Nineteenth-Century Japan Research Articles

Banks, credit supply, and the life cycle of firms: Evidence from late nineteenth century Japan

How does local credit supply affect economic dynamism? Using an exogenous bond shock in historical Japan and new genealogical firm-level data, we empirically examine the effects of credit availability on firm life cycles. We find that the lifespan of firms decreases with bank capital and that capital-abundant regions have more firm creation and destruction. These effects are amplified for manufacturing, while service sector firms experience no change in longevity and have less creation. Our results suggest that samurai bonds were conducive to the emergence of banking, which eased firms’ financial constraints and led to more capital-intensive investment and economic dynamism.

An observational comic novel of manners. Review of the Russian edition of the book Footing It Along the Tōkaidō by Jippensha Ikku

The article offers a critical review of the Russian edition of the comic novel Footing it Along the Tōkaidō by an outstanding writer of the Tokugawa era (1603–1868) Jippenshya Ikku. Recently published by Saint Petersburg’s Hyperion, the novel was masterfully translated from Japanese by Anastassya Y. Borkina who thoroughly studied this complex observational comedy of manners or humerous book (kokkeibon) and provided the necessary analytical apparatus, including commentaries and a preface. The narrative develops around the adventures of two characters, Yajirobei and Kitahachi, who embark on a journey along the so-called Tōkaidō road, the most important of the routes of Japan, connecting Edo and Kyoto. They meet various personages from a variety of cities and regions as well as from different strata of society, getting themselves into farcical situations and every time finding their way out of comic conundrums. The road itself works as a central axis of the story, propelling the characters forward and offering diverse settings for their escapades. The novel with illustrations by the writer was especially popular in nineteenth century Japan, yet the adventures of Yajirobei and Kitahachi remain well-known up until today, providing inspiration for a trove of literary parodies, manga novels, anime books, and video games.

Making sense of violence in semi-technologized conventional civil war: Evidence from nineteenth-century Japan

While existing studies highlight features of violence in conventional civil wars, they overlook how war technology is linked to the tactics of armed forces. To shed light on the understudied phenomenon of semi-technologized regular forces in a civil war, this article explores why and how violence is executed by such forces. To do so, we examine patterns of violence in the Boshin War that took place in Japan between 1868 and 1869. Our analyses of novel geocoded event data demonstrate that violent incidents occurred in strategically important locations but in ways that differed from conventional and guerrilla wars. Armed forces were unable to operate as technologically sophisticated forces do in modern conventional civil war due to limited logistics capabilities. Avoiding encounters in less accessible areas, the forces tended to fight in and contest areas that allowed them to establish relationships with local civilians. Additionally, violence against civilians was more likely to occur on the front lines where armed forces and civilians interacted because the former relied on the latter to convey provisions, arms, and ammunition. Unlike in conventional civil wars, military battles and one-sided violence were not unrelated to each other. With these findings, we address temporal, regional, and typological biases in civil war studies. Si bien los estudios existentes enfatizan las características de la violencia en las guerras civiles convencionales, estos estudios pasan por alto cómo se vincula la tecnología de guerra con las tácticas de las fuerzas armadas. Este artículo analiza, con el fin de arrojar luz sobre el poco estudiado fenómeno de las fuerzas regulares «semi-tecnologizadas» en una guerra civil, por qué y de qué manera estas fuerzas ejercen esta violencia. Para ello, estudiamos los patrones de violencia en la Guerra Boshin que tuvo lugar en Japón entre 1868 y 1869. Los análisis que realizamos de nuevos datos de eventos geocodificados demuestran que los incidentes violentos tuvieron lugar en lugares estratégicamente importantes, pero de maneras que diferían de las guerras convencionales y de las guerras de guerrillas. Las fuerzas armadas no pudieron operar de la misma manera que lo harían las fuerzas tecnológicamente sofisticadas en la guerra civil convencional moderna debido a las limitadas capacidades logísticas. Las fuerzas armadas evitaban encuentros en áreas menos accesibles y tendían a luchar y a disputar áreas que les permitieran establecer relaciones con civiles locales. Además, era más probable que la violencia contra civiles tuviera lugar en las líneas del frente donde las fuerzas armadas y los civiles interactuaban debido a que las fuerzas armadas dependían de los civiles para transportar provisiones, armas y municiones. En contraposición a las guerras civiles convencionales, las batallas militares y la violencia unilateral no eran independientes una de la otra. Con estas conclusiones, abordamos los sesgos temporales, regionales y tipológicos en los estudios de la guerra civil. Bien que les études actuelles mettent en évidence les caractéristiques de la violence lors des guerres civiles traditionnelles, elles omettent la relation entre la technologie et les tactiques militaires. Pour expliquer ce phénomène sous-étudié, notre article analyse pourquoi et comment les forces traditionnelles semi-technologisées ont recours à la violence dans une guerre civile. Pour ce faire, nous étudions des schémas de violence au cours de la guerre de Boshin qui a sévi au Japon de 1868 à 1869. Nos analyses de données géocodées inédites sur cet événement montrent que des incidents violents ont eu lieu dans des lieux stratégiques, mais pas de la même façon que dans les guerres traditionnelles ou guérillas. La limitation de leurs capacités logistiques empêchait les forces armées d’intervenir comme elles l’auraient fait si elles bénéficiaient de technologies sophistiquées dans des guerres civiles traditionnelles modernes. Elles évitaient les rencontres dans les zones aux accès limités, préférant se battre pour le contrôle d’espaces qui leur permettaient d’établir des relations avec la population locale. En outre, les violences contre les populations civiles survenaient plus souvent sur le front, lors des interactions avec les forces armées en quête de provisions, d’armes et de munitions. À la différence des guerres civiles traditionnelles, il existait des liens entre les batailles militaires et la violence unilatérale. Grâce à nos observations, nous étudions les biais temporels, régionaux et typologiques des études sur les guerres civiles.

