, supported by universities, government, corporations, newspapers, and the military. Kadia quotes the leader of the Mōkyō expedition explaining that “[s]cholars are the front line of the march … humble troops in the culture war on the Asian continent” (44). The research reports assigned Japan a moral responsibility to rescue Mongols and other ethnic groups from Chinese exploitation, but Kadia notes that these expeditions provided little useful information for policy makers or military planners. They were more successful in generating public fascination with exotic “others” through newspapers, documentaries, and exhibitions, and building up academic fields, including ethnology. Importantly, they established group fieldwork as standard, and cemented personal and institutional ties by bringing together diverse groups of scholars in remote locations where, supplied with prodigious quantities of alcohol, they learned more about each other than the people they were studying.
In the postwar period they adapted to—and helped create—new national aims and values, funding sources, and global connections that closed off some research possibilities and opened up others. Japan’s human scientists and America’s pioneering postwar Japan scholars began to build personal and institutional relationships and establish programs that still exist. But Kadia also emphasizes how research done to support imperial Japan was turned to American Cold War uses, as in the Human Relations Area Files project that translated studies on strategically important areas, including Izumi’s report on the Mongolian expedition, with CIA funding.
In the postwar period, explains Kadia, the ideals imposed on and accepted by Japan were democracy, capitalism, and peace, and since achieving these meant building a “cultural nation” (bunka kokka), culture became the key subject of analysis for human scientists. Izumi helped build Japan’s first cultural anthropology program at the University of Tokyo. He also began a series of studies on migration within and beyond Japan: villagers in Hokkaidō, Koreans from Jejudo in Tokyo, and later, pioneering work on Japanese emigrants and their descendants in Brazil that made him a founder of Nikkei studies.
One reason Izumi looked abroad for research opportunities, suggests Kadia, was an “ethnographic refusal” experience when he was chastised by an Ainu interviewee for “exploiting us” (139). From 1958 to 1969 he conducted archaeological digs in Peru. There he not only changed scholars’ understanding of Andean history but developed new methods that included assembling interdisciplinary teams and collaborating with local indigenous communities and scholars. Although his discoveries at Kotosh were from the Chavín era (going back to 900 BCE) and far earlier, they ignited an “Inca boom” in Japan because Incas were the familiar symbol of Peru’s past.
Kadia argues that the Inca boom pushed aside lingering concerns over war guilt and “ushered in a new, more positive formulation of Japanese identity: Nihonjinron, or the ideology of Japanese uniqueness” (184). This reviewer is not persuaded. Kadia points to a 1966 book by Masuda Yoshio arguing that both the Incas and Tokugawa Japan were isolated and ethnically pure, managed their states efficiently, and were skilled at cultural borrowing. Such ideas could just as well be a result as a cause of Nihonjinron. Kadia herself offers another explanation: “the very success of modernization led to the creation of a national identity that returned attention to racial and cultural sources of Japan’s supposed preeminence” (186).
In her final chapter, Kadia argues that by the upheavals of 1968 the “men of one age” realized that their cherished objectivity had limitations and that modernization had costs, but did not admit responsibility for supporting the state before 1945. Therefore “it was they who inaugurated the changes that ultimately forced them and their worldview from authority” (190). Of course none of this was unique to Japan, as she acknowledges. Kadia asserts that the next generation of human scholars rejected objectivity and embraced Nihonjinron. One wishes she had qualified this. Surely only part of that generation “trained an analytical gaze on the Self with the goal of understanding and reinforcing Japan’s contemporary economic dominance” (214).
Kadia is critical of Izumi and his generation for several things, including their wartime work and their failure to understand the complaints of student protestors in 1968, but she leaves final judgements to the reader. This book nicely complements Andrew E. Barshay’s work on social scientists (The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Into the Field is an important, thought-provoking, impressively researched contribution to our understanding of how human scientists shaped Japan’s views of itself and others in the twentieth century.
Timothy S. George
University of Rhode Island, Kingston