Actually existing dystopia: imagining Japan through science fiction under late capitalism

Japanese science fiction has become a global cultural phenomenon since the Second World War, evident in the popularity of novels like Sakyo Komatsu’s Japan Sinks (1973) and kaiju films such as Godzilla (1954). Yet, as these examples highlight, the Japanese science fiction genre has been dominated by dystopian “imaginations of disaster”1. Postwar Japanese science fiction and cyberpunk genres at once both reflect long-standing anxieties of the demise of Japanese cultural exceptionality in the confrontation with Western (capitalist) modernity since the 1910s, most famously articulated by Kyoto School debates about ‘overcoming modernity’ in the 1940s,2 yet also indicate a reimagining of Japan, from the Western perspective, as exemplifying “the postmodern present and near-future of the West”3, a “techno-Orientalist”4 imagination that has nevertheless been appropriated and rearticulated in Japanese science fiction itself.

Sato has argued that the fusion of American cyberpunk ideas with Japanese modernization has facilitated the reconstruction of an imagined Japanese unique identity (or, Japanism) that associates Japan with technology and correlates its technological modernization to a reclamation of its past.5 However, the uniqueness of Japan comes from its own monstrosity, its representativeness of a world falling apart. Mark Fisher, the British critical theorist, conceptualised the idea of ‘capitalist realism’, where, under contemporary late capitalism, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”6. Imagining disaster through science fiction becomes a cultural reproduction of a resurgent, techno-capitalist Japan from the 1980s where Japan itself was reimagined as the ‘terminator’, the monster, of world capitalism.7 Dystopia was thus “both frightening and exciting”8; Japanese science fiction epitomises what Walter Benjamin noted in 1936 where humanity’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure”.9

Just as Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse described the ‘end of utopia’, where society could now actually achieve ‘utopian’ social transformation and thus negate utopia’s inherent impossibility,10 Japanese science fiction represents an ‘end of dystopia’. Now, dystopia is no longer imaginative but instead “an extrapolation or exacerbation of [reality] rather than an alternative to it”.11 In relating Japanese identity to science fiction themes of hyper-capitalism and technology, through techno-Orientalist tropes, Japan becomes an ‘actually existing dystopia’ where science fiction is no longer an imagination, but merely an extension of reality. In this way, postwar Japanese science fiction, in its imaginations of disaster, paradoxically both reflects the fears and anxieties of the realities of contemporary Japan, where Japanese culture and national essence is eroded by the onset of the ahistorical and culturally detached society of late capitalism and postmodernity, and simultaneously appropriates such dystopia by historically and culturally locating techno-capitalism in Japan in a rearticulation of Japanism as a unique ‘actually existing dystopia’. As Kawamura Takeshi, a contemporary Japanese playwright who gained notoriety in the 1980s for his dystopian and postmodern themes, has argued, “it is absolutely necessary for an age of monsters to put in an appearance” because “such an age has already come very close to us”.12

  1. Susan J. Napier, ‘Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira’, The Journal of Japanese Studies 19:2 (1993), pp.327-351. [↩]
  2. Kumiko Sato, ‘How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context’, Comparative Literature Studies, 41:3 (2004), pp.343-344. [↩]
  3. Ibid., p.347. [↩]
  4. David Roh, Betsy Huang and Greta Niu (eds), Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History and Media (New Brunswick, 2015). [↩]
  5. Sato, ‘How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism’, p.353. [↩]
  6. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, 2009), p.17. [↩]
  7. Napier, ‘Panic Sites’, p.349. [↩]
  8. Ibid. [↩]
  9. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), p.242. [↩]
  10. Herbert Marcuse, ‘The End of Utopia’, lecture delivered at the Free University of West Berlin, July 1967. [↩]
  11. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p.17. [↩]
  12. Peter Eckersall, ‘Japan as Dystopia: Kawamura Takeshi’s Daisan Erotica’, TDR 44:1 (2000), p.107. [↩]

Kita Ikki and the Contradictions of Utopianism

The seminal events which China and Japan faced from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century catalysed many utopian ideas in public discourse, which imagined how their societies might be reorganised for modernity. Within these utopias, however, the interplay between indigenous and Western ideals produced systems of thoughts which have embedded contradictions between the two forces at play.

Examples of this contradictory utopianism could be seen in many utopian thinkers and activists both throughout the late 19th to early 20th century. Ishiwara Kanji, who in the immediate post WW2 era was an ardent advocate of world federation, was in the 1930s a general, instrumental in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.1 Late Qing thinker Kang Youwei’s idea of Datong contains, within its critique of the existing world, contradictions between the substance and the origins of its thoughts. Kang, in his proposals for women and for the public raising of children, implicitly critiques the traditional notions of family and filial piety, as burdening mothers with responsibility for raising the child, and burdening children with responsibility for requiting their parent’s care.2 Yet Datong finds its original utopian expression in the Confucian classic Book of Rites (Liji).3 The conflict between Kang’s critique of the traditional institution of family and filial piety, and the provenance of his utopianism is unresolved.

