Japan Archives - Not Even Past

Kusumoto Ine: A Remarkable Woman in Meiji Restoration Japan

On September 23, 1873, Japan’s young emperor Meiji received tragic news. His consort, Hamuro Mitsuko, had died, five days after delivering a stillborn boy. Sadly, such deaths were not uncommon. The imperial house suffered from high rates of maternal and infant mortality, probably due to some combination of inbreeding and poor diet. Ironically, their elite diet of white rice, unlike the humble Japanese diet of brown rice and millet, led to vitamin B deficiencies and related health problems. One detail of Mitsuko’s labor and delivery warrants special attention, even almost 150 years later. Mitsuko was attended by Kusumoto Ine (1827-1903), Japan’s first female physician.

Kusumoto was an unlikely candidate to serve the imperial house. She was the daughter of a Nagasaki courtesan named Taki, rather than an elite family. Her father was not Japanese, but rather a German physician, Franz von Siebold, who had worked for the Dutch East India Company. Siebold was banished from Japan when Ine was only two. He had exchanged maps with Japanese scholars and physicians, and the shogunate concluded that he was a foreign spy.

*Nagasaki Harbour, Kawahara Keiga (workshop of), c. 1833 – c. 1836, RIjkmuseum, NG-1190*

By almost every measure, she was an outsider: the mixed-race, illegitimate daughter of a courtesan and a foreigner. Ine’s rise from humble origins to the highest circles of Japanese society was part of the revolutionary potential of Japan in the 1860s and 1870s. For bold and ambitious people like Ine, the window between the collapse of the old order, the Tokugawa shogunate, and the consolidation of the new Meiji state, was a period of possibility. For a relatively brief historical moment, Ine’s intelligence and skill mattered more than her birth status or gender. Ine was “born at the right time.”

*Kusumoto Ine, photographer unknown (via Wikipedia and original post)*

In an earlier generation, Ine’s career would have been thwarted by conventional Japanese restrictions on women in the public sphere, as well as the traditional status system. While many Japanese women acquired basic literacy, and some became accomplished poets, women rarely learned classical Chinese, which was central to higher learning. Nor would Ine have been able to transcend her low status. Access to the emperor was so restricted that when the Emperor Nakamikado wished to view an elephant in 1729, the animal first had to be given imperial court rank. And in the early 1800s, the imperial court would not have been interested in a doctor trained in Western medicine.

In a later generation, Ine would have faced different challenges. Beginning in 1868, the new Meiji government instituted “westernizing” and “modernizing” reforms, including new western-style universities. That interest in western knowledge helped advance Ine’s career, since she had learned western-style medicine from her father’s circle of students. But the Meiji government’s westernizing reforms included western-style restrictions on women. Following western models, Japan began to regulate medicine, requiring licensing exams and formal training at recognized schools. But those schools, also following western models, were almost exclusively male. Ine rose to prominence before those restrictions, and she was allowed to continue practicing medicine under a “grandfather clause,” but only as an “old-style midwife” rather than a physician. Thus, the new Meiji government did not liberate women so much as change how it would deny them positions in public life. Viewed from the perspective of Ine’s life, the samurai who “modernized” Japan merely introduced Victorian patriarchal norms to replace Neo-Confucian restrictions.

*Ships in Nagasaki harbor, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1956-461*

Much of Ine’s life seems remarkably “modern.” She was an accomplished professional woman who moved in the highest circles of Japanese society. In the 1860s, before serving the imperial house, Ine worked as house physician to the lord of Uwajima. Seeing her treated with respect by the nobility, foreign observers assumed she was of samurai status.

Ine’s family was global and sprawling. She reconnected with her father in the 1860s, after he was allowed to return to Japan, and established a relationship with her half-brothers Alexander and Heinrich, Siebold’s sons by his German wife. Ine chose to raise her daughter, Tada, as a single mother. Tada’s father was Ishii Sōken (1796–1861), one of Siebold’s students and Ine’s teachers. Ine accepted Sōken’s instruction and professional support, but refused to marry him. Her decision likely had a #metoo component: after her mother’s death, Tada reported that Sōken had raped Ine. Ine navigated that fraught relationship with determination, rejecting Sōken’s marriage proposals but accepting his career help.

*Ine’s daughter, Kusumoto Takako (right) and her husband Mise Shūzō (Wikipedia).*

But Ine’s story also shows the “lumpiness” of history — there is rarely a straight path from “then” to “now.” Rather we find moments in the past that seem more “modern” than recent events. Ine’s story leaps out to us as an example of events from 150 years ago that seem immediate and directly connected to our present moment.

For more on the “lumpy” history of modern Japan, see:

Mark Ravina, Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History (2017)

Marius B. Jansen, Sakamoto Ryōma and the Meiji Restoration (1961). A classic study of a charismatic rebel leader of the 1860s.

Anne Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Task and the Meiji Restoration (1998). A thoughtful feminist intervention: the Meiji Restoration as seen through the life of a politically engaged woman poet.

Mark Ravina. The Last Samurai: the Life and Battle of Saigō Takamori (2004). My biography of the most controversial figure in the early Meiji government

Top image credit: Kawahara Keiga, Arrival of a Dutch Ship, depicting Ine, Taki, and Siebold at Dejima (Wikipedia).

Nanban Art: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 2)

(via Wikimedia Commons)

This series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways written archives alone cannot.