The Poetic Knowledge of Shizuki Tadao Traces of Dutch Poet Jacob Cats in Early Nineteenth-Century Japan

In the history of the Dutch-Japanese relations, Shizuki Tadao is recognised as an extraordinary scholar. However, his translations of European books from Dutch into Japanese only paint a partial picture of his research. In fact, he also developed valuable theories on language that allowed the Japanese to better grasp Dutch. Furthermore, he introduced European grammatical concepts and terminology in Japan. A lesser-known interest of Shizuki was poetry, evidenced by three citations from the Dutch poet Jacob Cats (1577‑1660), found in Shizuki’s works on language, by two Dutch poems attributed to him, and by an additional indirect reference to Shizuki’s knowledge on the theory of poetry. The present article aims at better understanding the figure of Shizuki as a scholar of Dutch and to add a piece to the research on the spreading of Cats’ emblems.

BUDDHISM AND MODERNITY: SOURCES FROM NINETEENTH‐CENTURY JAPAN. Edited by OrionKlautau and Hans MartinKrämer. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. Pp. viii+291. Hardback, $68.00; Paperback, $28.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 47, Issue 4 p. 558-558 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: East Asia BUDDHISM AND MODERNITY: SOURCES FROM NINETEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN. Edited by Orion Klautau and Hans Martin Krämer. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. Pp. viii+291. Hardback, $68.00; Paperback, $28.00. First published: 19 January 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.15606Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume47, Issue4New Religious Movements and Documentary FilmsDecember 2021Pages 558-558 RelatedInformation

The United States at the Center of the Action

The United States at the Center of the Action

Sexual Assault and the Evidential Body

This article explores the formation of what Christopher Hamlin has called a “forensic culture” in late nineteenth-century Japan, and its impact on the prosecution of crimes of sexual violence. Before the 1870s, acts of rape often went unpunished or were resolved through private monetary settlements between the victim and her family and the rapist. However, after the formation of the modern Japanese state in 1868, legal reform, an important aspect of the state-building process, created a new opportunity for victims to seek legal redress. Over the course of a decade, an unprecedented number of rapes were prosecuted, with most resulting in convictions and long prison terms for the perpetrators. That situation, however, changed as forensic medicine came to be institutionalized as a specific medical discipline and as part of the criminal justice system. Viewed by the police and jurists as modern, scientific, and rational, forensic medicine created a new standard for what counted as evidence, with the result that the testimony of the victim and others was devalued in favor of traces of blood, semen, and bodily injury—evidence that, as some contemporaries noted, ignored the reality of rape.