In the utopian ideas of Kita Ikki’s An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan, it is unsurprising to find contradictions in his conception of an East Asian utopianism. The premise of Kita’s thoughts are based on situating Japan at the forefront of an ‘Eastern Republic’ with an indigenous ideology.4 Thus central to Kita’s thoughts is the need for a supra-regional entity by which to challenge Western hegemony, formed on the basis of universality of his revolutionary ideology.5 Yet in constructing the ideology, Kita maintained particularist elements, such as the contribution of Nichiren Buddhism, to his ideology.6 Equally Kita argued against the import and imposition of democracy in Japan as being insensitive to its ahistoricism in a Japanese context, yet saw no contradiction in suggesting the imposition of his ideology beyond a Japanese context. Likewise, Kita’s conception of male suffrage as being part of a citizen’s duty to the nation stood in contrast to his contempt and his lack of belief in the ability of common people for transformation as historical agents.7 Most damning is his conception of Koreans as lacking sufficient self-awareness for self-determination, even as he expounds equality of citizens under the emperor.8

How could we account for this tendency towards contradiction? The desire to construct a utopian imaginary based on native, rather than Western, ideals, meant that such utopian works drew from traditions which may otherwise have been critiqued as part of its utopian narrative. For Kang, the Confucian concept of ren and the innate goodness of Man underpinned his belief in the perfectibility of humanity, which is the basis of his utopianism.9 For Kita, Nichiren Buddhism provided the common basis by which Japan and China, for example, can fraternalise and bind.10 That there are internal contradictions in these utopias are unlikely to themselves be indictments of those ideas, but these nonetheless represent an unresolved tension at the heart of many utopian ideological projects in East Asia.

  1. Konrad Lawson, ‘Reimagining the Postwar International Order: The World Federalism of Ozaki Yukio and Kagawa Toyohiko’, in Simon Jackson and Alanna O’Malley (eds), The institution of international order: from the League of Nations to the United Nations (New York, 2018), pp. 185, 188. [↩]
  2. K’ang Yu-wei, ‘Ta T’ung Shu’, in Laurence G. Thompson (ed.), Ta T’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei (London, 1958), pp. 38-39. [↩]
  3. Ibid., pp. 27-29. [↩]
  4. Brij Tankha, Kita Ikki and the making of modern Japan: a vision of empire (Kent, 2006), pp. 129-130. [↩]
  5. Ibid., pp. 159-160. [↩]
  6. Ibid., p. 159. [↩]
  7. Kita Ikki, ‘An Outline Plan for the Reorganisation of Japan’, in William Theodore De Bary, Carol Gluck, Arthur E. Tiedemann, Andrew Barshey, and William M. Bodiford (eds), Sources of Japanese Tradition: Vol. 2: 1600 to 2000 (New York, 2010), pp. 964-965. Tankha, Kita Ikki, p. 158. [↩]
  8. Tankha, Kita Ikki, pp. 136-138. [↩]
  9. K’ang, ‘Ta T’ung Shu’, in Thompson (ed.), Ta T’ung Shu, pp. 42-44, 46-47. [↩]
  10. Kita, ‘An Outline Plan’, in De Bary et al. (eds), Sources, p. 159. [↩]

Kita Ikki and Japanese Fascism

Muruyama Masao has identified Kita Ikki as “the ideological father of Japanese fascism.”1 The ideology that Kita fathered is an utterly bizarre cocktail of contradictory principles, some of which go directly against the tenets of classical Italian Fascism and German National Socialism.  Kita fused imperial autocracy with democracy,  militant nationalism with cosmopolitan internationalism, technocratic elitism with radical egalitarianism, and market incentives with strict socialism. This blog post will determine the place of Kita’s eccentric ideology within the wider philosophical continuum of fascism.

According to Roger Griffin, the “mythic core” of all fascist ideologies is   “palingenetic ultranationalism.”2 What does is palingenetic ultranationalism and where does Kita’s ideology stand in relation to it? To properly understand Griffin’s definition of fascism and its relation to Kita, it must be broken down into its constituent parts. 

Palingenesis is the complete rebirth of a community against the forces of decadence and decay. Rebirth in the fascist context refers not to the restoration of an old social order (as is the case of traditional reactionaries), but the creation of a completely new order that while preserving “essential” social institutions and values is perfectly in line with the inexorable march of modernity.3 There is no doubt that Kita’s vision of Japan’s future is palingenetic in nature. Kita saw Japan as a decaying nation that had to be renewed through the complete destruction of the existing socio-political order and its replacement by a new one: the present ruling classes were to be purged from positions of power, “excess” private capital confiscated en masse by the state, a highly extensive system of state welfare established, and strict social controls enforced, all with the intention of building a new society. But despite all of this radical change, the emperor would remain at the undisputed center of the new order. This was because while the feudal nobility were an archaic relic of the past and the capitalist zaibatsu an unwelcome outgrowth of modernity, the emperor was seen as a timeless and essential pillar of Japanese communal identity; to Kita, without the emperor there could be no Japan.4 

