Early 20th Century Japan Research Articles

Transition to broader-based politics: The role of suffrage extension in early 20th century Japan

The period of modern industrialisation is commonly characterised by gradual democratisation through enfranchisement and intra-elite competition between traditional landlords and emerging capitalists. This raises the question of whether the redistribution of de jure political power via suffrage expansion can catalyse the transition of intra-elite power structures, as reflected in political representation. This study explores the impact of suffrage extension, induced by the wartime tax increase in Japan during the mid-1900s, on the occupational composition of the House of Representatives. Employing a difference-in-differences approach, I demonstrate that the expansion of the electorate led to a significant decline in the seat shares of agricultural landlords, who initially constituted the dominant occupational group in the House. In consideration of the historical context, the overall findings suggest that suffrage extension likely played a crucial role in diversifying House politics away from a landlord-centred system.

Projected on the Dusk: Seeking Cinema in 1910s and 1920s Japanese Poetry

In this article, I explore a set of poetic works from early 20th-century Japan that took cinema—films, movie theaters, screenings, sets, and a variety of cinematic technologies—as their main subject. An enormous range of poets, including some of modern Japanese poetry’s most canonical figures, took a diverse set of approaches to the subject matter, but all were less interested in portraying films themselves, and more in how poetry could use “cinema” and the “cinematic” to grapple with questions of memory, media, ecology, the body, and social change. Looking at these works—most of which appear here in English for the first time—we can find a new archive of early cinematic thought and sensation not bound to the screen.

The Modern Boy as the New Body of Modernity? Contesting the Meaning of Masculinity in Early 20th-century Japan

ABSTRACT This article examines textual and visual representations of the modern boy during the height of his circulation in the Japanese media during the 1920s and 1930s. Depending on the ideological agendas of the various cultural producers constructing the modern boy in discourse, the body of the modern boy signified different things. On the one hand, he was endorsed as a novel and utopic form of embodied modernity, a prototype of the modern Japanese man who personified the spirit and energy of the times. On the other hand, he was also portrayed as a display of inauthentic, failed masculinity with the didactic purpose of demonstrating what a modern Japanese man was not. By analysing competing views of the modern boy in conversation with questions of gender, modernity and power, this article argues that the modern boy constitutes a complex and contradictory narrative of Japanese masculinity shaped by competing ideological agendas of the period. The ambivalence of the modern boy discourse points to the way modern masculinity was a highly contested and politicised concept during the 1920s and 1930s, as individuals, social institutions and the state vied to control the contours of the ideal male body in early 20th-century Japan.

Sankyoku Magazine and the Invention of the Shakuhachi as Religious Instrument in Early 20th-Century Japan

The early 20th century was a period in which understandings of music, religion, and the nation-state underwent rapid change in Japan. In this article I examine Japanese cultural discourse from the first decades of the 20th century in which the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute, was frequently portrayed as a religious instrument. In some cases, this discourse referenced pre-20th century historical affiliations of the shakuhachi with the Fuke-sect, an organization that was loosely affiliated to Rinzai Zen Buddhism. But the article also explores how religio-musical discourse surrounding the shakuhachi intersected with developments in modern Japanese religious life, as well as pre-WWII developments in the political life of Japan and Asia. Drawing primarily on articles from Sankyoku, one of the most important music magazines in early 20th century Japan, I show how public discourse contained in the media and other forms of writing is an important way to understand the rapid developments taking place in music and religion in Japan at this time.

The long-run heterogeneous effects of a cholera pandemic on stature: Evidence from industrializing Japan

The recent COVID-19 pandemic poses the general question on how infectious diseases can persistently affect human health. A growing body of literature has found a significant amount of evidence on the long-term adverse effects of infectious diseases, such as influenza, typhoid fever, and yellow fever. However, we must be careful about the fact that little is known about the long-term consequences of the acute diarrheal disease pandemic cholera – Vibrio cholerae bacillus – which still threatens the health of the population in many developing countries. To bridge this gap in the body of knowledge, we utilized unique census-based data on army height at age 20 in early 20th-century Japan, with a difference-in-differences estimation strategy using regional variation in the intensity of cholera pandemics. We found that early-life exposure to a cholera pandemic had heterogeneous stunting effects on the final height of men; the magnitude of the stunting effects increased as the intensity of exposure increased.