John Monsour’s exhibit on Nanban screenfolds exemplify the deep connections of the colonial Americas to early-modern Japan. Portuguese Jesuits and merchants arrived in southern Japan in the mid-sixteenth century with commodities from India, Europe, and the Americas and with hundreds of Luso-Africans. The foreigners were called “Nanban” (barbarians from the south). The Jesuits gained a foothold with Japanese lords that led to the massive conversions of commoners and nobles. Jesuits and Japanese artisan established workshops that produced many Nanban objects, including screenfolds documenting new European cosmographies. The maps also document the introduction of Chinese-Korean maps. Monsour’s exhibit shows the maps on Edo workshops led by Jesuit and the new cosmographies they engendered.

More from the Colonial Latin America Through Objects series:

Of Merchants and Nature by Diana Heredia López

Rethinking American Grand Strategy in the Asia Pacific

By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783. By Michael J. Green. Illustrated. 725 pp. Columbia University Press. $45.

by Jonathan R. Hunt
University of Southhampton

First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (October 23, 2017).

Otto von Bismarck once remarked that the United States was blessed: “The Americans are truly a lucky people. They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbours and to the east and west by fish.” Thanks to this geographic grace, George Washington could call for freedom from “entangling alliances” in his farewell address. This distance has also bred a strong undercurrent of parochialism and chauvinism in American culture. From these two impulses has emerged the conceptual DNA of American foreign relations in the form of two dichotomies—exemplarism versus interventionism; cosmopolitanism versus exceptionalism—lending form and structure to debates about how a democratic people should manage their affairs in an often unkind, even hostile, world.

In his sweeping and authoritative account of United States grand strategy in the Asia Pacific, Michael J. Green reminds us that Americans have long regarded this maritime expanse – from the Aleutians to Cape Horn in the Western Hemisphere across to Australasia and Sakhalin in the Eastern — as integral to defending their ‘empire of liberty’. Nineteenth-century policymakers from Thomas Jefferson and Matthew C. Perry to Henry Seward and John Hay sought to pry open these watery frontiers to American influence (and conquest) so as to stave off any threats that might overleap the Pacific Ocean. Their twentieth-century successors, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt, George Marshall and Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, George Shultz and Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have fought to keep the Pacific an American lake – for now.

Green brings scholarly and policymaking credentials to this tour d’horizon. Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and an associate professor at Georgetown University (not to mention the Asia hand in George W. Bush’s White House), he is supremely qualified to narrate and appraise more than two centuries of decisions, processes, and events. On a hemispheric tableau teeming with squadrons, legations, missionaries, gunboats, marines, emissaries, island chains, and good intentions, he paints a United States government in pursuit of a “distinct strategic approach” that would guarantee “that the Pacific Ocean remain[ed] a conduit for American ideas and goods to flow westward, and not for threats to flow eastward toward the homeland.” (5)

The Alaska Purchase, 1867. Left to Right: Robert S. Chew, Secretary of State (USA); William H. Seward; William Hunter; Mr. Bodisco, Russian Ambassador; Baron de Stoeckl, Charles Sumner; Fredrick W. Seward (via Wikimedia Commons)

Green charts this strategic disposition from the Articles of Confederation to Obama’s pivot to Asia, dividing the chronology into four eras when a rising power—the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and China—convulsed the region’s politics. American assertiveness waxed as European empires toggled from New World outposts to Asian colonialism in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. In short order, Jefferson’s greater Louisiana brought on James Monroe’s enunciation of an American protectorate in its hemisphere, John Tyler’s extension of that Monroe Doctrine to the Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i to natives Polynesians), and William Seward’s purchase of Alaska (dubbed his ‘ice box’), before the Civil War cut short the Pacific ambitions of Lincoln’s secretary of state.

This section is rich in geography and personality, acquainting readers with a century-long campaign to seize “stepping stones,” most pivotally Hawai’i, in the Pacific, introducing swashbucklers like Captain David Porter, whose piratical voyage to the Pacific in the War of 1812 foreshadowed the fusion of mercenary and military aims that would become the country’s modus operandi, and keeping a running tally of plenipotentiaries (of uneven quality) who served in an ever more prostrate Qing China. Green’s treatment of dusty concordats such as the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin, in which the United States pledged its “good offices” to Beijing in dealings with rapacious British, French, and Russians after the second Opium War, and the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which recognized Chinese eminent domain over its whole territory, is welcome. He is sharp on the strategic contours of these many-sided rivalries; yet, while alive to the noxious influence of Anglo-Saxonism in nineteenth-century American culture, his tendency to treat republican virtues as more significant in U.S. foreign policy than Manifest Destiny chauvinism yields a handful of errors and omissions.

Green’s heroes are, above all, republican realists, high priests at the altar of the balance of power who still find ways to promote democracy, the rule of law, and free trade in the wider world. Thus, his hinge is fin-de-siècle power couple are Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan—the quintessential man of action married to the man of ideas. The latter expounded a strategic theory based on naval bases, sea lanes, and deep-water armadas; the former built a Great White Fleet to enforce it. The tendency to view America’s holdings in the Pacific, mostly insular takings such as Guam, Hawai’i, and the Philippines, as incidental rather than intrinsic to American power leads Green to paint the Bull Moose in overly Mahanian hues, emphasizing his naval leadership and power-balancing after the 1905 Russo-Japanese war while downplaying his protectionism and colonialism. What passed for strategic élan in Washington, after all, in Manila simply looked like another instance of imperialism. He is on firmer grounds in his treatment of John Hay’s push for trade reciprocity in China, contesting Wisconsin School members who deem the Open Notes clear evidence that the United States was (and remains) a capitalist octopus in ravenous search of pliant markets.