While palingenesis is common to all revolutionary movements, ultranationalism is a distinctive trait of fascism. Ultranationalism is to be distinguished from regular nationalism by its overtly anti-liberal and supremacist nature. As such, fascism is an inherently racist and bigoted ideology.5 By contrast, Kita quite explicitly calls for the equal treatment of ethnic minorities and for brotherhood among nations. Yet such sentiments cannot be considered to be truly anti-racist or internationalist. While in principle Kita supported the theoretical equality of nations, in practice he was supremely chauvinistic. Kita believed that many of Japan’s neighboring nations, especially Korea, were so utterly incapable of self-determination as to require foreign domination in order to be “civilized.” Needless to say, Kita believed that Japan was in a superior state of development compared to rest of Asia, and thus had a duty to spread “civilization” throughout the east.6 Unlike the Nazis and other fascists, who saw the natural hierarchy of nations as unchanging, Kita saw it as fluid but nonetheless historically essential. Kita thus did not truly believe that all nations should be seen as equal, but that all nations could be made equal if molded in the image of Japan. In this way, Kita’s racism was neither of the exterminationist brand of the Nazis nor the segregationist brand of many modern fascists, but of a distinctly assimilationist brand.

Being fundamentally anti-liberal, fascism in its purest form rejects notions of universal rights, equality, pluralism, and individualism.7 This would seem to be a stark contrast with Kita, who believed in the inalienability of certain human rights, including universal male suffrage, and called for radical social and economic equality. At the same time, Kita outright rejected the sanctity of popular will and of the social contract fundamental to liberal democracies. The protection of basic political rights was by no means an endorsement of pluralism; not every voice was deserving of consideration and some voices in fact ought to be suppressed especially in the initial period of transformation. Ultimately, Kita insisted on human rights and equality not for their own sake, but for the specific goal of establishing a cohesive national community. The act of political participation was seen not an exercise of individual sovereignty; rather it was an affirmation of membership in, and loyalty to, the Japanese Nation in much the same vein as military service. The equality of citizens served only to further reinforce and clarify the supreme sovereignty of the emperor.6 

Despite his rhetoric of human rights, equality, and anti-racism, Kita Ikki’s ideology can rightly be placed within the continuum of Japanese Fascism. For all its superficial dissimilarity to more familiar European fascisms, Ikki’s fascism is built on the same mythos of palingenetic ultranationalism. 

 

  1.  Masao Maruyama and Ivan Morris, “The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism,” essay, in Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (London etc.: Oxford University Press, 1969), 28. [↩]
  2. Roger Griffin, “The Palingenetic Core of Fascist Ideology,” essay, in Che Cos’è Il Fascismo? Interpretazioni e Prospecttive Di Richerche (Rome: Ideazione Editrice, 2003), 97–122. [↩]
  3. Griffin, “The Palingenetic Core of Fascist Ideology”; Roger Griffin, “1. Staging the Nation’s Rebirth,” Fascism and Theatre, December 31, 2022, 13–7, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781785330476-002. [↩]
  4. Ikki Kita, General Outline of Measures for the Reorganization of Japan (Shanghai, 1919). [↩]
  5. Roger Griffin, “Nationalism,” in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia. Volume 1 A-K, ed. Cyprian P. Blamires and Paul Jackson (Santa Barbara , CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006). [↩]
  6. Ikki Kita, General Outline of Measures for the Reorganization of Japan [↩] [↩]
  7. Griffin, “Staging the Nation’s Rebirth,” 7 [↩]

Cat Country: How Story Mirrors Reality

In Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction, Nathaniel Isaacson discusses the emergence of Chinese science fiction in the early to mid 1900’s. He highlights many different Chinese science fiction stories, but one that especially stood out was City of Cats by Lao She, written in 1933.

The story follows that the narrator crashlands on Mars and finds a city run by cats in “Cat Country”.  The cats in Cat Country have a corrupt economic system, government, and education system, and everyone is addicted to the “reverie leaves”, which are drug-like leaves that are similar to opium. The narrator watches as the civilization falls into greater and greater disrepair, and tries to save it, but ultimately loses the civilization. An army of short people overruns Cat Country and kills all the cats. The narrator later leaves on a French ship back to earth, leaving Cat Country behind.

I found City of Cats more interesting than the other stories Isaacson covered, partially in its symbolism of China at the time by the author, and also from the simple dystopian plotline. In between the strangeness of cats on Mars, and armies of short people, the story boils down to a simple dystopia that reflected the anxieties of a person in China in the 1930s and can represent the anxieties of people around the world today.

