Japan, A Short History

by Mikiso Hane
2000, Oneworld, Oxford

30 January 2007 . Pages 1-70 of 212.


I get really carried away sometimes wanting to take in a lot of information, dipping into way too many books at one time. This is especially true when I’m working on a book or play. I want to create a broad base of knowledge for myself because I like books by authors who seem to be geniuses, such as Thomas Pynchon, Gore Vidal or Norman Rush. Never mind that I’m hindered with being a slow reader with an only moderately retentive memory. Never mind that as I’ve grown up, I realize these writers often trip themselves up on their own erudition; still, there’s something in me that feels a novel should be a vast collage of facts and ideas from many different disciplines. So I’ll go to the library and grab a lot of books off the shelf. When I was less mature, I’d have grabbed some ancient, voluminous history of Japan, which would probably have been jammed from preface to appendix with raw data. But wanting to keep my sanity, I know that it’s a wiser first step to go with a book like Mikiso Hane’s, which is at least manageable that you can get through it and feel you still have time left over for having a life.
Of course, a book like this requires a lot of concentration and a lot of imagination. You can’t drop a stitch. For the novice, every concept and historical figure is new, so you have to keep close track of them all as they're introduced. What’s a Shοen, who were the Takugawa, and what roles did the two play in relation to the Bakufu? Blink and you’ll miss the definitions, and so you have to either be constantly flipping back or you have to make the compromise of skimming forward and just getting an intuitive overview of the shape of the thing. Maybe that’s the most productive way to approach a book like this: even if you’re not trying to memorize the entire labyrinth of Japanese history, you get a sense of the ball game of history, the way that chaotic free-for-alls resolve into stable hegemonies, and the way these hegemonies decay. Some interesting things to me so far have been: the fact that even though the Japanese have long viewed the Emperor as a godlike figure, he’s usually had very little real power; the early conversion of hundreds of thousands of Japanese to Christianity; the plight of the peasantry, which suffered famines so harsh that mass cannibalism may have occurred; the Confucian-influenced caste-system, which included an “untouchable” caste called the burakumin; and the various sects and divisions of Buddhism, including Mahayana, which focuses on the compassionate Bodhisattvas, the Nichiren Sect, which extolled the power of meditative chanting, and the Jodo school, which believed that merely by saying the name of a gracious Bodhisattva, Amida, with true devotion, one can gain salvation. I do wish that there were more attention given to art and culture. We get a quote from Hokusai and learn that Hiroshige was a master of depicting the various different effects of light, but it seems that in order to put art into its own perspective you have to somehow approach the artist’s own inner conflicts and social relationships with the same attention you pay to the intrigues that take place between the samurai and the imperial court.
(The brief description of Hiroshige made me take a good look at a set of postcards of his prints, compiled out by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and published by Pomegranate in San Francisco. It’s definitely worth looking at. I especially enjoy the way he’ll often put objects in the extreme foreground, as though the viewer’s face is just inches away from them. For instance, one scene is a rice paddy as viewed through the gaps in a stand of irises; in another scene, a descending raptor fills the top of the picture and the remainder of the scene is a distant, snowy landscape.)

18 February 2007, pp. 70-136

As history progresses toward the present, Mikiso Hane seems more in his element. This is especially true of the social history of Japan, i.e., the conditions of abject poverty endured by many. The section about factory workers during the late Meiji Era is a study in brutality, and it ought to ring a bell for people today who get a little anxious with the way “globalization” seems primarily to be about the dismantling of social safety nets. The section on factory workers takes us on a guided tour through some of the vicious cycles and catch-22s that characterize the condition of workers in that time. The system described seems not just unfair and dishonest, but also intentionally sadistic. High rates of injury in factories were blamed on workers’ “carelessness.” Workers with cholera were sometimes burned alive. Contrast this with the obscenely wealthy zaibatsu (basically the dominant corporate interests in Japan at the time) and you begin to see the scope of the economic tensions at play.
The subject of labor history brings up the subject of another book I read recently, Thomas Pynchon’s "Against the Day", which focuses largely on the frictions between a Colorado mining family and the family of plutocrats who set out to cause their downfall. If you’re not a fan of Pynchon you can skip this paragraph. What struck me about Day is that Pynchon, who tends to revel in ambiguity and intellectual game playing has come down so solidly on the side of the workers and anarchists of the period. Pynchon’s historical fiction is a lot more fun than a lot of the “straight” stuff that’s out there because he presents conspiracy theories, tabloid hoaxes and pure invention on the same footing as “legitimate” fact, and he does so for a good purpose: to take away the drab shroud of dignity that we usually bring to the past in literature. But in Against the Day, Pynchon seems much more careful about preserving some dignity when it comes to the workers’ movement at the turn-of-the-century. He does this, I think, because he sees this part of history as the bedrock reality, and the story of presidencies, the rise and fall of economic and cultural institutions, and even the progress of science more as fictions and myths that may be freely tampered with. Furthermore, the sweeping “global” aspect of the book that seems to have annoyed so many readers seems to turn things inside out and show us that history might be easier understood if we see the most exploited and oppressed peoples as composing a cohesive, underlying fabric whose wholeness is compromised and distorted by the patterns of nationality and hierarchy that are stitched on from above. That’s a clunky description on my part; suffice it to say that because of Pynchon’s book, I’m looking for different things in Mikiso Hane’s book than I would have otherwise.
The no-nonsense style of the book (no illustrations, no maps, very little biographical background and only a handful of illustrative quotes from the people involved) is necessary to keep the book slim and manageable, but it does make it hard to keep track of the many players who seemed to act as midwives to the transition of Japan from a feudalistic to a more modern government. I wonder if this might not be more appropriate to our era: after all, with internet access as long as you have at your disposal names such as Okubo Toshimichi and Yamagata Aritomo, all you need to do is type in the name and you’ll have a wealth of graphic information right on your screen. Will printed histories evolve towards simply being repositories of keywords that can be looked up online for further details?
One other thing to say is that once the Meiji Era starts, the coverage of artistic and intellectual developments becomes much more comprehensive and interesting. The description of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s disturbing Jigokumon (The Hell Screen) is enough to make me want to seek the story out on my next trip to the library.

14 March 2007: p. 136 to end.

Hane has written some other history books, some of which deal with postwar Japanese history. His short history shows how differently he regards the story before and after the war. Before the war, whether we’re talking about prehistory, the days of the shogun, or the battles of WWII, all questions are essentially answered. After the war, however, mysteries still exist. Why did Japan become such an economic powerhouse? What is the relationship between Japanese corporations and yakuza?
This isn’t intellectual dishonesty; it’s a matter of perspective. From the point of a historian of recent events, bygone centuries have to stand as a pedestal upon which our own period must stand that we might view it. What’s amazing is that Hane has managed to look back so far, and tell the story in such detail. He’s not exactly consistent: each period has its own focus, based on what he thinks is the most significant arena of development. But overall, we get an amazing glimpse of how a student of history can trace lines of cause and event from the oldest available archaeological data to the present day without exhausting his or her mortal capacity.
I like the way that Hane affords himself a single sentence of punditry and commentary when he notes that the militarists and nationalists who led the charge into WWII and who sent soldiers to war sat safe in Tokyo while their soldiers die, as leaders during war almost always do.
And it’s interesting to see the way that many of those people and forces who led the nation into war managed to slip back into power once the war was over—although alliegences had changed (in line with the new Cold War) and progress had been made on issues such as suffrage for women.
One thing that’s missing from the book is a study of the environmental side of Japan’s history, which is a shame because Japan faces so many challenges that force it to walk an ecological tightrope that other industrialized nations have not been forced to.