“AND, AFTER ALL, THE PHILIPPINES ARE ONLY THE STEPPING-STONE TO CHINA” – cartoon from Judge Magazine showing Uncle Sam with the “tools of modern civilization” using the Philippines as a stepping stone to China, ca. early 1900s (via Wikimedia Commons)

His appraisal of Asia policy from Teddy Roosevelt to cousin Franklin is scathing, and for good reason. Wilson sold out Korea and China’s Shangdong province to Japan for his League of Nations, before Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover retracted U.S. power after Teddy’s ally, Henry Cabot Lodge, nixed an American role in the league. Green includes a revealing vignette about American interwar finance, as William Straight and J. P. Morgan sought Chinese debt before the crash of October 24, 1929, put paid to their schemes. For Green, the Department of State’s willingness to accommodate Japan, whose militaristic expansions would upset the (perhaps excessively) elegant Washington Treaty, violated Mahan’s signature insight—playing sides against one another to avert a peer regional competitor from arising. Although the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere bore this warning out, he dismisses too perfunctorily the alternatives that Franklin Roosevelt’s Asianists—Lawrence A. Lowell, Joseph Grew, Stanley Hornbeck, and John Von Antwerp MacMurray—put forth. After all, MacMurray’s call to retrench at the Second Island Chain prefigured modern realists like Barry Posen, whose 2014 Restraint contends that the United States would best observe Mahan’s dictum by re-drawing its defense lines further west while retaining command of the commons. (To be fair, assured nuclear retaliation has now nullified whatever existential threats had existed.)

What happened after the United States sanctioned Japan for yet another massacre in China in 1940, after seven years of turning a blind eye (par for the course in the Guernica decade), was the country’s first fair fight in the Pacific. Green is too credulous that Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war (Tsuyoshi Hasegawa shows that the Soviet declaration of war was equally if not more decisive), but his verdict that Roosevelt and Truman failed to leverage Chester Nimitz and Douglas MacArthur’s military triumphs on behalf of a grand strategy that would deliver post-war security is devastating. When the Soviet Union switched from wartime ally to geo-ideological adversary, U.S. officials overlooked the Kuomingtang’s weakness and Mao Tse-Tung’s zeal; as a result, they held out on China serving as a fourth United Nations policeman. This even as Chiang Kai-Shek’s battle lines crumbled, in part for lack of American support (apart from a woefully inadequate 900 military advisors), leading to the loss of China and setting in train a series of events that would culminate in the militarization of containment in Korea and the Americanization of the war for peace in Vietnam.

The Cold War tested American grand strategy in ways new and old, first with proxy wars fused to anticolonial struggles, and then the Soviet Union’s massive naval build-up in the 1980s. Next to old chestnuts such as the extent of continuity in personnel and policy between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations is the conspicuous omission of the former’s obsession with China’s nuclear-weapons program (its first nuclear test was on October 16, 1964); even though it was nearly a decade before Beijing fielded a survivable arsenal, the first Asian nuclear-weapon state was a game-changer, catalysing the Vietnam War, severely constraining U.S. military options once there, and helping usher the People’s Republic into the United Nations. Likewise, there is a clear and disturbing hierarchy of liberal values for Green, with genocide ranking far lower than free trade. When he supports the contention that “noble cause” advocates make that the war helped cauterize communist insurgencies in Indochina, Malaysia, and Thailand, for instance, he glosses over the 500,000 Indonesians estimated dead in the mass killings that shepherded the Suharto dictatorship into power in Jakarta.

Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. It was the first trip made by an American president to the nation, 1972 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Nixon earns plaudits as an unsentimental president who ended twenty-five years of non-recognition between the most powerful and most populous nations on Earth; but Reagan, who convinced Japan to serve as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” (405) invested massively in the U.S. Navy, and midwifed democracy movements in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan, receives the lion’s share of praise. In Green’s telling, his emphasis on security and stability afforded strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos and Park Chung-hee the leeway to sanction free elections. Reagan’s application of military, ministerial, and moral instruments to a coherent strategy in the region affords a case study for wedding power to principle effectively. Green also holds it to offer lessons for the newest and most challenging contender for regional pre-eminence: The People’s Republic China.

The final section dovetails with a set of vigorous debates now gripping Washington and Asian capitals. Can the United States and China resolve differences without military recourse as Beijing stakes its position in the South China Sea and Senkaku islands? Will America’s hubs-and-spoke network of alliances survive as China’s wealth and power cast a spell over neutrals and allies alike? Can Washington nudge the alphabet soup of multilateral institutions toward trans-oceanic rather than intra-regional orientations, especially now that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is comatose? Will the U.S. join the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or acquiesce to the PRC’s “One Belt One Road” initiative of ports, highways, railways, and pipelines? Will Washington and its partners succeed in embedding Beijing as a stakeholder in the global rules-based order or will it shear off its sphere of influence from the norms and institutions that expedited its return to greatness?

Bill Clinton garners high marks for his strategy of engaging and balancing China, a two-pronged approach that George W. Bush and Barack Obama would adopt. And while Donald Trump’s beleaguered and inept administration has so far proven less unorthodox than anticipated on trade, Green’s emphasis on island chains, aircrafts carriers, and strategic sea-lift when compared to human rights, labour, immigration, and cultural dialogue yields a deafening silence on the centrifugal forces now eviscerating what once passed as bipartisan consensus on the importance of engagement in the Asia-Pacific for the security and prosperity of the United States.

Also by Jonathan Hunt on Not Even Past:

1986 Reykjavík Summit between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev
Iran’s Nuclear Program and the History of the IAEA
Review: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy

Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we have been posting their suggestions throughout the month. This is our last set of book recommendations; this week we feature books on women and gender in East Asia and South Asia.