There were many themes that were prevalent in Chinese science fiction in the early 1900s. Social collapse, colonial modernity, and the metaphor of the Iron House, popularized by Lu Xun–known as the father of Chinese science fiction– all came together in the anxieties of the writers of Chinese science fiction.  Lu Xun’s popular metaphor of the Iron House was a comparison of Chinese society to “an iron house: without windows or doors, utterly indestructible, and full of sound sleepers— all about to suffocate to death. Let them die in their sleep, and they will feel nothing. Is it right to cry out, to rouse the light sleepers among them, causing them inconsolable agony before they die?”1. This metaphor, along with the others above, is pertinent to the despairing society that cannot seem to bring themselves to shed their skins and work together to revive their society.

The parallels to Chinese society at the time, or at least what Lao She thought of Chinese society at the time are clear. As Isaacson so succinctly puts it “[t]hese observations lead to the diagnosis of social and institutional illness, and the prognosis is devastatingly bleak from the outset,”2. Lao She’s  “suffocating image of Chinese culture” is a human reaction to what he sees as China’s “own cultural decay and selfishness were to blame for the national plight” and is a stirring thought for those of us reading it ages later3.

The anxieties of any person at any time can be translated through writing and through time. City of Cats and the bizarre cats on Mars can be a warning to anyone about working as a community to do better, and can also be an interesting read for someone craving a story of cats on Mars.

  1. Isaacson, Nathaniel. Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2017, p. 4 [↩]
  2. Ibid, p. 125 [↩]
  3. Ibid, p. 127 [↩]

Japan’s ‘Moral Re-Armament’ Movement: Continuity from World War to Cold War

After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, many Japanese politicians and public figures revitalized militaristic language for the formation of a world federation to bring about global peace and for the defeat of Communism. This was the Moral Re-armament Movement and it was led by figures like Kagawa Toyohiko, the vice president of the League for the Establishment of World Federation (later called the World Federation Movement).1 Although Kawaga redeploys militaristic metaphors of war-time Japan, his domestic analogies were aimed for a spiritual (rather than literal) battle against communism. Through this anti-communist framing, he was able to avoid censorship from the US occupied force.2 His speech to an audience in Kobe was published in the local newspaper Kobe Shinbun despite being ripe with Showa Era imperial messaging.

‘If Japan disarms… it will perhaps shame the United States into abandoning its own weapons. Japan can lead the world, spark a moral movement, achieve the dream of a Greater East Asia, and bring all eight corners of the world under a single roof’ (Kagawa Toyohiko 1945).3

After seeing the devastation of war and the horror of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese thinkers increasingly embraced pacifism, disarmament, decolonization, and nuclear deproliferation. They also recognized the unique capacity Japan would have in bringing about international peace through the formation of a World Federation. Fascinatingly, this utopian vision echoes the pre-war universalism, manifested in Pan-Asianism, which justified the imperial expansion of Japan and its Greater East Asia C0-Prosperity Sphere for world peace.4

Although there are countless examples of Japanese thinkers (including Kagawa) across a range of political spectrums, adapting their universalist messaging for Japan’s Imperialism, none are as unique as Kita Ikki. Kita was a writer who is considered a core influence in the creation of Japanese fascism.5 Western historians often consider him ‘right wing’ but he doesn’t necessarily fit into these traditional categories.6 Ikki espoused ‘Social Democratic’ principles like social reforms, democracy, enfranchisement, and gender equality while also stressing the need for Japan, led by its emperor, to expand and protect these universalist ideals abroad, through force, especially in China.7

However this militaristic language for Japan’s expansion was also anti-imperialistic, criticizing the Western colonialists like Britain and the Meiji Restoration for replicating it.8 Kita Ikki’s Pan-Asianism stresses the unique capacity of Japan to protect Asia from the West through a Japanese led “Asian Monroe Doctrine”, allowing nations to come to their own ‘national awakening’, or revolution, without Western pressure.9 In this way Japan could progress world history by bringing world peace and prosperity to Asia through expansion – this being the nation’s “moral destiny”10.

This utopian vision, ripe with militaristic language and humanist idealism, emphasizes the complexity of the Japanese imperial ideology. Unlike other writers of the time, Kita stressed the reality of his ideals; Force and blood were needed to form an Asian Federation, however this would eventually create peace and prosperity.11

The legacy of Japanese militarism and its ‘moral’ role in the international community would persist post WW2. Kagawa would draw on the power of the Japanese national morality or ‘Kokutai’. However, just as the meaning of Kokutai changed to fit a war time expansionist agenda, Kagawa would use it for a demilitarized Japan and its Moral Re-armament.  The World Federation Movement, during the Cold War’s ideological ‘fight’ against communism, represents the adaptability of Japanese thought to fit new political contexts.

