WAITING FOR THE COOL MOON: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan’s Empire | By Wendy Matsumura

Ascendant fascism in today’s crisis of capitalism, compounded by ecological crisis in the agrarian sectors worldwide, compels us to rethink the complex relationship between capitalist crisis, agrarian crisis, and fascism. Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan’s Empire is an exemplary case of rethinking Japan’s fascist experience during the interwar period from the perspective of the current fascist conjuncture, and it analyzes an important method by which the Japanese state tried to save capitalism from its inevitable and periodic economic crises and extricate the national economy from chronic economic depression. How did the Shōwa state (1926–1989), which was so fearful of a socialist revolution in the countryside, react to Japan’s chronic agrarian crisis after World War I?

Wendy Matsumura’s book gives us a good example of what Louis Althusser called interpellation, or the ideological “call” from the state to its subjects, which represents an imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence that serves to reproduce the class of wage-labour. Waiting for the Cool Moon shows how one of the most powerful means of state interpellation was the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce’s 1921 “Farm Household Survey” (Nōka Keizai Chōsa), which gathered statistical data from individual household reports on their “labour-capacity” (rōdō nōryoku) and “labour efficiency” (rōdō nōritsu), as well as on everyday expenditures, working hours, days of rest, the number of children in the household, deaths of family members, and so forth (30–36). Based on this data, Japanese families could qualify for state financial relief. The state’s depression-era policies of providing relief to impoverished rural households was thus more accurately an economic policing mechanism, one that enlisted families to become self-managing and self-accounting households that reported their economic data directly to the state. The Farm Household Survey, which targeted the household economy (oikos)as an object of investigation, was an “oikonomic tool that the ministry wielded to repair cracks in the state’s legitimacy in the ailing countryside” (29).

The Japanese household and family were thus hardly the natural or eternal social forms of human organization that pre-war Japanese social scientists and policy makers commonly imagined them to be, on both the Left and the Right. Rather, the family and the household were contested and often violent sites of political organization and exclusionary politics, as well as sites of economic exchange, production, and social reproduction. They were also sites of unaccounted premature deaths of young and racialized women from Japan’s colonial hinterlands, such as the death of Sachiko Yamashiro (156–157). The national statistics of Japanese households could only have appeared on the basis of making the unpaid labour of colonized women, as well as their deaths, disappear. This erasure “made it possible for [Japanese] families that appear in the report … to transform themselves into success stories worthy of being celebrated as models for the rest of the nation” (99). To wit, the Farm Household Survey remade small farm households into “apparatuses through which fascism instantiated itself in the body politic of Japan” (13–14).

The many voices of anti-imperialist struggles that Matsumura documents are heard most powerfully during the post-World War I agrarian crisis in Japan, notably by buraku and Korean women activists, e.g., the 1927 struggles over the expropriation of land north of the Asama River in Mie Prefecture (50–53); the struggles against the intensification of work with no pay increases at the Matsukata Momen Company in 1934 (65–68); the struggles in 1931 against state austerity policies and the unemployment relief system (69–77); the strike against unequal pay between men and women at the Kishiwada Spinning Factory (81); and the strikes in 1929 against wage-cuts, layoffs, and the 12-hour working day at the fertilizer and phosphate corporation, Taki Seihi (122–129). Matsumura also amplifies the voices of the Kinyūkai (Rose of Sharon Society), which emphasized that, “Unless women workers are released from their slave-like chains through the liberation of the working class, and unless the ethnic-racial (minzokuteki) discrimination is abolished, the working class will not be free” (113–114). The Suiheisha movement further elaborated upon this proto-intersectional analysis by identifying the “triple suffering” of proletarian buraku women (chapter 3).

What theoretical problem(s) do these diverse struggles lead us to rethink? On the one hand, Matsumura relies on Sylvia Wynter’s framework of the pieza, or the standard of exchange of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which represented and figured Black bodies as fungible and dehumanized units of labour. Wynter’s analysis reminds us that anti-Black racism was a standard of capitalist exchange itself, and we can add that it was also a fundamental characteristic of the historical development of capitalism in its mercantilist stage, based on merchant capital. This is relevant for the analysis of capitalist development in Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 because the Meiji state’s first economic policy was one of mercantilism (1868–1890). On the other hand, Matsumura develops “social reproduction theory,” which emphasizes the gender politics of the reproduction of the labour-power commodity. In this framework, work, the labour process under capitalism, and capitalist exploitation all have to be grasped beyond the point of capitalist production and within the commonly informal yet intimate spaces of the domestic household, i.e., in the everyday life of familial and non-familial social relations, where, under capitalism, gendered and racialized divisions of labour extend anddistort distinctions between paid and unpaid labour, free and unfree labour.

By combining these two perspectives, we gain clarity on the racialized and gendered standards of exchange that mediate what Uno Kōzō called the impossibility of the commodification of labour power (90). We are also exposed to the doubling- and tripling- effects of the exploitation of the proletariat and its class struggle, now expressed in discourses for racial and gender equality within, and around, the agrarian household economy. These struggles have not been properly registered in the historical consciousness of revolutionary organizing. Waiting for the Cool Moon—which is a waiting for a “sign that their dream of turning the world upside down is not theirs alone,” but a “dream shared by many” (162)—is a welcome antidote to this omission, and a must read for anyone interested in anti-imperialist struggles in the heart of Japan’s empire and beyond.

Ken Kawashima

University of Toronto, Toronto