Huaiyin Li recommends:

Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (1999)

Focusing on the life stories of five prominent women activists in twentieth-century China, this book examines Chinese feminism in the Republican era and its fate under the socialist state. Its depiction of the feminists’ pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation contrasts sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s master narrative of women’s liberation under its leadership.

Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011)

Based on interviews with 72 village women in Shaanxi province, this book shows how the Chinese Communist Party’s policy reshaped women’s agriculture work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting from the 1950s through the 1970s. It also addresses the intriguing questions of how memories are gendered and how gender figured in the making of socialism in Chinese agriculture. (Reviewed on Not Even Past).

Nancy Stalker recommends:

Jan Bardsley, Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan (2014)

(Bloomsbury, 2016) is an engaging new work that reveals gender roles and gender politics in the 1950s through close readings of diverse popular media. Focusing on newsworthy events centered around women, such as the wedding of the imperial prince to a commoner and Japan’s first Miss Universe title, Bardsley reveals the media construction of the “housewife” embedded within discourses on postwar democracy, Cold War geopolitics, and US – Japan relations.

Cynthia Talbot recommends:

Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India (2012).

This book combines historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to track the fate of South India’s devadasis, originally Hindu temple dancers who came to be regarded as prostitutes as India was transformed by colonial modernity. Typically unmarried and residing in quasi-matrilineal communities, devadasis often served as concubines or courtesans for elite men but came under increasing condemnation by social reformists beginning in the mid-nineteenth century; they were officially outlawed in 1947. Soneji goes beyond the standard narrative of social change in colonial India by including an extensive examination of the role of dance in Indian royal courts and a sensitive exploration of the memories of ex-devadasis in this innovative, well-written work.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Great Books (US)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

Notes from the Field: Northeast Japan after the Tsunami

I lived near the port city of Kesennuma, in northeastern Japan, from 2006 to 2008. That was several years before the event they call 3/11. That’s March 11, 2011, the day a record-setting earthquake and tsunami devastated the area and cost over 18,000 lives. Most of the victims were Japanese, but several foreigners died as well, including two Americans who were doing same the job I had done: teaching English in elementary and junior high schools.

Kesennuma Fishing Port in 2006. Via Wikimedia Commons. — Kesennuma Fishing Port in 2006.

I kept in touch with several friends in Japan after I returned to the United States to attend graduate school. When the tsunami hit and it became clear just how bad the damage was, there was a long, tense period as I waited to hear from them through email or Facebook or mutual acquaintances. Fortunately, nobody I knew died in the tragedy. But many of them did lose their homes, their cars, and their own family members, friends, students, and neighbors.

Shishiori-Karakuwa Station after the 2011 Tsunami. Via Wikimedia Commons. — Shishiori-Karakuwa Station after the 2011 Tsunami.

I couldn’t help but wonder how the place I used to live had changed. In the months following the disaster I heard about the shops and homes that had been washed away, about the temporary housing that cropped up, and about the giant beached ships (Kesennuma is a major commercial fishing port) that were left sitting inland after the waters receded.

The blue placard near the window of a Karakuwa shrine shop marks the tsunami's water line. Many businesses in the area feature similar placards. — The blue placard near the window of a Karakuwa shrine shop marks the tsunami’s water line. Many businesses in the area feature similar placards.

My dissertation involves Japan, though it is not related to the tsunami, and I received the opportunity to research there for the 2013-2014 academic year. I was thrilled to go back, and even more thrilled that through happenstance and the invaluable help of Japanese historians on both sides of the Pacific I was able to live in the same general part of the country I had lived in years before. This time I was three hours away from Kesennuma, close enough to visit relatively easily.

Nothing I had heard could have prepared me for what I saw there. While many buildings I recognized were still standing, and some had already been rebuilt, large swaths of the town were simply gone. One of Kesennuma’s two rail stations had been destroyed, and I did not have a car, so I traveled there by bus. It dropped off in the middle of several cracked foundations. Only by memory could I tell that I was a stone’s throw from the site of a restaurant I used to frequent. A friend picked me up at the bus stop, and on our way to his home in my old neighborhood we passed a fishing vessel tipped on its side. The ocean was several meters away on the righthand side of the road, and the ship was on the left.

A bus stop in Kesennuma City. These foundations are that's left of buildings that once stood here. In some parts of this city there are acres of nothing but foundations. — A bus stop in Kesennuma City. These foundations are that’s left of buildings that once stood here. In some parts of this city there are acres of nothing but foundations.

In my old neighborhood we drove past the site of an elementary school I used to teach at. It had been a century-old wooden building, architecturally beautiful but with a permanent stench from bad plumbing. It had probably needed to be replaced, but not like this. In its place was a cluster of small, plasticky temporary houses that stood out among the modern homes and large, old wooden ones that survived the disaster. Many observers have argued, and I agree, that the Japanese government has been too slow to replace the tens of thousands of destroyed residences in the affected parts of the country.

Temporary houses in Karakuwa, the neighborhood of Kesennuma City where I used to live. Most people displaced by the tsunami stayed near their original homes, either with relatives or in temporary housing, but some moved to other cities in the area like Sendai City and Ichinoseki City. — Temporary houses in Karakuwa, a neighborhood in Kesennuma City. Most people displaced by the tsunami stayed near their original homes, either with relatives or in temporary housing, but some moved to other cities in the area like Sendai City and Ichinoseki City.