  1. Lawson, Konrad. ‘Reimagining the Postwar International Order: The World Federalism of Ozaki Yukio and Kagawa Toyohiko’ (2014):9 [↩]
  2. ibid., p. 12 [↩]
  3.   ibid., p.11 [↩]
  4. ibid., p.2 [↩]
  5. Wilson, George M. ‘Kita Ikki’s Theory of Revolution.’ The Journal of Asian Studies 26, no.1 (1966):89. [↩]
  6. ibid [↩]
  7. Tanka Brij, ‘Kita Ikki and the Making of Modern Japan.’ Global Oriental (2006) [↩]
  8. Tanka Brij, ‘Kita Ikki and the Making of Modern Japan.’ Global Oriental (2006): 200. [↩]
  9. ibid., p. 87. [↩]
  10. ibid., p. 212 [↩]
  11. Wilson, George M. ‘Kita Ikki’s Theory of Revolution.’ The Journal of Asian Studies 26, no.1 (1966):95 [↩]

Confucian revival: 20th century China and Japan’s references to tradition

Intellectuals in Japan and China reawakened principles of Confucianism in response to Western domination of a certain conception of modernity, though their methods and goals would prove quite different. Confucianism had been heavily suppressed in Meiji Japan, with the rise of modern nationalism leading to the irreversible appropriation of spaces that had been hitherto intertwined with Confucian networks of knowledge, values and science.1 Meanwhile in China, Confucianism was stifled by pushes towards western-inspired systems of education and modernisation, during the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, particularly as foreign powers sought to assert their economic and political dominance over the weakening Qing government.

Intellectual circles in Japan and China were both distinctly affected by the repercussion of the First World War. The War presented a challenge to liberals, undermining Enlightenment universalist principles of rationality and progress that presented the West as an exemplar of civilisation. Chinese intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Zhang Junmai, who had toured Europe in 1918-19 as part of a delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, posited that the West had become too materialistic, and had much to learn from spiritual Eastern civilization.2 This led, for instance, to Zhang Hunmai collaborating with German idealist Rudolph Eucken to produce a book that brought together ethical and metaphysical ideas of China and the West. Others in China sought a constructive dialogue with Western thought out of a belief in affinity between the two. The conservative journal Critical Review, founded in Nanjing, sought to synthesise native Chinese culture with new Western knowledge, while thinkers like Liang used ‘Easternisation’ to assert the East’s complimentary role in modern culture; the West would benefit from understanding Confucianism just as much as China had to learn from the West.3

However, in Japan in the aftermath of the First World War, rather than working in synthesis with Western ideas, Confucian discourse was used by state structures to frame Japanese notions of superiority. Kiri Paramore argues that the War brought significant economic expansion to Japan through trade revenue in war provisions and imperialist expansion in China, which was justified by Japan’s self-representation as the steward of Asian tradition, defending East Asian values against the corruption of western ideologies, unlike the Chinese republicans and communists.4 This meant that fears over an imminent breakdown in the social order through labour conflict and capitalist inequality, seen as inherent to high Western modernity, led to a desire to return to non-Western and pre-industrial value systems to thus circumvent this contemporary problem. This conservative movement led to the establishment of Shibunkai, an activist Confucian organisation that oversaw the integration of Confucianism into Japanese society. Confucianism became intertwined with the state alongside Shinto, and adopted into the structures of the state imperial cult through ceremonies associated with national morality, state organs, and the military.5 This would later lead to Confucianism being associated with authoritarian and fascist governments, as nationalistic cultural homogenisation policies utilised Confucian statecraft and values.

While this was undermined by a fundamental contradiction between the idea of Japanese exceptionalism and attempts to universalise Japanese perceptions of Confucianism, such associations with fascism meant ultimately Confucianism became a taboo topic in Japan.6 In China, the rise of the New Confucians in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution brought elements of Confucianism back into the mainstream discussion. Arguments such as those of Zhang Junmai’s Manifesto, positing that the obsession of modern Western civilisation with progress and expansion stems from a fundamental discontentment that could learn from the East’s deep wisdom, demonstrate that unlike Japan’s new culturalism of the 1930s, such understandings of Confucianism were based around mutually beneficial interactions between East and West.

  1. Paramore, Kiri. Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History. of New Approaches to Asian History. (Cambridge, 2016), p.142. [↩]
  2. Edmund S. K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era. (Cambridge, 2010), p.66. [↩]
  3. ibid. p.75. [↩]
  4. Paramore, 2016, p.166. [↩]
  5. ibid. p.156. [↩]
  6. ibid. p.168. [↩]

Kappanese or Japanese? Ryūnsosuke Akutagawa and the influence of Utopian Literature in early 20th century Japan

The Meiji period has often been characterised as the “utopian era in modern Japanese history”, marked by widespread enthusiasm for western novels that could construct new societal possibilities1. Depicting utopia in fiction requires an ambiguous interplay between the two poles of reality and fiction, allowing space for reflection on Japanese society2.Mochi emphasises how examining Japanese utopian literature within its social and historical context reveals the genre’s inherent ambiguity, as writers grappled with redefining the meaning of modern Japan. Among these novels, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Kappa (1927) stands out for its distinctive satirical critique of Western influence3. As the optimism of the Meiji utopia gave way to the economic uncertainties of the 1920s, Kappa reflects how Japanese authors moulded their writings to engage with the anxieties and aspirations of futurology in Japan.

