Author: 富士山

John Namjun Kim argues that “cosmopolitan freedom mobilises political projects of domination by endowing them with a semblance of ethical legitimacy of winning the approbation of those who will be subjugated.”¹ In other words, ethical promises, such as universal freedom, allow for actors to engage (knowingly or unknowingly) in unethical practices behind a shield of benevolence.²

The Kyoto School of Philosophy, a group of thinkers prominent in 20th century Japan, have been criticised for their view of ‘global history’ as a “thinly disguised justification[…]for Japanese aggression and continuing aggression.”³

This post will look at a short case study of Nishitani Keiji, a second-generation thinker of the Kyoto School and a disciple of the originator, Nishida Kitarō, and his Nation of Non-Ego. During the symposium on ‘Overcoming Modernity’ in 1942, Nishitani reflected that moral energy (moralische Energie) “realises a popular and national ethics by having each and every citizen serve the state and annihilate their selves in the state.”⁴ By moral energy, Nishitani means a “feeling of healthy morality and fresh energy,” a force that “moves world history.”⁵ By destroying the distinction between self and other, and concentrating moral energy onto solely the state, the “community of the people itself is made ethical.” Nishitani recognises that this exclusive offering up of moral energy to national interests allows room for the “colonial exploitation of other races and states.” He argues around this by proposing that Japan, due to the nation’s founding ‘pure and clear’ spirituality and religiosity of ‘subjective nothingness’ would benefit others by benefitting itself.⁶  In other words, due to Japan’s founding character as a ‘nation of non-ego,’ Japan’s empire would be cooperative and benevolent rather than a self-centred and aggressive. 

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see why such theory is not practicable. Indeed, at a separate symposium, responding to Nishitani, Kōsaka Masaaki, another member of the Kyoto school noted that if there was an attempt to put Nishitani’s “worldly ethics” into practice it would be as “the ethical system for a Greater East Asian region.”⁷ In practice, projects like the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere led to a new Japan-centric colonial order.⁸

Through this lens, Nishitani’s universalism appears less as a transcendent world ethic and more as a moral vocabulary that excuses coercive power. In practice, the rhetoric of world-historical responsibility functions as a vessel for subjugation rather than liberation. In contemporary contexts, appeals to defending a liberal world order continue to be used as tools to similar ends, justifying military interventions and violations of international law.

1. John Namjun Kim, ‘The imperial cosmopolitanism of Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime’ in Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (eds), Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism, and Borders (Taylor & Francis Group, 2006), p. 195. [↩]
2. Kleingeld, Pauline and Eric Brown, ‘Cosmopolitanism’ in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition) [↩]
3. T Najita and HD Harootunian, ‘Japanese Revolt against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century’ in Duus P (ed.) The Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge University Press, 1989) p. 741. [↩]
4. Nishitani Keiji, ‘My Views on Overcoming Modernity’ in Richard F. Calichman (ed.)(trans.) Overcoming modernity: cultural identity in wartime Japan New York, 2008) p. 60. [↩]
5. David Williams (ed.), The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance A reading, with commentary, of the complete texts of the Kyoto School discussions of ‘The Standpoint of World History and Japan’ (Routledge, 2014), p. 166. [↩]
6. Nishitani, Overcoming Modernity, p. 60-2. [↩]
7. Williams, The Philosophy of Japan’s Wartime Resistance, p. 219. [↩]
8. William L. Swan, ‘Japan’s Intentions for Its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as Indicated in Its Policy Plans for Thailand.‘ in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 27:1 (1996), p. 146. [↩]

During the Meiji era, Viscount Shinagawa Yajirō and Count Hirata Tosuke studied European cooperative models, particularly the Schulze-Delitzsch and Raiffeisen systems, as a means to address Japan’s rural economic challenges. Confronted with widespread tenant indebtedness, falling agricultural incomes, and increasing commercialization, they sought to adapt these foreign models to support farmers through affordable credit and collective cooperation. Their efforts culminated in the establishment of Japan’s first comprehensive cooperative law in 1900.¹

During the 1870s and 1880s, Yajirō and Tosuke travelled to Germany and studied social and economic systems. What captured their attention were the Schulze-Delitzsch and Raiffeisen models of savings and credit cooperatives. The Schulze-Delitzsch model, developed by Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, sought to protect “the independence of our lower-middle-class tradespeople” against “the monstrous development of big industry,” and advocated for credit, warehousing, producing, marketing, and consumer cooperatives.² F.W. Raiffeisen developed his own version – one that crucially extended the concept of cooperatives to rural and farming communities and one that encouraged a single cooperative for each village.³