While there was ample physical evidence of the disaster, the attitudes of the people I met and renewed friendships with were almost universally “genki”—a Japanese word meaning healthy, happy, and lively. One friend who lost her home and her business on 3/11 treated me to her memories of that day, and concluded by insisting “This [loss of property] is not sad. Because there were many people who lost their lives.”

However, the nuclear aspect of the disaster is still a source of concern for many. The troubled and leaking Fukushima reactor is just a few hours south of Kesennuma. I visited one shop in nearby Sendai City that advertised “Fukushima-free” foods, made without any agricultural or sea-based products from the area around the plant. Every scientific study I know of has determined that food from most of Fukushima is safe to eat, but farmers there are having a hard time convincing the public to buy their goods. Almost every day’s television news broadcast leads with an update on the damaged plant. On the other hand, at one sushi party I attended another foreigner asked whether any of the fish was from waters off Fukushima. A Japanese patron responded, “Maybe, but we can’t worry about it.” Not to eat fish is too great a sacrifice.

A bowl of raw seafood. Some of this may have come from water near the damaged Fukushima reactor, but when it's right in front you, you just "can't worry about it." — A bowl of raw seafood. Some of this may have come from water near the damaged Fukushima reactor, but when it’s right in front you, you just “can’t worry about it.”

While in Japan I hosted several visitors from America (and two from Australia), and they all reported having a wonderful time. Disaster-affected areas are working to increase tourism to help their ongoing recovery. It is safe to visit the northeast of Japan, and the area is home to several unique, ancient sites that are off the usual tourist path but every bit as rewarding as locations in Tokyo and Kyoto. If you get a chance to go, let me know, and I’ll give you a list. I miss Japan greatly and look forward to going back again someday.

Few foreign tourists visit this breathtaking gorge in northeast Japan, even at peak fall leaf viewing seasons. It is not far from Sendai City.

David Conrad at Takkoku no Iwa, a shrine built into a rock face near Ichinoseki City.

First two images via Wikimedia Commons.

All remaining photos courtesy of David Conrad.

Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)

Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli produced many internationally celebrated and beloved animated films, including the award-wining Spirited Away. His farewell masterpiece, The Wind Rises, however, received mixed reactions from international audiences. Viewers who expected to see a fast-paced fantasy like other Miyazaki movies may have been disappointed, because The Wind Rises is a slow-paced historical film. It traces the life of Horikoshi Jiro, an aircraft engineer who invented the famous Zero fighter, which was used by the Japanese navy during WWII. And it chronicles the life of Jiro’s wife, Nahoko, a fictional character from Hori Tatsuo’s acclaimed novel, on which the film is loosely based. Miyazaki describes the tragic fate of the young couple in the maelstrom of prewar Japan.

The Wind Rises vividly depicts Taisho and Showa Japan from the economic hardships in the 1920s through the rise of militarism in the 1930s. Jiro encounters the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 on a locomotive to Tokyo. The magnitude 7.9 earthquake shook the entire metropolitan area, destroying 111,000 buildings. Moreover, since Japanese houses were mostly built of wood, fire spread rapidly, burning down 212,000 residences. As a result, 105,000 people perished, and Japan lost 47% of GNP. Despite Tokyo’s quick recovery, which surprised Jiro’s younger sister Kayo, the earthquake ushered in recurring economic crises. When Jiro arrives in Nagoya to work for an aviation company, he witnesses a run on a local bank, a common phenomenon during the Financial Crisis of 1927, when widespread hysteria precipitated the collapses of 37 banks throughout Japan. While we watch Jiro striving to produce a high-quality fighter aircraft for the army, the Showa Depression hits Japan in 1929. The worst depression in prewar Japan caused severe deflation, financial meltdown, and countless bankruptcies, leaving 2.5 million people unemployed. Meanwhile, thorugh Jiro’s eyes Miyazaki shows us the contradictions in Japan’s ambition to catch up with the West in modern military technology while its people were suffering from the excruciating poverty. “The fact is this poor country pays us [engineers] a lot of money,” Jiro’s colleague Honjo sneers at him, “Embrace the irony.”

Bank run during the Showa Financial Crisis

Following the so-called Taisho Democracy in the 1920s, symbolized by universal male suffrage, active labor movements, and cooperative diplomacy, militarism engulfed the Japanese society in the 1930s. During this period, Jiro’s romance with Nahoko takes place in the quiet mountains of the Karuizawa resort., A German traveler, Castorp, whose name derives from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, describes the quiet mountains as a shelter from the gloomy atmosphere in Japan caused by the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, and the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. After his engagement with Nahoko, Jiro becomes extremely busy creating a new fighter aircraft under surveillance of the secret police, as Japan prepares for war with the United States. As tuberculosis, then an almost incurable disease, makes Nahoko increasingly feeble, the young couple decides to get married so that they can spend what little time they have left together. Although Jiro becomes ever more engrossed in the project, Japan’s war machine trumps his dream to craft “a beautiful airplane,” when he develops its ideal blueprint. “The weight becomes the big problem,” Jiro explains to his colleagues, “One solution would be… we could leave out the guns. [The colleagues burst into laughter.] So I decided to put this design back on the shelf.” These lines reflect Miyazaki’s caustic sense of humor.

A Japanese Navy Mitsubishi A6M2 "Zero" fighter (tail code A1-108) takes off from the aircraft carrier Akagi, on its way to attack Pearl Harbor during the morning of 7 December 1941. — A Japanese Navy Mitsubishi A6M2 “Zero” fighter (tail code A1-108) takes off from the aircraft carrier Akagi, on its way to attack Pearl Harbor during the morning of 7 December 1941.

