by liberal japonicus
Since I've been found out, I figure I should just fly my hammer and sickle flag. Debout, les damnés de la terre!!
But naturally, the Japanese flavor of Marxism tastes a bit different....
https://palladiummag.com/2021/08/20/the-school-that-built-asia/
But during its lifetime, the Japanese colony was a highly unusual exercise in the history of imperialism. The harsh realities of Chinese life under the regime existed side-by-side with an ambitious pan-Asian ideological experiment. Japan’s tradition of technocratic modernization played a central role in Manchukuo’s governing bodies, like the Concordia Association, the one-party state’s governing apparatus, and in the so-called South Manchuria Railway Company Research Department, a RAND Corporation-like research institution which ended up running much of Manchukuo’s development.
This interest in technocratic modernization did not remain within established ideological confines; many radical ideas, anything that could inform development, found a receptive audience. For example even socialist ideas and Soviet policies informed the actions of Japanese technocrats and intellectuals, with a number of Japanese Marxists joining Manchukuo’s institutions after fleeing persecution in Japan itself. These Marxist exiles drew up industrial Five-Year Plans and promoted agricultural collectivisation, until they too fell afoul of the army-led purges of the political left in the early 1940s. Under the slogan of “Five Races Under One Union,” pan-Asianists in Manchukuo’s institutions attempted to put their ideas into practice, even finding themselves caught up or participating in movements against Japanese imperialism.
I think the article suffers a bit from the suggestion that Marxism in Japan is totally inexplicable. This article has this
To summarise the reception history of Marx in Japan is no small task.1 In fact, it is essentially impossible to give an adequate overview of one of the deepest, most prolific, and most variegated linguistic repositories of the Marxist tradition. Although it remains remarkably little-known in contemporary European or North American intellectual circles, Marxism was the dominant strand of theoretical inquiry in Japan for most of the 20th century; more pointedly, we might say, Japanese has remained perhaps the most important language for Marxist-theoretical scholarship beyond English, German, and French, yet its theoretical history remains relatively isolated within its own linguistic boundaries. From its initial entry into the Japanese intellectual world in the late 1800s, Marxist analysis quickly came to constitute a vast and osmotic field that permeated all aspects of academic life, historical thought, forms of political organisation, and ways of analysing the social condition. Numerous examples testify to this, including the striking fact that the first Collected Works of Marx and Engels in the world was not published in German, Russian, French or English, but in Japanese, by Kaizōsha publishing house in 1932 in 35 volumes, overseen by Sakisaka Itsurō.
[...]
While the English, French, German, Italian, American and numerous other receptions of Marx saw his work as immediately linked to and embedded in the history of the workers’ movement, it would be hard to say that this holds true in the case of Japan. [...] ...Marx’s work entered Japan not simply as the political vanguard of the labour and socialist movements, but also (or even principally) as the theoretical vanguard of the cutting-edge of social-scientific inquiry into the character of modern society, with its two central poles: the social relation of capital, and the formation of the modern national state.
I'm most familiar with Marxism in economics, which is actually is a research thread in Japan and I have a few colleagues who specialize in it (when I first came to work here, I was surprised to find a large bust of Marx on the third floor of our library. Something told me we weren't in Kansas any more), and this article discusses it. I get a bit frustrated with Jacobin, but this is a worthwhile interview on Marxism in Japan and if you want to get in the weeds, this article might be of interest (behind a paywall, save as html and drop in your browser). But here is a taste:
The boom [interest in Karl Marx] was ignited by a 34-year-old associate professor at Osaka City University who re-imagined the theory expounded in the 19th-century German thinker’s seminal “Das Kapital” from the perspective of environmental conservation in a bestselling book published last September.
In it, Kohei Saito argued that the realization of sustainable development goals set by the United Nations is as impossible as “drawing a round triangle” under modern-day capitalism.
The success of the book resulted in an invitation from Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, to present a commentary on Marx’s foundational theoretical text, known by its full title in English as “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,” on a program aired in January.
“Many people noticed the contradictions of capitalism when they saw only socially vulnerable people struggling during the coronavirus pandemic,” Saito said in a recent interview.
[...]
Saito presents a theory of “degrowth communism” inspired by Marx, in which he argues that society can stop the perpetual cycles of mass production and mass consumption under capitalism by pursuing a more humanistic path prioritizing social and ecological well-being over economic growth.
However, I'm not really sure if it was Marxism or technocratic modernization, as the first article suggests, I think that it is more that Japan has always been very happy to vacuum up any thing that serves Japanese aims, with both Marxism and pan asianism being good examples.
Pan-asianism has always been a japanese thing. That is, until it runs into problems and then it is not. One of the most interesting examples of that for me was the 1909 assassination of Ito Hirobumi, the first and 4 time Prime Minster of Japan, by An Jung-geun, a Korean independence activist. Ito was actually not a hard-liner, but a leading pan-asianist who argued that Asian countries needed to work together in order to counterbalance Western encroachments on Asia. However, as this chapter observes
Embodying the ideal of cooperation among the nations of East Asia against the threat of Western imperialism and domination, the movement was egalitarian in theory. Whereas the Japanese government’s diplomatic efforts (see Chapter 2 in this volume) focused on establishing and maintaining friendly relations with the Western powers, Pan-Asianist writers and activists emphasized the need for closer relations with Japan’s Asian neighbours and, in some circumstances, a Pan-Asian alliance against the West. However, in many cases, this aim also implied Japanese claims to leadership in Asia.
Funny how that works out like that. Another interesting article about Pan-Asianism is here.
So anyway, An Jung-geun, who also believed in Pan-Asian cooperation, assassinated the person who was pretty sympathetic to pan-Asian goals, and his assassination led to hard-liners taking power. Though I'm not sure if An and Ito could have been able to reach each other.
And An Jung-geun, strangely enough, impressed his guards at Lushan prison (where he was held before being executed for the assassination) so much with his sincerity that not only was he treated with a measure of respect, a guard named Chiba received An's funeral calligraphy, which he brought back to his hometown and later returned it to South Korea as well as having a tablet erected in a Soto zen Buddhist temple in his hometown in Miyagi prefecture, Dairinji. I'm always a bit suspicious of these honoring the prisoner who accepts his fate stories, but it does seem that he had a quality that reminds me of stories of Mandela in prison.
And another aspect that I find interesting is that An Jung-geun converted to Catholicism and was rather devout.
So I wonder what all of you make of this. Have at it.
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