Shinagawa and Hirata recognized that similar institutions could benefit Japan’s countryside. By the mid-1880s, about 70% of the working population was employed in agriculture, with the sector making 40% of the nation’s gross national product.⁴ Farmers faced a decrease in net agricultural income of 17 to 22% caused by the new land tax as well as frequent fluctuations in rice prices.⁵ Japan, like Germany, also saw an increase in commercialisation. Tenants typically paid rent in kind for rice land, with rates fixed annually based on expected harvests and adjusted only if yields dropped below 10%. Increasingly during the Meiji period (1868-1912), tenants began to supply their own capital borrowing from landlords and hiring additional labour.⁶ Amidst this context, Viscount Shinagawa and Count Hirata recognised that the Raiffeisen and Schulze-Delitzsch cooperative models could be introduced, to supply cheaper credit to farmers.⁷

In 1891, as Shinagawa became Minister of the Interior and Hirata joined the Legislative Bureau, the pair drafted a Cooperative Credit Society Bill based on the German models. The bill was proposed to the Second Imperial Diet in 1891 but failed to be enacted when the Lower House was dissolved after a budget crisis. Six years later, the same bill was presented to the Tenth Imperial Diet as the First Industrial Cooperative Bill. Again, although deliberated, the bill was shelved when the Diet session ended early.⁸

This process was accompanied by a heavy campaign of propaganda led by Shinagawa and Hirata advertising the benefits of cooperative societies. Ogata argues that there was much collaboration between Shinagawa and Hirata, and the Hotokusha, an altruistic mutual savings and credit society founded in 1843.⁸ The drafters formed two pioneer societies in 1892 in Kakegawa and Mitsuke in Shikzuoka Prefecture, a stronghold of the Hotokusha. The propaganda campaign was also helped by Mr. Fukuzumi, and the pioneer societies were organized by Mr. Okada and Mr. Ito, all of whom were leading spirits of the Hotokusha Movement. Ogata also cites evidence of a meeting between Hirata and Mr Fukuzumi to integrate the German system of credit cooperatives with “the high moral and ethical principle of the Hotokusha.”⁹

According to Fisher, the bill was criticised on two main grounds. The first was its perceived foreignness.¹⁰ An ‘almost exact imitation’ of the German Co-operative Law, more native organisations like the Hotokusha found the law alien from their system (which functioned more as a charitable social institution).⁸ The second reason was the failure of many of the credit societies’ new ventures, which Fisher accords as unsurprising given the lack of competent and trustworthy management.

By 1896, however, official surveys recorded 101 credit societies; two years later, 144 societies with over 21,000 members and assets exceeding 922,000 yen were in operation. Around this time, the forerunners of marketing and purchasing cooperatives also appeared, helping farmers collectively buy seeds, fertilizers, tools and machinery. 

Recognizing this momentum, the government decided to provide a comprehensive legal framework for cooperative activity. In 1897, a new bill, this time sponsored by the Department of Agriculture and Commerce, was presented to the House of Peers. Drawing inspiration from both the Rochdale consumer cooperative model in Britain and the German Raiffeisen credit model, the proposed law covered multiple types of cooperatives: credit, purchasing, marketing, and production cooperatives, which could manage shared equipment, hospitals, or kitchens. The law was finally enacted in March 1900.  

Hirata worked for the 1900 bill as a member of the House of Peers, and Shinagawa witnessed the bill turn into law just a few days before his death. ⁸

1. G.M. Fisher, ‘The Cooperative Movement in Japan’, Pacific Affairs, 11:4 (1938). [↩]
2. H. Schulze-Delitzsch, Assoziationsbuch fiir deutsche Handwerker und Arbeiter (Leipzig, 1853), p. 56. [↩]
3. B. Fairbairn, ‘The Rise and Fall of Consumer Cooperation in Germany ‘ in E. Furlough and C. Strikwerda (eds) Consumers against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan, 1840-1990 (Oxford, 1999), pp 270-273. [↩]
4. B.R. Tomlinson, ‘Rural Society and Agricultural Development in Japan, 1870–1920: An Overview,’ Rural History 6:1 (1995), p. 46. [↩]
5. Ibid, pp. 49, 51. [↩]
6. M.V. Madane, Agricultural Cooperatives in Japan: The Dynamics of Their Development (International Co-operative Alliance, 1990), p. 54. [↩]
7. Fisher, ‘The Cooperative Movement in Japan’, p. 479. [↩]
8. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
9. K. Ogata, The Co-operative Movement in Japan, (London, 1923), p. 46. [↩]
10. Fisher, ‘The Cooperative Movement in Japan’, p. 479. [↩]

“‘Why in the world did ‘the man who loved love’ waste such vast quantities of gold and silver on his myriad women, when the only pleasure and excitement to be found is in male love?”¹

The concluding words to Ihara Saikaku’s introduction of his work The Great Mirror of Male Love (Nanshoku Okagami) encapsulates his message. Why love women when you can love men? His work, which chronicled forty stories of male–male sexuality, enjoyed broad appeal and faced little controversy at publication.² In today’s Japan however this is difficult to imagine, with contemporary lawmakers describing same-sex relations as ‘unproductive’ and threatening a ‘breakdown of the family.’³