While most Japanese films about WWII either glorify or demonize prewar Japan, The Wind Rises movingly depicts the era through a personal tragedy of loss and dashed dreams. Not only did Jiro’s beloved wife pass away in solitude, but the war also destroyed his Zero fighter. In early Showa Japan, Jiro’s beautiful airplane was indeed “a cursed dream,” as Italian aircraft designer Geovanni Caproni tells him in the imaginary world they shared. In the final analysis, however, Miyazaki emphasized not only the tragic history but tells a story about how Japan’s youth tried to live in this time, as indicated by his reference to Paul Valery’s poem: Le vent se lève! Il faut tenter de vivre! The wind is rising! We must try to live!

Student Showcase – The “Knock Knock Who is There” Moment for Japan: The Signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854

By Kathleen Ran

Read the full research paper

In 1854, a fleet of American naval ships arrived in Japan’s Tokyo Bay. The squadron, led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, was charged with the mission of convincing the Tokugawa shogunate to open commercial and diplomatic ties with the West. Beginning in the mid-17th century, the island’s feudal leaders enforced an economic, political and cultural isolation, allowing no contact with foreigners in order to preserve traditional Japanese society. After a series of tense negotiations between Japanese and American officials, including indications from Commodore Perry that his ships were willing to use force, both sides ratified the Kanagawa Treaty, also known as the Convention of Kanagawa, which officially opened Japan to international trade and diplomacy.

Kathleen Ran’s Texas History Day paper, “The ‘Knock Knock Who is There’ Moment for Japan: The Signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854,” explores the historical impact of this watershed agreement on Japanese society. She argues that significant political, economic and cultural changes took place as a result:

Woodblock print portraying an 1854 meeting between Commodore Perry, his officers and Japanese noblemen, circa 1887 (Image courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum)

“The Americans came to Japan and sought access to ports and friendship. They got what they wanted through the Treaty of Kanagawa. The Japanese were reluctant and in some ways were dragged to the treaty table. However, the treaty later turned out to be very profitable to Japan. The Treaty of Kanagawa was primarily responsible for the rapid transformation of Japan from an isolated and feudal empire to one of the world’s most powerful and successful nations.”

The opening of Japan stirred a negative reaction from many segments of Japanese society. This 1861 woodcutting reflects such sentiments, depicting a traditional sumo wrestler throwing a foreigner to the ground. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

“Before the treaty came into effect, the country was far behind in areas of technology, economics and entirely shunned foreign relations. Now, though, Japan is among the world’s cutting-edge producers of technology and an integral part of the world community. The Treaty of Kanagawa opened the door of Japan and initiated the nation’s transformation from a feudal empire to a modern world power; therefore, it was a turning point in history.”

Kathleen Ran
Junior Division
Research Paper

Mark Metzler on Post-War Japan

By Mark Metzler

In the fifteen years after World War II, Japan made an astounding transition from wartime devastation to the boom known as the “Era of High-Speed Growth.” Japan’s High-Speed Growth system was an epoch-making innovation that opened the current Asian age of world industrialization. The inflationary creation of credit by banks funded this industrial transformation, set its directions, and forced its pace. In fact, Japan’s style of hypercapitalist growth illustrates basic principles of capitalist development in an exceptionally clear way. Credit-leveraged growth also has built-in insustainabilities—we see them reflected today in the building up of international debt bubbles on an unprecedented scale. Here too, Japanese experience has lessons to offer.

In trying to grasp this process, I found that the name of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter entered the story in an unexpected way. Not only does Schumpeter’s century-old book, The Theory of Economic Development, help us see this industrial revolution in a clearer light. More surprisingly, Schumpeter’s Japanese students chaired some of the country’s most influential policy councils during this crucial period. They took Schumpeter’s ideas and put them to work in entirely new ways.

Schumpeter’s basic realization was that the inflationary creation of new credit-capital—new purchasing power— mainly by banks, is the basic mechanism of capital creation under modern capitalism. On one hand, this is a form of monetary expropriation: high inflation, by its nature, robs the purchasing power of existing monetary wealth. But in appropriate developmental circumstances, when properly modulated, inflationary credit creation can also generate rapid industrial growth. No past economic system has approached what industrial capitalism has achieved in this respect. In Japan’s case, a highly rationalized system of credit-capital provision funded a kind of growth that seemed miraculous. We might also call it Faustian, for a classic literary work points to some of its sources.

Faustian Capital

In Part Two of Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe presents an allegory of paper money and capitalist development. The scene opens at the court of the emperor at a time when the empire is overburdened with debt. Faust and the devil Mephistopheles, appear at court. Mephistopheles, in the guise of court jester, tells the emperor that he need not wait for treasure to be dug out of the ground before spending it. Mephistopheles understands that a credible, negotiable claim to money is money. He explains that the vast unknown treasures underground can be represented by paper notes. The emperor’s paper money represents nothing more than potential wealth, yet the creation of believable claims written on slips of paper is enough to enroll legions of followers and set them to work creating new productive resources. The emperor’s debts are erased at a stroke and Mephistopheles and Faust earn a place at the emperor’s side. Faust goes on to become an entrepreneur, which of course is when the devil comes to collect his debt.

Faust’s venture into capital creation recalls an episode in history that Goethe knew well: the story of the financier John Law, who after the great war of 1701–14 proposed to the French regent that the kingdom’s land could be a basis for creating paper money. The French regent hired the Scottish bankerand fired his alchemists, who were now redundant. Then he set up a state bank that paid off the kingdom’s immense war debts.

