Tanabe Hajime and imperial Japan utilized the Logic of Species argument to criticize and diminish the validity of ethnic nationalism, outwardly supporting individual freedom and the power to negate the nation, but inwardly promoted ethnic nationalism to support their expansionist ambitions.
Modernity made two historically constructed classifications, the nation and ethnicity, appear natural. The ‘territorial nation state’ as the ‘fundamental unit of the modern international world’ conveniently sorted individuals into ‘particular nationalities’.1 This classification of humanity by nationality thus comes across as the intuitive method to do so, yet Naoki Sakai argues that this ‘vision’ has only existed ‘since the seventeenth century’.2 Moreover, individuals are defined primarily by the nation to which they belong, similar to the actual biological classification of humanity, which ‘converge[s] in the topos of the logical algorithm of species and genus’.3 In other words, the classification also appeared natural as it mimicked the actual method of identifying and categorizing living organisms. These perceptions, especially during the 1930s and early 1940s, produced postwar myths and conceptions like tan’itsu minzoku, which stated that ‘Japanese society ha[d] been ethnically homogenous’ since premodernity—whereas the Japanese empire stated it was ‘explicitly created against the principle of ethnic nationalism’.4 Therefore, the classification of individuals into nation-states is a modern concept, which Tanabe Hajime argued was unnatural.
In Tanabe’s Logic of Species, his ontology rejects ethnic essentialism, arguing that identity exists only through a dialectic of belonging and negation. In contrast to the natural assumption, Tanabe insisted that the ‘individual’s belonging to the nation…must be “mediated” by his or her freedom’.5 In essence, ‘immediately’, individuals belong to no nation, and have the freedom to determine and mediate their nation.6 In addition, Tanabe contends that an individual must have their ‘own self-awareness, or jikaku’, prior to any social classification, as they can only be ‘classified into a species’ if they are ‘aware of belonging to’ the species.7 He argues that the freedom to ‘negate and disobey’ the requirements ‘imposed by’ the ‘totemic beliefs’ of a species is the true essential prerequisite for having a part within the species; individuals must be able to join and critique the species to make it relevant.8 Moreover, he holds that species (shu) is not biological and changeable thereby removing the view that it is natural and lifelasting.9 Tanabe uses the notion of genus (rui), which is an ‘essential moment in mediation between the individual and the species’, allowing the individual to exist ‘independent of the species’.10 If individuals can exist outside of the species through the mediating moment of the genus, then they are not inherently and immediately tied to a nation.
The Japanese imperial state appropriated Tanabe’s philosophy to enforce ethnic nationalism even though the philosophy itself denies the natural basis of nationalism. In his lecture at Kyoto Imperial University on May 19, 1943, he used his philosophies to justify patriotic devotion and wartime mobilization, emphasizing that individuals must be ‘committed to the state’s mission’ like himself.11 However, the Logic of Species, which he references ‘refute[s] and discredit[s]…ethnic nationalism’, and directly contrasts his statements, insisting that the individual must negate the nation.12 Tanabe’s arguments made ethnic nationalism impossible, yet they were still used to support Japanese nationalism during the war. As such, even though the Japanese imperial government publicly rejected ethnic nationalism, they still practiced it and had various officials supporting ‘total erasure of ethnic differences within the Japanese nation’ and ‘insistence upon racial purity’.13 For minority populations, this private embrace of ethnic nationalism through the Logic of Species ‘was nothing but an endorsement of colonial violence’, forcing them to be in the nation, stripping them of the promised freedom of individual choice.14
Tanabe argued that no individual belonged to a nation immediately or naturally, and that belonging must be achieved through the exercise of one’s freedom, to critique ethnic nationalism in support of Japanese imperialism. However, what imperial Japan required at the time for its military was the opposite: natural, fixed, and unquestionably loyal individuals, which, in contrast to Tanabe’s argument, was ethnic nationalism. The Japanese government used Tanabe and this rhetoric to justify, through philosophical argument, patriotism, militarism, and expansionism, which Tanabe supported even though it contradicted his philosophies.
- Naoki Sakai, ‘Ethnicity and Species: On the Philosophy of the Multiethnic State and Japanese Imperialism’, in Viren Murthy, Fabian Schäfer, and Max Ward (eds), Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (Leiden, 2017), p. 146. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 144. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 147. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 148. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 154. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 154. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 157. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 160. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 155. [↩]
- Ibid., pp. 163-165. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 151. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 170. [↩]
- Ibid., pp. 147-148. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 172. [↩]