Canonising Shakespeare in 1920s Japan

In 1927, just before completing the first Japanese translation of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) selected eight of his translations for inclusion in his own Selected Works, which were published in fifteen volumes in conclusion to his career as one of the leading exponents of cultural reform of his generation. His choice is idiosyncratic as it omits the plays that had become most popular during the period of Shakespeare’s initial reception in late nineteenth-century Japan, but includes a number that were relatively unknown, such as Measure for Measure. This article suggests likely reasons for his selection before discussing the comments he makes on each play in his translation prefaces, and thus provides an overview of what Tsubouchi had come to value about Shakespeare.

Rival principals and shrewd agents: Military assistance and the diffusion of warfare

AbstractMilitary assistance is a perennial feature of international relations. Such programmes typically aim to improve the effectiveness of local partners, exporting the donor's way of war through the provision of training and equipment. By remaking indigenous armies in their own image, donors likewise hope to mitigate the profound agency costs associated with the transfer of military capability. But, while technical and organisational transformations can provide notable battlefield advantages, the philosophies underlying such innovations are not so easily propagated. Instead, new tactics, structures, and technologies typically intersect with pre-existing local schemata of war, producing novel if sometimes dysfunctional hybrid praxes. According to principal-agent theory, the application of greater conditionality in the provision of military assistance should improve the fidelity of military diffusion, aligning agents’ divergent interests with their principals’ goals. In practice, however, principal-agent exchanges rarely exist in isolation. Examining the modernisation of nineteenth-century Japan as a case study in military diffusion, this article argues that competition between rival patrons allows recipient states to play would-be principals off against each other, bypassing conditionality by replicating a marketplace for military assistance. In so doing, however, agents trade functionality for sovereignty in their military diffusion.

From Country to Nation: Ethnographic Studies, "Kokugaku," and Spirits in Nineteenth-Century Japan by Gideon Fujiwara