The novel is narrated by a schizophrenic man confined to a mental hospital, who claims to have travelled to the world of the Kappas – mythical figures in Japanese folklore4. Scholars continue to debate whether his novel serves as a satirical attack on Taishō Japan, or is more a reflection of Akutagawa’s personal challenges, particularly in light of his suicide in the same year.

Tsuruta delves into Akutagawa’s challenging upbringing, such as the trauma of his mother’s mental illness who died when he was ten, as well as the dominance and cruelty of his aunt, Fuki, which encouraged him to believe that he had inherited the insanity of his mother5.In the depiction of a Kappa birth in the novel, an unborn child is asked by their father whether they wish to be born, to which the child replied, “I do not wish to be born. In the first place it makes me shudder to think of all the things that I shall inherit from my father – the insanity alone is bad enough. And an additional factor is that I maintain that a Kappa’s existence is evil.”6.Whilst this reflects Akutagawa’s fear of losing control over his mind as his illness progressed, it also resonates with the growing uncertainties of the 1920s. The aftermath of WW1, the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, and the rise of imperialist fascism, reconfigured daily life and consciousness, sustaining his ultimate fear of the growing irrationality of the modern world.

Setiowati offers an alternative perspective, interpreting Kappa as an allegory to criticise the shortcomings of humans driven by Japan’s growing capitalist economy7.  Frequent parallels are drawn between humans and the scaly, grotesque appearance of the Kappas, emphasising their role as symbols of human weakness, greed and the immorality fostered by capitalist ideology8.  This critique is particularly poignant in the context of labour organisation and unemployment, pressing social issues as a result of the transition to a westernised industrial economy4 Through its narrative, the novel probes readers to reflect on the capitalist ideology that was reshaping the values of modern Japan, particularly the mindset of the workers as they moved from feudal labour to wage labour.

To summarise, there is an undeniable attempt in Akutagawa’s utopian writing to encourage society to confront the internalisation of exploitative capitalist ideology, and explore alternative visions of the nation’s future. Despite the limited impact of Kappa, its political commentary sheds light on the ambiguous nature of utopian literature and its distinctive function in shaping Japan’s social and political consciousness.

  1. Mochi, Yoriko. “Japanese Utopian Literature from the 1870s to the Present and the Influence of Western Utopianism.” Utopian Studies, 10:2 (1999) p.90 [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]
  3. Ibid. p.91 [↩]
  4. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
  5. Kinya Tsuruta. “The Defeat of Rationality and the Triumph of Mother ‘Chaos’: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Journey.” Japan Review, 11 (1999) p.75 [↩]
  6. Ibid. p.84 [↩]
  7. Rosa Vania Setiowati, ‘Capitalism as an Ideology Criticised through Allegory in Ryūnsosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa’, Journal of Language and literature, 16:2 (2016) p.178 [↩]
  8. Ibid. p.187 [↩]

Revolution and National Polity: Kita Ikki’s Vision for Modern Japan

Kita Ikki was a prominent thinker in post-Meiji Restoration Japan whose work offers a unique synthesis of revolutionary ideas and critiques of state structures. His conceptualization of ishin (revolution) and kokutai (national polity) intertwines socialist, liberalist, and nationalist thought, aiming to balance individual agency with national unity in response to Japan’s modern crisis. Through ishin, Kita envisions collective will as a force for transformative change, while kokutai provides the ideological foundation to unify this transformation within a distinctly Japanese identity.

The challenges of modernity and Westernization led many early 20th-century Japanese thinkers to reconsider government structures, imperialism, and Japan’s path forward in the global political sphere. While observing the Chinese situation approaching the Xinhai Revolution, Kita related the circumstances to other modern revolutions in order to produce a history of revolution which he could use to critique the contemporary state of Japanese affairs.(( George M. Wilson, ‘Kita Ikki’s Theory of Revolution’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 26: 1 (1966), p. 90. )) Believing history progresses along an uneven but linear trajectory of social evolution, ishin in Kita’s framework is a gradual transformation of social values and institutions rather than a sudden violent upheaval, contrasting with many of his socialist contemporaries.(( Ibid. )) These value changes, he posited, emerge first in a ‘war of ideas’ within each country and culture—an ongoing ideological struggle where victorious ideologies shape human action and societal direction. Revolutions, then, must act alongside the newly established social values and aim to form a ‘citizen state’ rooted in social democracy, driven by self-conscious intellectual elites and military support as agents of change.(( Ibid., p. 91. ))

Kita’s interpretation of ishin is closely linked to his observations of the Meiji Restoration and modern revolutions, and his goals for the kokutai are reflected in what he feels are changes which were stunted by the Restoration. By defining what revolution should do, Kita came to critique the Meiji state as a bourgeois construct serving capitalist and landlord classes. With the creation of the imperial constitution, Kita argued that legally a socialist state existed but remained unrealized due to oligarchic domination and a capitalist economy controlled by the elite.((Brij Tankha, Kita Ikki and the Making of Modern Japan: A Vision of Empire (Kent, 2006), pp. 69-70 )) For Kita, the Meiji Restoration successfully changed Japan’s social values but failed to transform government structures, leaving it trapped in a patriarchal rather than a people’s state.1 His critique strongly diverged from his socialist contemporaries by adapting revolutionary ideals to Japan’s unique conditions and incorporating the emperor’s role into his ideal form of government.