Through various literary works, Sabine Frühstück surveys the iterations of queer identities that ‘ultimately lead to today’s LGBTQIA+ community,’ arguing that today’s queer communities in Japan variably ‘insist on an ordinariness’ and ‘normalisation’.⁴

Frühstück’s starting point, Ihara’s The Great Mirror of Male Love, provides an insight into the long tradition of male–male sexual culture present in the warrior class, Buddhist monks, and in the entertainment world. Ihara attempts ‘to reflect in this mirror all of the varied manifestations of male love.’⁵ In premodern Japan, popular literature incorporated male love as a natural part of the broader literary theme of sexual relationships within society, and as a marker of sophistication and culture.⁶ For Ihara then, the central tension was not to prove male–male love as natural, but as superior to male–female love.

From The Great Mirror of Male Love, Frühstück takes us to Mori Ōgai’s Vita Sexualis (Wita Sekusuarisu). Published in 1909, reception to Mori’s novel marked a change in attitudes to same-sex love. The semi-autobiographical novel which detailed the sexual history of the protagonist received backlash and was banned.⁷ The novel’s title marks this shift as well, with the title being derived from Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which describes same-sex attractions as sexual anomalies and mental degeneration.⁸ Frühstück describes this change in attitude as a result of an increase in Western influence.⁹ Indeed, Mori seems to be influenced by a range of European authors. In a two-part article published in 1902 to 1903, he mentions more than fifty European scholars of sexual psychology, including Sigmund Freud.¹⁰ By the 1900s, the ‘love of beautiful boys’ illustrated by Ihara was replaced by ‘hentai seiyoku’ or ‘perverse sexual desire’ which emphasised the physicality of relationships over their spirituality.

Next in Frühstück’s survey is Yoshiya Nobuko’s works. Yoshiya was Japan’s first public figure in the twentieth century to openly identify as a lesbian. Notably, she published Flower Tales (Hana Monogatari, 1916–1924), a collection of short stories centering female romantic friendships, and a novel, Women’s Friendship (Onna no Yūjō), serialized in Fujin Kurabu (1933–1935). The author in her own life delayed ‘adopting’ her partner as a means to civil union to advocate for same-sex marriage.¹¹

Miyatake Gaikotsu’s Hannannyokō (Thoughts on Hermaphroditism, 1922), was a collection of stories that centered sexually and gender nonnormative individuals from a mix of rumors and legends. Distributed under the counter and aimed as much at entertaining readers as at imagining a utopian future of universal hermaphroditism, it echoed contemporary European sexology, such as the works of German researcher Magnus Hirschfeld.¹² Reflecting a transnational exchange of ideas, the text shows how early twentieth-century thinkers in both Japan and Europe were beginning to question binary gender and sexual norms.

Approaching the present day, Being Lesbian (‘Rezubian’ to aru to iu koto, 1992) by Kakefuda Hiroko critiques ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and gave impetus to genres of media specifically catering for sexual minorities. The text preceded the HIV/AIDS epidemic which enabled network building between previously disparate gay and lesbian groups, as well as reframing discussions about queer identities as a human rights issue.¹³

Today’s Japan faces a range of issues concerning LGBTQ+ rights. While public sentiment increasingly recognises the discrimination queer people face, and both corporations and lawmakers move toward institutionalising anti-discrimination measures, same-sex marriage remains unrecognised. Stagnant policies continue to shape the ruling parties’ approach to explicit prohibition of sex and gender-based discrimination.¹⁴ The recent election of conservative Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae further signals limited prospects for progressive reform.

1. Ihara Saikaku, The Great Mirror of Male Love, trans. Paul Gordon Schalow (Stanford, 1990), p. 56. ↩
2. Sabine Frühstück, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan (Cambridge, 2022), p. 144. ↩
3. Ibid, p. 159. ↩
4. Ibid, p. 60. ↩
5. Ihara, The Great Mirror of Male Love, p. 56. ↩
6. Ibid, p. 6. ↩
7. Frühstück, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan, p. 146. ↩
8. Yoshiyuki Nakai, ‘Ōgai’s Craft: Literary Techniques and Themes in Vita Sexualis’, Monumenta Nipponica, 35:2 (Summer 1980), p. 228. ↩
9. Frühstück, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan, p. 146. ↩
10. Nakai, ‘Ōgai’s Craft: Literary Techniques and Themes in Vita Sexualis’, p. 229. ↩
11. Jennifer Robertson, ‘Yoshiya Nobuko: Out and Outspoken in Practice and Prose,’ in Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Jennifer Robertson (London, 2005), p. 164. ↩
12. Frühstück, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan, p. 149. ↩
13. Ibid, p. 152. ↩
14. Ibid, pp. 154–156. ↩