Joseph Schumpeter considered John Law’s scheme an epoch-making capitalist innovation, despite the notorious Mississippi bubble of 1719–20 it produced. He credited Law with the discovery that banking operations could “manufacture” money—“and hence capital in the monetary sense of the term.” The problem with Law’s plan, Schumpeter said, was that the newly created credits were not directed to a commercial or industrial enterprise that would have repaid the social investment. As it happened, Law’s banknotes lost their purchasing power, Law’s bank collapsed, and Law fled the scene.

Schumpeter originally described the mechanism at work here as “forced savings.” New credits created for new investment reduce the purchasing power of already existing money—it is a privately imposed “inflation tax” and, in effect, a fractional expropriation of purchasing power from others. In this way, capital formation could be forced upon the community “through monetary witchcraft,” as Schumpeter’s friend Fritz Machlup put it.

Schumpeter’s idea of forced savings appeared in Japan’s first and most influential textbook of neoclassical economics, written by Schumpeter’s student Nakayama Ichiro. And hence the explanation given by Okita Saburo, the Japanese government’s top economic planner, in 1957: if a country were to restrict its new investment to the amount of monetary savings already collected, “not much could be done.” But by investing in excess of savings, great deeds could be accomplished.

Mirrors and Miracles

It is in the nature of credit-money that it can somehow be “in” two places at once, without really being “anywhere” at all. Schumpeter joked that you can’t ride on a claim to a horse, but you may be able to create new claims on the basis of that claim. This is what economist Hans Christoph Binswanger, returning to Goethe for inspiration, described as “the modern economy’s alchemical core.”

Schumpeter developed a sophisticated justification for the extraordinary money-creation license given to banks, arguing that new purchasing power created by banks, although inflationary in the short run, would not be inflationary in the long run, if it were directed to the expansion of production. The new production would balance, or over-balance, the new means of payment. Cycles of price inflation and deflation are not incidental to the capitalist developmental process but rather are the very mechanism through which it operates.

Schumpeter’s idea is a credible description of the main direction of capital investment during Japan’s Era of High-Speed Growth. This was also a time when Japanese governmental and central bank authorities actively restricted the use of capital for nonproductive purposes.

But what of capital created by banks for speculation in land, or in already existing commodities? And what of capital created for the even more reflexive, recursive business of purely financial speculation, capital scarcely or not at all mediated by investment into the world of material commodities? This brings us to the economic bubbles of recent decades.

The first great economic bubble appeared in Japan; the appearance of the same phenomenon in the United States, Britain, and Europe suggests a further idea: that Schumpeterian finance, on the scale of the credit creation that funded the first great age of industrial capitalism, has outlived its usefulness in the already industrialized world. More than that, it appears radically incompatible with the emerging circumstances of countries that are experiencing zero population growth and need now to embark on a course of qualitative development rather than rapid, extensive industrial growth. Massively leveraged finance, created in ever greater volume, cannot continue to correspond to an ever greater torrent of production. In these new circumstances, the type of banking system that funded the first great age of capitalism works as a bubble machine, casually throwing up immense debts that act as a dead weight on everything else.

In considering our twenty-first-century world, the Japanese experience may have a more universal significance than has hitherto been recognized. Japan’s High-Speed Growth, the culmination of an eighty-year process, was itself a historic super-compression of capitalist development. And now, it seems that Japan is the country that completed the modern inflationary process first. Simultaneously the country is making a highly compressed transit from the “first” demographic transition to the “second”—meaning that population decline is already under way. Underlying forces tend now in the direction of deflation rather than inflation. The present slowdown may thus signify a turning point on a very long timescale: the culmination of Japan’s modern era of inflationary industrial-capitalist development. This question will be answered by a history that remains to be seen. It is also a question in the spirit of Schumpeter’s own approach and vision of economic life as a rhythmic, dynamic developmental process.

Mark Metzler, Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle, (2013).

Further Reading

Hans Christoph Binswanger, Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe’s Faust. A senior professor of finance, Binswanger makes an important contribution to economic philosophy in this brilliant and popular interpretation of Goethe’s life’s work.

Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World. This is Volume III of Braudel’s magnificent trilogy, Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th–18^th Century. Markets and market economy were something very different from modern capitalism, as Braudel explores with a combination of marvelous detail and panoramic sweep. Many would vote Braudel the twentieth century’s greatest historian and Schumpeter the century’s greatest economist.

At first approach, Joseph Schumpeter’s own prose style is meandering and overfull with illustrations, asides, and historical qualifications. He is also sensitive to the aliveness of economic life and his new insights often emerge from the detail. His big three books are The Theory of Economic Development (1912; English edition, 1934), with its theory of innovation, capital creation, and development through cycles; Business Cycles (1939), with its historical vision of economic long waves; and his wartime essay Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Each book alludes only lightly to the theories developed in the others; when they are read together the whole vista of modern economic history opens up.

Schumpeter’s work inspires many others. One recent and important work is Chris Freeman and Francisco Louça, As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution, which focuses on waves of technological innovation, boom, and bust. Another, also highly readable, is Erik Reinert’s book, How Rich Countries Got Rich, And Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, which revisits the question of economic development by reference to an alternative canon of continental European thought, exemplified by Schumpeter. Schumpeter’s inspiration crops up also in some less expected places, including the cyclic vision developed by the ecologist C. S. Holling in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems.