Kita’s dynamic relationship between kokutai (national polity) and seitai (form of government) particularly distinguishes his ideal form of government. Kita challenged established static interpretations of the emperor’s role, which he instead argued must derive power only from the people.(( Ibid., p. 36. )) Rather than seeing society structured by a contract between the state and the populace, Kita supports his interpretation with the assertion that societies are organized for survival, attributing state power to the unified population.(( Ibid. )) In order to correct Japan’s governance, oligarchic rule must end and harmony must be repaired between the sovereign and the people; however, this would not be accomplished by abolishing imperial rule but instead by redefining kokutai. By moving beyond the patriarchal state and unbroken divine imperial lineage, Kita reinterprets kokutai as the essential body of the state which adapts to the changing needs of society.(( Ibid., p. 37. )) Instead of imitating Western ideals of revolution or government, Kita saw the path to utopia in the “process of self-genesis through national awakening” which was enabled through ishin and kokutai as he understood them.(( Wilson, ‘Theory of Revolution’, p. 96 )) By reconciling these concepts, Kita Ikki proposed a new way of thinking about Japan’s national identity and political philosophy. His vision reflects broader implications for the roles of tradition and modernity in state building, providing a unique Japanese response to the crises of his time.

  1. Ibid., p. 70. [↩]

The West as a ‘truth-spot’: An analysis of the reception of ‘Western’ ideas by 20th Century Chinese philosophers

Sociologist Thomas Gieryn, having analysed how places influence what is believed to be true, proposed the notion of ‘truth-spots’: locations which, by design, facilitate the credibility of beliefs that are associated with them. For example, a scientific discovery claimed by someone working in a lab is considered more credible than if it were claimed by someone working out of their garage. To put simply, the credibility of claims can be said to be shaped by the places they are associated with.1

In the 20th century, many Chinese philosophers carried out a formalised assimilation of Chinese philosophical thought with that of the West. I argue that the manner in which this took place may have been caused by a perception held by Chinese philosophers (at the time) of the West as a truth-spot. This is reflected in their adoption of Western methodologies and ideas to reinterpret elements of their own philosophical tradition.2

Consider how the very discipline of philosophy came about in China: initially, fields like history, philosophy and literature were clubbed under a singular pursuit of study, ‘ethics’. However, the birth of ‘philosophy’ as a singular, distinct discipline took place in 20th century China, as an emulatory response to the kind of divisions (based on fields) that existed in institutions in the West.3 Further, Chinese thinkers took on the responsibility of drawing insights from Chinese philosophy that were mainly relevant to topics under scrutiny by Western Scholars; for example, Chinese scholars turned to ‘Masters Studies’- a term denoting scholarly work that took place during the Warring States era- because they were able to derive insights from it on psychology, logic and history.4  We see here, then, that Chinese thinkers associated intellectual practises and ideas that were birthed in the West- be it institutional organisation or topics of investigation- as more credible than their own schools of thought; as a consequence, they believed that this warranted a reshaping of their own philosophical schools.

A key example of this is the notion that Chinese philosophy is inherently ‘deficient’ in comparison to Western philosophy- since its mode of articulation is dominated by ‘aphorisms, allusions and illustrations’ and not the kind of systematic, logically rigorous forms of expression characteristic to the Western philosophical tradition.56 This belief led many Chinese philosophers to rework elements of their philosophy, articulating them in a manner accessible to the West. For example, Feng Youlan, a noted philosopher, engaged with the emerging ‘New Realism’ school of thought in the West, which was concerned in the validity of metaphysics. Youlan argued that ideas of Zhu Xi (a Neo-Confucian philosopher) addressed some of the questions related to New Realism, however, they were articulated in a ‘moral framework of reasoning’. So, Youlan rewrote them, employing a logical method of expression.7

Gieryn suggests how places can act as truth-spots by imposing order; this is evident in Western philosophy- both in the way institutions are organised, and in the systematic method via which thoughts are expressed in it. He also notes that places may be viewed as truth-spots because they ‘manipulate time’, and this may be true for Chinese philosophy because of the preservation/survival of tradition reflected in it.8 It would be extreme to say that 20th century Chinese philosophers saw the West as the only truth-spot, and saw no signs of credibility in the beliefs associated with their own environment. However, it may, at the very least, be said that they perceived the West, in some sense,  to be a a truth-spot superior to their own.