Reviewed by: From Country to Nation: Ethnographic Studies, "Kokugaku," and Spirits in Nineteenth-Century Japan by Gideon Fujiwara Mark Teeuwen From Country to Nation: Ethnographic Studies, "Kokugaku," and Spirits in Nineteenth-Century Japan. By Gideon Fujiwara. Cornell East Asia Series, 2021. 292 pages. ISBN: 9781501753930 (hardcover, also available as e-book). Ibukinoya, the Kokugaku school of Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), stands out among the private academies of the late Edo period for a number of reasons. Ibukinoya had an exceptionally large number of registered disciples—well over four thousand by 1870 following a rise from 553 at the time of Atsutane's death. Atsutane's teachings spread to all corners of Japan, even making some inroads into the curriculum of domain schools. In the first years of Meiji, Atsutane's heir, Kanetane (1799–1880), and other Ibukinoya members occupied positions of influence in the new government, adding to the school's visibility and leading to a temporary influx of new members. This ended abruptly in 1871–1872, however, when an alleged plot to return the emperor to Kyoto and the death of Kanetane's son and heir plunged Ibukinoya into a steep decline. Atsutane's ideas and practices nonetheless remained central to many of the Shinto sects that won official status from 1882 onward. Ibukinoya's cycle of boom and bust raises many questions. How did this school attract so many members across such a large spectrum of classes and localities? What did Atsutane's teachings mean to those who invested in them, and why did Ibukinoya's membership expand so rapidly decades after his death? What forms did local Ibukinoya groups take, and what kind of activities held these groups together? Finally, what was the local legacy of such groups after the 1871 crisis? Gideon Fujiwara's book sheds light on these questions by focusing on a hitherto largely ignored Ibukinoya group based in Hirosaki domain (the western half of today's Aomori Prefecture, also known as Tsugaru). This group never grew particularly large or prominent, reaching only a modest eighteen members in 1871 in contrast to branches in places like neighboring Akita domain, with 330 members, or the Ina valley in Shinano (Nagano), with 386. Hirosaki was in fact a latecomer on the Kokugaku scene. The initiative to start an Ibukinoya group there was taken by the townsman Tsuruya Ariyo (1808–1871) in 1857; the group collapsed in the year of Ariyo's death, which coincided with Ibukinoya's sudden decline at the national level. In the intervening fourteen years, the group produced no scholars of national note. That, of course, was equally true of most other Ibukinoya branches in the provinces. Fujiwara cites five goals for this study (pp. 8–9). The first is to shed light on the diversity within Kokugaku at the grassroots, as revealed by the wide range of activities [End Page 382] and interests among local members. Goals two through four are concerned with tracing and analyzing a few of those interests, namely, visions of a divine "Imperial Japan" and attempts to find a place for local identities within that national framework; an "ethnographic" fascination with local customs; and "religious" practices revolving around kami worship and particular views of the spirit world and the realm of the dead. The fifth aim is to trace how the Ibukinoya group in Hirosaki fared when modernity rendered Kokugaku irrelevant in a world dominated by Western ideas and technology. The two main protagonists of the study are the aforementioned Ariyo and the more famous Hirao Rosen (1808–1880). As noted, Ariyo was the primus motor of the Hirosaki group. He ran a poetry circle and served as a liaison between acquaintances in Hirosaki (mainly fellow circle members) and Kanetane in Edo. Ariyo's group bought books by Atsutane and held regular poetry meetings. Worship practices were integral to its activities: Ariyo recited norito prayers in front of Atsutane's portrait and other "spiritual treasures" associated with the scholar at the meetings. He also encouraged all members to perform "daily worship" of gods highlighted by Atsutane and of their ancestors (pp. 110–13). Members prayed to be freed of the corrupting influence of the "Chinese heart" and to...

Making and Using Scientific Instruments in Japan: How Scholars and Craftsmen Cooperated, 1781-1853.

This article examines five separate but interrelated cases concerning scientific instruments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan. Instruments like telescopes and clocks were not typically traded goods on the early modern Japanese market, but their use and production show us the inventive activities carried out in later Edo Japan. The first two cases highlight academic activities in Osaka, where scholars, in collaboration with craftsmen, made and used instruments in order to study Western natural sciences. Their activities were possible thanks to wealthy merchants, who promoted the active circulation of things and information. The three other cases are ingenious craftsmen who demonstrate the importance of their contact with academic intellectuals for making and elaborating optical and mechanical instruments. An analysis of their career paths reveals to what extent the goals and outcomes of their inventive activities were constrained and promoted by their social and occupational standing in the feudal society.

On the Politics of Decadent Rebellion: Beardsley, Japonisme, Rococo

The graphic designer Aubrey Beardsley created perverse, grotesque illustrations that encapsulate our sense of decadent visuality. This essay explores Beardsley's use of foreign styles, specifically those of nineteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century France. Looking at Beardsley's illustrations for Salomé (1893) and The Rape of the Lock (1895), the essay argues that the Japanese and French stylistic influences are actually connected, despite their diverse geographies and temporalities. Studying both styles together reveals the ways that decadence embraced hierarchy and the inequality of persons, wielding a surprisingly normative politics of racial and cultural otherness to produce a Victorian counterculture. Decadence harnessed these familiar imperial-era attitudes in strange ways, using models of taboo difference to create a transgressive aesthetics that moved toward both embodiment and abstraction.