Photo Credits:
Hiroshi Okura, “Satoyama to konbinato” (Village landscape and Kombinat)
Joseph Schumpeter in Japan in 1931 via Wikipedia Commons

Musui’s Story, The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai by Katsu Kokichi (1991)

Musui’s Story is an exceptional account of one man’s hell-raising, rule-breaking, and living beyond his means. The autobiography documents the life of Katsu Kokichi, a samurai in Japan’s late Tokugawa period who adopted the name Musui in his retirement. Katsu is something of a black sheep within his family, being largely uneducated and deemed unfit for the bureaucratic offices samurai of his standing were expected to hold. As such, he typifies in many ways the lower ronin, or masterless samurai, many of whom famously led roaming, directionless lives and wreaked havoc among the urban poor and merchant classes.

The book is quick and simple to read, with barely literate Katsu’s prose skillfully translated by Teruko Craig. The autobiography follows Katsu’s whirlwind of adventures, which involved a great deal of fighting, name-calling, and extortion. What Katsu lacks in ambition is more than made up for by his knack for getting into trouble. The supposed premise of the autobiography is to serve as a cautionary tale for his descendants, as Katsu advises from the very beginning, “Take me as a warning.” In actuality, however, the story smacks of a thinly veiled account of braggadocio.

Many of the stories are almost certainly exaggerated, and even if they were not, they would not be exemplary of the samurai class as a whole. Still, the expectations and conflicts Katsu faces are representative of the underlying economic and social tensions of Tokugawa Japan. Musui’s Story offers a money-obsessed voice to the low-ranking samurai class, in light of its struggle to establish its purpose in a society that increasingly saw it as parasitic. Katsu broke with the accepted moral code of his class, exemplifying the societal struggle that marked one of Tokugawa Japan’s most distinctive features. The role of the Tokugawa samurai was increasingly out of touch with the social reality of the period. It was a class plagued by insecurity of both income and identity. Samurai had emerged as the dominant, warrior class during Japan’s feudalistic era. Originally a rural class, many samurai including Katsu came to live in Edo (modern day Tokyo) during the Tokugawa period, where they lived on capped government stipends. Samurai were, in name, at the top of Japan’s four-tiered shi-no-ko-sho system, but many found themselves unemployed, heavily indebted, and directionless.

Musui’s Story epitomizes the growing pressure many samurai must have faced as they were torn between outdated cultural expectations and an impossible financial reality. Katsu gives a charming and hilarious voice to the struggle, and through his story we see that a study of samurai teachings is insufficient to capture the samurai life in its actuality. Katsu all but abandons the bushido code he would have been taught, venturing among the urban poor and abusing the threat of seppuku, or honorable suicide, as a means of extortion to avoid payment and punishment.

These disjointed expectations for displaying wealth regardless of a samurai’s income level offer a simple explanation for Katsu’s decision to run away, twice, in shame. Tokugawa social insecurity might also be in some ways reminiscent of our contemporary society’s complex relationship to debt. Despite their temporal and geographical distance from the events in Katsu’s autobiography, UT students might find a few striking parallels to their own lives, but hopefully not so much that they would be inspired to imitate Musui’s violent antics.

Photo credits:

19th century woodblock print of the famous Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Edgar Walters is a Plan II junior. He is an undergraduate intern at the Harry Ransom Center and associate editor at the Daily Texan. He would like to pursue a graduate degree in the humanities in the future.

Check out Jacob Troublefield’s winning submission for Not Even Past’s Second Annual Undergraduate Essay Contest.

Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village by Ronald P. Dore (1994)

by David A. Conrad

Ronald P. Dore’s Shinohata brings to life the recent history of rural Japan. Shinohata is a small, wooded village in Tochigi prefecture, part of Japan’s central plain. Dore, an English sociologist who first came to Japan during the American occupation after World War II, wrote the book after more than two decades of intermittent visits and observations in the town. Shinohata is a unique blend of scholarship and anecdote, insight and humor. The book goes beyond simple facts and impersonal statistics, and offers a memorable narrative of small town life in postwar Japan.

The first three chapters describe the town’s prewar history. Nineteenth-century famines, Meiji-era tax reforms, and twentieth century market fluctuations all affected the residents of Shinohata. Naturally, the war with America and the occupation that followed left their marks as well. But the basic social structures of the traditional village survived the upheavals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relatively intact. In Shinohata in 1955, Dore says, “[n]obody subjectively felt that the world had fundamentally changed.”

By 1978, though, change was everywhere. Over the preceding twenty-three years, Dore and his friends in Shinohata had witnessed major shifts in the material aspects of village life. Items that once were luxuries, such as bicycles for children, now abounded. Virtually everyone had remodeled their homes to install tiled floors, tatami mats, modern bathtubs, color televisions, and so-called “Western” toilets that, as anyone who has been to Japan will confirm, are far superior to actual toilets in the West. Farming, the traditional mode of employment in Shinohata, had become mechanized, and almost nobody relied on it anymore for income. Household finances in Shinohata compared favorably with urban household revenues, and people in the town enjoyed more leisure time than they had in the past. Japan’s postwar economic boom proved more influential than all the crises and violence of the prewar decades.

Throughout the book, Dore provides a respectful and intimate look at the lives of Shinohata’s residents. A chapter called “Couples,” for example, deals with marriage and relationships, while “Growing-up” examines the habits of children and young adults. The townspeople Dore writes about are colorful and friendly, and he intersperses his clear prose with a chorus of local voices. He shares personal anecdotes and long passages of villagers’ conversations, and is careful to replace real names with pseudonyms to safeguard the privacy of people who were his neighbors and friends. The charm and poignancy of this rustic Japanese town will linger with readers, as will Dore’s important observations about the nature of twentieth-century rural Japan.

You may also enjoy David Conrad’s review of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

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