  1. Gieryn, Thomas F.. Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe. University of Chicago Press, 2018. Chicago Scholarship Online, 2019 [↩]
  2. Note that conversely, the works of Western scholars who studied Chinese philosophy at the time (or the East in general) are often infamously termed as ‘Orientalist’ because of exploitative undertones present in them [↩]
  3. Lin, Xiaoqing Diana. “Creating Modern Chinese Metaphysics: Feng Youlan and New Realism.” Modern China 40, no. 1 (2014): 42-44 [↩]
  4. Ibid. [↩]
  5. Ibid., p. 48 [↩]
  6. Youlan, Feng. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy. (ed.) Bodde, Derek. New York, 1958): 12 [↩]
  7. Lin, “Creating Modern Chinese Metaphysics”, pp. 47-51 [↩]
  8. Gieryn, “Truth-Spots”, pp. 173-175 [↩]

Religion, philosophy, or neither? The challenges of engaging Confucianism in global cultural dialogues

Throughout the twentieth century, tensions between (Western) modernity and (Chinese) national culture dominated Chinese philosophical and intellectual debates. This was, and continues to be, especially the case in the difficulties in attempts to reconcile contemporary (liberal) political thought with traditional Chinese socio-political culture, questions that have remained “largely unanswered”.1

Confucian revivalism which seeks to relate and place Confucianism into direct conversation with Western-centric concepts can thus be problematic. Whilst conceptually useful in terms of introducing Confucian ‘motifs’2 to non-Sinitic intellectual spaces, its appropriateness in the reverse sense, when framed through non-Confucian notions, can be contested. The hegemony of Western modes of thought means that Confucianism, when related to other schools of thought, is often conceived through the lens of philosophy or religion. Whilst there is value in translating Confucianism into something more directly comparable to Western concepts, enabling Confucian ideas to be reappropriated into different cultural-historical contexts, it is also delimiting, rigidly fixing Confucianism into externally-produced intellectual ‘boxes’. This fails to account for the more comprehensive ways in which Confucianism interacts with, shapes, and is enacted in social and political life. Rather than an abstract ‘idea’ like democracy, liberalism, or Marxism which can be transported to different contexts, or a religion that can be ‘adopted’ and followed, Confucianism is more deeply and specifically entwined within Sinitic civilization or culture.

The civilizational discourse promoted by the New Confucian movement, inspired by the thought of Xiong Shili (1885-1968), thus seems most appropriate for conceptualising Confucianism in a global sense. This approach views connections between civilizations, in their comprehensive totality, as a means for Chinese “national character to reach higher places of perfection”,3 adopting a broader notion of Confucianism as the core of an all-encompassing Chinese civilization. The ‘Confucian Constitutional Order’ advocated by Qing Jiang4 or the political philosophy of “Confucian political perfectionism” envisioned by Joseph Chan5 offer examples of engaging with and at times integrating Western ideas yet remaining fundamentally rooted in and derived from a Confucian basis. These scholars have not pursued a complete Sinocentric approach: they recognise and engage with alternative (namely, Western political-philisophical) models of thinking about society. Yet, they have adapted them into a distinctly Confucian (Sinitic) civilizational framework: Confucianism provides the intellectual lens through which other cultures are approach, rather than fitting Confucianism into external concepts of philosophy or religion. This means that engagement with other cultures can take place through Confucianism in its comprehensive form, as a form of inter-civilizational dialogue, rather than a distorted, appropriated ‘Confucianism as philosophy’ or ‘Confucianism as religion’.

The idea of a ‘world philosophy of culture’ as advocated by the ‘Boston Confucians’6 is a valuable framework at the general, global level. However, when engaging with Confucianism specifically, utilising Western-derived concepts like philosophy or religion can distort, appropriate, and delimit Confucianism. As Sun has highlighted, such discourses have sometimes been reproduced in China itself,7 as, in attempts to relate Confucianism to other (Western) ideas, Chinese intellectuals recast Confucianism according to these conceptual labels, which shapes how Confucianism is studied, imagined and manifested in contemporary China.   Consequently, inter-civilizational dialogue perhaps provides the most appropriate, albeit similarly inherently imperfect, means for intercultural exchange and translation.

 

 

  1. Edmund S.K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era (Cambridge, 2010), p.94 [↩]
  2. Tu Weiming, ‘Foreword’ in Robert C. Neville, Boston Confucianism: portable tradition in the late-modern world (Albany, 2000). [↩]
  3. Carsun Chung, ‘Manifesto for a Reappraisal of Sinology and the Reconstruction of Chinese Culture’, The Development of Neo-Confucianism, pp.465-483 in W.M. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano (eds.), Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century (New York, 2001), p.553. [↩]
  4. Qing Jiang, A Confucian Constitutional Order: how China’s ancient past can shape its political future, translated by Edmund Ryden, edited by Daniel A. Bell and Ruiping Fan (Princeton, 2012). [↩]
  5. Joseph Cho Wai Chan, Confucian perfectionism: a political philosophy for modern times (Princeton, 2014). [↩]
  6. Robert C. Neville, Boston Confucianism: portable tradition in the late modern world (Albany, 2000) [↩]
  7. Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (Princeton, 2013) [↩]