Dominant Forms and Marginal Translations: Re-reading the Emergence of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Franco Moretti has defined form as ‘the repeatable element of literature’. However, without a precise definition of the form(s) analysed in a given study, it is difficult to gauge what has been repeated. Moreover, no matter what guise we consider ‘form’ to take, the following objection remains: just because some element has been (or seems to have been) repeated, this does not mean that its function has been repeated too. In terms of Japanese literary history, perhaps no period better demonstrates this than the Meiji period (1868–1912). The main innovation of this paper is to adapt the text-linguistic notions of acceptability and intertextuality (see de Beaugrande and Dressler) to show that this period's ‘familiar history of rupture’ (cf. Zwicker) is indeed a valid framework for understanding the emergence of modern Japanese prose fiction. In this appeal to local context, I locate an alternative to the temptation to see, as Moretti does, an increasing amount of ‘sameness’ on the global literary stage.

Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan

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Beyond the connoisseurship approach: creating a chronology in Hokusai prints using non-invasive techniques and multivariate data analysis

This study combines scientific and connoisseurship approaches to establish a production chronology of 141 woodblock prints from Katsushika Hokusai’s series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji belonging to different cultural institutions in Europe and the United States. In order to create this chronology, the reflectance spectroscopy (FORS) signature of the indigo/Prussian blue mixture of the key-block printed outlines was measured and compared using multivariate data analysis. This approach yielded 9 clusters of prints, each one presenting slightly different FORS features, and therefore, different Prussian blue/indigo mixtures. The connoisseurship approach was then applied to impressions of the same print found across the 9 clusters. This allowed for arrangement of the clustered prints according to their production time, resulting in a comprehensive timeline for the 141 prints examined. To date, this work represents the only systematic study of such a large corpus of Japanese/Hokusai woodblock prints integrating chemical analysis and statistical treatment of data with careful visual examination of the prints. The result is a novel approach to creating a chronology for these objects. Our study easily differentiated between early nineteenth and early twentieth century prints as well as between various printing batches/clusters. Creating a chronology of such an important print series is also crucial to understand the evolution of artist and printing studio practices in late nineteenth-century Japan, a period of great economic and cultural changes.

The Samurai Bond: Credit Supply, Market Access, and Structural Transformation in Pre-War Japan

While credit supply growth is associated with exacerbating financial crises, its impact on long-run growth is unclear. Market access similarly has ambiguous economic effects over time. Using regional variation in bond payments to samurai and the introduction of railways in nineteenth century Japan, we find that together they are associated with persistent redistributive effects between regions and sectors. Areas with higher bond value and railway access experienced tertiary sector growth and primary sector shrinkage, with analogous results in sectoral labor shares. This interaction between credit supply and market access facilitated structural transformation but had little long-run net growth impact.

Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan, written by Robert Tuck

Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan, written by Robert Tuck

Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel by Daniel Poch

Reviewed by: Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel by Daniel Poch Brian Dowdle POCH, DANIEL Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 304 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $64.99 e-book. Daniel Poch’s significant Licentious Fictions is a wide-ranging critical history of ninjō: “human emotions.” Although ninjō includes a range of feelings, Poch focuses on it as code for “amorous emotion or love, often including sexual desire” (12). Due to its erotic connotations, ninjō was often seen by Japanese readers as problematic or “licentious.” This work follows recent scholarship on the long nineteenth century in Japan. Poch makes a meaningful contribution to suture this period into “a coherent literary and discursive space held together by an intensified critical and narrative awareness of emotion” (4). Since this work covers many of the same texts and issues, it can be seen as a companion to Jonathan Zwicker’s Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth Century Japan (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2006). Although Poch is constructing a nineteenth-century genealogy of the novel through the discourse of ninjō, he intentionally chooses to exclude authors from the 1850s to 1870s, writing, “it is legitimate to discard, at least for the purpose of this discussion, the many minor gesaku works and authors that proliferated, from the bakumatsu period well into Meiji times” (9–10). This removal of an entire generation who helped shape the term ninjō and wrote the very types of fiction he seeks to analyze creates a noticeable lacuna in the work. Poch’s genealogy of history actually stretches beyond the nineteenth century and provides a rich historical background, as can be seen in the two chapters of Part I, “Ninjō and the Early-Modern Novel.” The first, “From Ninjō to the Ninjōbon,” connects the mid-nineteenth-century genre of the ninjōbon to its Japanese and Chinese antecedent discourses on emotion in poetry and fiction. Poch defines the ninjōbon as “books of human emotion” that focus on “male-female love” (2). This focus differs from Jonathan Zwicker’s or Peter F. Kornicki’s view of the genre as sentimental [End Page 362] books, which were designed to bring the reader to tears. Weaving together numerous interpretive threads, Poch convincingly shows how, by the 1800s, works focusing on ninjō were “unstable” in their social position and reveals how such works were stuck between historical “legitimizing discourses that highlight their morality and didactic value” and “discursive devaluation [of the genre] as licentious” (58). Hence, Poch sees in the author Tamenaga Shunsui’s (1790–1843) writing the representation of “titillating licentiousness” as well as under-appreciated “moral-didactic ambitions” (58). Despite this ambiguity, by the 1880s, Poch argues the ninjōbon was taken as “a lowbrow narrative medium focusing on ninjō and therefore potentially dangerous” (58). Chapter Two, “Questioning the Idealist Novel,” turns to yomihon, an early-nineteenth century genre of historical fiction, which was seen as “inherently moral” with “a serious or idealist mission” (61). Poch, however, challenges this one-dimensional view of it as an “idealist novel,” identifying a similar nuanced ambiguity as found in the ninjōbon. He provides a compelling close reading of the yomihon’s representative author, Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848), and his magnum opus, Nansō satomi hakkenden (1814–1842), demonstrating how Bakin’s depiction of ninjō complicates this idealism. Both Bakin and Hakkenden are noted for their kanzen chōaku (promotion of good and chastisement of evil) as “both a plot paradigm” and the “novel’s moral ideology—a strict dichotomy of good and evil” (60). Poch’s contention is that “Bakin’s writing of ninjō blurs this seemingly unshakable dichotomy” (62). Poch reconsiders Bakin’s legacy by highlighting how his novels also “displayed a strong interest in ninjō” and he astutely asserts, “Bakin’s yomihon, in their writing of chaste romance, almost served as the ninjōbon for educated men” (65). This ultimately counters idealist readings of Bakin and the yomihon, because “Bakin did not reduce emotion and desire to the stabilizing moral poles of either virtue or vice; they belonged to the gray zones...

Tax Revenues of Local Budgets in Unitary States: a Case Study of Japan

This article discusses municipal self-government in Japan by focusing on tax receipts of local budgets. Revenues and expenditures of local governments of unitary states, such as Japan, roughly corresponds to subnational budgets of federal states. In unitary frameworks, however, local authorities enjoy greater autonomy. In Japan, local governments account for a large share of public spending and tax revenues. Tax re-venues are decentralised and taxes play a significant role in consolidated budget receipts. The centralised system of local administration and finance that evolved in late nineteenth-century Japan was based on arrangements prevailing in Germany at that time. In the second half of the twentieth century, the system of inter-governmental fiscal relations was rebuilt according to the Anglo-Saxon decentralised model, resulting in more autonomy (including tax administration) given to local authorities. The current version of the local public finance in Japan has several salient characteristics and combines both centralisation and decentralisation features. The tax base for the key prefectural and municipal taxes overlaps the tax base for the national income and consumption taxes. The main source of municipal revenue is the property tax. Financial equalisation is achieved through grants, essentially in the form of the local allocation tax (LAT), which is a percentage of national taxes that is channelled to prefectural and municipal budgets. Another important feature of local finance is that municipal governments cover a comparatively large share of expenditures by is-suing local bonds. The reform of local governance and inter-governmental fiscal relations conducted in the early 2000s increased the financial autonomy and tax receipts of municipalities. The reform’s results were positively received by the international community and may be interesting for several transitional and developing economies that are seeking to improve their system of local finance. For citation Pokrovskaia N.V., Belov A.V. Tax Revenues of Local Budgets in Unitary States: a Case Study of Japan. Journal of Tax Reform . 2020;6(1):73–89. DOI: 10.15826/jtr.2020.6.1.076. Article info Received February 14, 2020 ; Revised March 15, 2020 ; Accepted April 8, 2020

Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan by Sabine Frühstück

Reviewed by: Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan by Sabine Frühstück Davinder L. Bhowmik (bio) Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan. By Sabine Frühstück. University of California Press, Oakland, 2017. xi, 276 pages. $85.00, cloth; $34.95, paper; $34.95, E-book. The focus of this magnificently illustrated monograph on children, war, and play in Japan's modern and contemporary eras is on the use value of the metaphorical child in an array of textual and visual media. In a nutshell, Frühstück's argument is that children and childhood are instruments by which war is naturalized and peace sentimentalized. That children are similarly deployed in times of national conflict and in the absence of war is the paradox alluded to in the work's subtitle. Playing War is comprised of two parts, "Playing War" and "Picturing War." "Playing War" consists of two chapters, "Field Games" and "Paper Battles"; chapters on "The Moral Authority of Innocence" and "Queering [End Page 549] War" make up "Picturing War." In the first body chapter, "Field Games," Frühstück examines how children conceive of war as play on the ground, on paper, and on the screen and argues that children's "little wars" connect to the "larger wars" the nation-state of Japan engaged in beginning with the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars and extending to the Asia-Pacific War. Readers learn how, from the Meiji period onward, elites in government and education agreed on the importance of raising children to be prepared for war and debated about how best to achieve this end. Following Karatani Kojin whose "The Discovery of the Child" posits the "child" of today was only of recent vintage, Frühstück explains the process whereby in late nineteenth-century Japan the child becomes distinguishable from the adult and molded through education into a citizen-subject. In her 2016 ethnography, The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan, Andrea Gevurtz Arai expounds on this point: [K]ey theorists and historians of the modern category of childhood— Jacqueline Rose, Claudia Casteneda, Carolyn Steedman, Denise Riley, Stefan Tanaka, and Karatani Kojin—each situate issues of youth management and control within the new times of capitalist modernity and the structures and timelines of comparison that modern nation-states began to impose on each other.1 Through an analysis of contemporary newspapers, textbooks, and journals, Frühstück shows how military play (think King of the Hill) was repeatedly promoted as a means of preparing for war. Indeed, the author argues, such play soon became normalized, and by naturalizing the advance from playing to making war, Japan's elite created a clear trajectory from child to soldier (p. 56). The author deftly uses primary and secondary sources to build her argument, as demonstrated by including discussion of, for example, global concerns about the effects of modernity on children. American historian Lisa Jacobson noted that many adults worried that "an effeminate, postfrontier urbanism was robbing their boys of virility" and added that Daisy Air Rifles promised "to restore manly vigor to pampered middle-class boys" (p. 45). Despite all that separated them, Frühstück concludes that the child is the precursor to the soldier, that child and soldier are both liminal, and that each is the infinite mirror images of the other (p. 56). Having established a link between child and soldier in chapter 1, in "Paper Battles" the author shows how children's war games, which often included detailed maps, became ever more bound to the development of children's bodies and minds as Japan moved from nation formation to empire building. Sugoroku, games "similar to the ancient Indian game Snakes [End Page 550] and Ladders (known in the United States as Chutes and Ladders)" (p. 64), would presumably reverse the deleterious effects of modernity by allowing children to imagine invasion and war. Children's publications, rife with pictorial maps, added a geographical-imperialist dimension to reading. Wartime cartoons like Norakuro depicted a lowly dog-soldier steeped in adult notions of racial superiority, colonization, and just war (p. 84). In the 1950s...