Yujiro Motora's Theory of Personality and Cultivation (Shuyo) as Science: Focusing on the Problematic Regions of Nationalist Idealism and Scientism in Early 20th Century Japan

Yujiro Motora's Theory of Personality and Cultivation (Shuyo) as Science: Focusing on the Problematic Regions of Nationalist Idealism and Scientism in Early 20th Century Japan

The Noise Abatement Campaign in Industrializing Japan, 1923–37

Drawing on Karin Bijsterveld’s triple definition of noise as ownership, political responsibility, and causal responsibility, this article traces how modern Japan problematized noise, and how noise represented both the aspirational discourse of Western civilization and the experiential nuisance accompanying rapid changes in living conditions in 1920s Japan. Primarily based on newspaper archives, the analysis will approach the problematic of noise as it was manifested in different ways in the public and private realms. In the public realm, the mid-1920s marked a turning point due to the reconstruction work after the Great Kantô Earthquake (1923) and the spread of the use of radios, phonographs, and loudspeakers. Within a few years, public opinion against noise had been formed by a coalition of journalists, police, the judiciary, engineers, academics, and municipal officials. This section will also address the legal regulation of noise and its failure; because public opinion was “owned” by middle-class (sub)urbanites, factory noises in downtown areas were hardly included in noise abatement discourse. Around 1930, the sounds of radios became a social problem, but the police and the courts hesitated to intervene in a “private” conflict, partly because they valued radio as a tool for encouraging nationalist mobilization and transmitting announcements from above. In sum, this article investigates the diverse contexts in which noise was perceived and interpreted as such, as noise became an integral part of modern life in early 20th-century Japan.

Clinging to the Relics for Support: Capitalism and the Nation—Review of The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan by Gavin Walker

Observing the apparently anomalous retention of pre-capitalist forms amid rapid economic transformation, Marxists in early 20th-century Japan grappled with the theoretical challenges posed by a set of practices that did not adhere to the presumed teleology of capitalist development. In response, they proposed a sophisticated treatment of nationalism as an essential (but inherently temporary) stabilizing feature of capitalism, requiring constant reinvention as part of capitalism's fundamentally unstable and contradictory growth process. The validity of this treatment can be witnessed today with respect to populist backlashes in Europe and North America, and strident nationalist and even genocidal state policies in South Asia, amid a general stalling of the neoliberal globalization project that has increasingly been seen to fail in the unfolding aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–2009.

고토쿠 슈스이의 ‘과학적’ 사회주의 -동아시아의 진화론 수용의 한 양태-

메이지시기 사회주의자인 고토쿠 슈스이에 대한 학문적 평가에는 마르크스주의의 역사적 의의를 충분히 이해하지 못한 채, 무정부주의로 운동의 돌파구를 모색했다는 견해가 계속 남아있다.BR 본고는 고토쿠가 빠졌던 결함으로 지적되는 진화론과 관련해 그의 사회주의를 고찰한다. 고토쿠가 사상활동을 전개하던 때에는 진화론이 사회적인 상식은 물론 과학적 진리로조차 여겨지게 되었다. 이와 대비해 일반적으로 사회주의는 ‘경쟁’을 소거하고 ‘평등’을 추구한다고 여겨지면서 사회의 침체를 초래할 것이라 여겨졌다.BR 이같은 사상적 환경 속에서 고토쿠는 ‘경쟁’이라는 개념 자체의 진화를 주장하였고, ‘협동’ 또한 자연법칙이자 진화의 원리로 소개한다. 그의 사상은 프리드리히 엥겔스를 통한 마르크스주의의 이해와 함께 다위니즘, 영미의 사회개량주의로부터 뒷받침되었다. 이와 같이 그는 자신의 ‘과학적’ 사회주의를 자연 진화와 사회 진화를 통합적으로 구상하고서 ‘혁명’을 ‘진화과정’으로 주장하였다.

Chain effects of clean water: The Mills–Reincke phenomenon in early 20th-century Japan

This study explores the validity of chain effects of clean water, which are known as the “Mills–Reincke phenomenon,” in early 20-century Japan. Recent studies have reported that water purifications systems are responsible for huge contributions to human capital. Although some studies have investigated the instantaneous effects of water-supply systems in pre-war Japan, little is known about the chain effects of these systems. By analyzing city-level cause-specific mortality data from 1922 to 1940, we find that a decline in typhoid deaths by one per 1000 people decreased the risk of death due to non-waterborne diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia by 0.742–2.942 per 1000 people. Our finding suggests that the observed Mills–Reincke phenomenon could have resulted in the relatively rapid decline in the mortality rate in early 20-century Japan.

Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early 20th-Century Japan by John D. Szostak (review)

Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early 20th-Century Japan by John D. Szostak (review)

Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early 20th-Century Japan by John D. Szostak

Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early 20th-Century Japan by John D. Szostak

The Writing Subject: Makiguchi Tsunesaburo and the Teaching of Composition

Literacy education is always a potentially problematic undertaking, one that shifts people's relationships among themselves, with bodies of transmitted knowledge and with structures of political control (Collins & Blot, 2003; Lee, 2004; Mazrui, 1990). The teaching of writing and composition in early 20th-century Japan presented a number of unique challenges, centered on the complexity of the writing system and the historical diglossia that had separated the spoken and written forms of the language for centuries. In this article, the author compares the responses of Makiguchi Tsunesaburo (1871–1944) and Ashida Enosuke (1873–1951) to these challenges. Where Ashida promoted the idea of writing as a spontaneous expression of the “self,” Makiguchi encouraged a more deliberate, conscious and “scientific” approach to the teaching of writing, one that encouraged more interactive and socialized understanding of language and the self-other relations it embodies. These approaches are compared against the background of the role assigned to language learning and teaching in defining the contours of an emerging national “self.”

“Mission in Asia”: Kita Ikki, V.D. Savarkar and Radical Nationalism in Early 20th Century Japan and India

In the course of the decade spanning the late 1930s to the late 1940s, two men, one in Japan, one in India, were arrested and tried for murders it was known they did not physically commit. One was found guilty, the other was acquitted for lack of evidence. In Tokyo, Kita Ikki was found guilty of ideological contributions to the February Twenty-sixth Incident, the 1936 coup d’etat attempt that resulted in the deaths of three leading figures in the Japanese government. He was executed by firing squad in 1937. Just over ten years later, in Delhi, lack of evidence led to the acquittal of V.D. Savarkar, tried for having made ideological contributions to the assassination of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

The Real Estate Business of the Electric Railroad Companies in Early 20th Century Japan

The Real Estate Business of the Electric Railroad Companies in Early 20th Century Japan

Rise of the Department Store and the Aestheticization of Everyday Life in Early 20th Century Japan

Abstract: This paper focuses on the ways in which the department store has become a key site for the constitution of Japanese modernity through the introduction of images and goods taken from the West, along with the emphasis on “Western design” and “Western taste”. These new consumer spaces have become aestheticized in various ways so that we can speak of an “aestheticization” of everyday life. Yet this was also a modernizing learning process for Japanese consumers, hence a key problem was how these new experiences were to be classified and ordered into a relatively stable habitus. The rise of the department store has had an important mediating function here. Department stores not only provided new goods along with interpretations of how to use them, but also acted as theatres, as rehearsal spaces, with front and back stage areas where one can watch the performance, try out for oneself new roles. This is especially the case for women in the city, who were able to explore a new identity space with a new set of competence experiences and pleasures. In this process, the department store also provided a form of women's public sphere where they could enjoy shopping, entertainment and learning opportunities. Department stores encouraged not only a sense of luxury and theatrical settings, but also help to teach women how to assemble new tastes and styles into their lifestyle. In addition, it should be emphasized that in the Japanese case, department stores also played an important role not just as a new cultural initiative on the part of the businessmen and cultural intermediaries who invented consumer culture, but also as a political initiative on the part of the government who sought to link them to the reform of everyday life and the production of good Japanese citizens.

Banks and Economic Growth: Implications from Japanese History

In the 1950s and 60s, Alexander Gerschenkron claimed that banks facilitate economic growth among backward countries. In 1990s and 2000s, many theorists similarly claim that banks promote growth. Banks do so by their superior monitoring and screening capabilities, they reason. Through those capabilities, banks reduce informational asymmetries and the attendent moral hazard and adverse selection, and thereby improve the allocation of credit. As a fast-growth but allegedly bank-centered economy, Japan plays an important part in these discussions of finance and growth. In early 20th century Japan firms relied heavily on bank debt, observers argue. Those firms with preferential access to debt outperformed the others, and those that were part of the zaibatsu corporate groups obtained that preferential access through their affiliated banks. With data from the first half of the century, we ask whether Japanese banks performed the roles Gerschenkron and modern theorists assign them. Notwithstanding the usual accounts, we find that they did not. Japan was not a bank-centered economy; instead, firms relied overwhelmingly on equity finance. It was not an economy where firms with access to bank credit outperformed their rivals; instead, firms earned no advantage from such access. And it was not a world where the zaibatsu manipulated their banks to favor affiliated firms; instead, zaibatsu banks loaned affiliated firms little more (if any) than the deposits those firms had made with the banks. During the first half of the last century, Japanese firms obtained almost all their funds through decentralized, competitive capital markets.

Western nutritional knowledge in early 20th century Japan

Western nutritional knowledge in early 20th century Japan