Total War and "Modernization"

356 Pages·1998·19.558 MB·English

by  Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann, Ryuichi Narita

Total War and
'Modernization'
Edited by
Yasushi Yamanouchi,
J. Victor Koschmann,
and Ryuichi Narita
und Keime

Total War and 'Modernization'

Total War and
Modernization
Edited by
Yasushi Yamanouchi,
J. Victor Koschmann,
and RyOichi Narita
East Asia Program
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
The Cornell East Asia Series is published by the Cornell University East
Asia Program and has no formal affiliation with Cornell University Press.
We are a small, non-profit press, publishing reasonably-priced books on a
wide variety of scholarly topics relating to East Asia as a service to the
academic community and the general public. We accept standing orders
which provide for automatic billing and shipping of each title in the series
upon publication.
If after review by internal and external readers a manuscript is accepted for
publication, it is published on the basis of camera-ready copy provided by
the volume author. Each author is thus responsible for any necessary copy­
editing and for manuscript formatting. Submission inquiries should be ad­
dressed to Editorial Board, East Asia Program, Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York 14853-7601.
Number 100 in the Cornell East Asia Series.
© 1998 J. Victor Koschmann. All rights reserved
ISSN 1050-2955
ISBN 1-885445-60-1 he
ISBN 1-885445-00-8 pb
Printed in the United States of America
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10 98765432
©The paper in this book meets the requirements for permanence of ISO 9706:1994.
CAUTION: Except for brief quotations in a review, no part of this book may be
reproduced or utilized in any form, without permission in writing from the author.
Please address inquiries to J. Victor Koschmann in care of East Asia Program
Cornell University, 140 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601.
Contents
Preface The Editors.......................................................................................... vii
Introduction to the English Edition J. Victor Koschmann........................ xi
Contributors........................................................................................................ xvii
Total War and Social Integration: A Methodological Introduction
Yamanouchi Yasushi................................................................................ 1
I. Total War and Structural Change
National Socialism and Modernization: Recent Debates in the
Federal Republic of Germany Michael Prinz..................................... 43
Warmaking and the Transformation of the State: Japan and the U.S.
in World Warll Gregory Hooks and Raymond A. Jussaume Jr......... 61
II. Total War and the Formation of Thought
The Spirit of Capitalism as Disciplinary Regime: The Postwar
Thought of Otsuka Hisao J. Victor Koschmann................................ 97
Civil Society Theory and Wartime Mobilization: On the Intellectual
Development of Uchida Yoshihiko Sugiyama Mitsunobu.................. 117
Women in the Motherland: Oku Mumeo Through Wartime and
Postwar Narita Ryuichi.......................................................................... 137
Desire for a Poietic Metasubject: Miki Kiyoshi’s Technology
Theory Iwasaki Minoru......................................................................... 159
Prewar, Wartime, and Postwar in Education: The Thought and
Behavior of Abe Shigetaka Ouchi Hirokazu........................................ 181
HI. Total War and Social Integration
Self-Renovation of Existing Social Forces and Gleichschaltung: The
Total-War System and the Middle Classes Amemiya Shoichi......... 209
The Japanese Wartime Economy and the Development of
Government-Business Relations: An Overview Okazaki Tetsuji....... 239
The Historical Significance of the Industrial Patriotic Association:
Labor Relations in the Total-War State Sague hi Kazurd..................... 261
The System of Total War and the Discursive Space of the War
on Thought Sato Takumi......................................................................... 289
Glossary............................................................................................................. 315
vi
Preface
This volume is the product of a binational research effort among scholars
centered at Cornell University in the U.S. and the Tokyo University of For­
eign Studies in Japan. For a period of three years beginning in 1992, we en­
gaged in collaborative research aimed at a reassessment of Japanese society
in the period around World War II. The results of that project include not only
the essays presented here, but another group as well, soon to be published in
a second volume entitled The Deconstruction of Nationality. Both volumes
have already been published in Japanese.1
The collapse of the Berlin Wall symbolically marked the end of the Cold
War, which had determined the world’s power structure ever since the end of
World War II. However, relief from the burden of the Cold War did not nec­
essarily mean the beginning of an era of peace and emancipation. Indeed, the
dissolution of whatever stability had been preserved through confrontation
between the two superpowers inevitably uncovered new problems. Most of
these emerging problems are related to global capitalism’s nascent destabili­
zation of the nation-state, linchpin of the world power structure since the dawn
of the modem era. And despite the waning of the nation-state, no alternative
basis for world order is on the horizon.
Although the globalization of capital has indeed eroded the power struc­
ture of the nation-state, it has not fundamentally transformed our political and
economic institutions, which owe their basic character to the system-integra­
tion and homogenization carried out during the era of World War n. Nation­
s*tates programs of system integration have long-since disciplined our bodies
and molded our life attitudes, to the point even of prescribing the content of
linguistic communication. How might this legacy be overcome? Clearly we
cannot rely on high-level negotiations among government bureaucrats or elite
managers of multinational corporations. Indeed, more hope would seem to lie
at furthest remove from those dealings, in the critical scrutiny of habitual
patterns of daily life (what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘habitus’) that might give
rise to a new set of attitudes. Needless to say, if this critical scrutiny occurs
vii
only at the abstract level of individual self-reflection it will not achieve sig­
nificant results. To have an impact it must be carried out in the social context
of cultural friction and clashes of identity, that is, through participation in
what Mary Louise Pratt has referred to as ‘contact z*.ones 2
In orienting our research project toward this set of issues, we began with
our common suspicion that general mobilization during World War II brought
nation-states to the stage of system integration, and with that as the starting
point we attempted to come to grips with some of the problems of modernity
in the second half of the twentieth century. Surely neither democracy, as the
typical political system of postwar societies, nor the welfare state, as their
characteristic economic structure, are unrelated to the systematic social unifi­
cation and consolidation initiated during the era of world war. Democracy
had to be severely constrained by political loyalty to the nation-state under
that new consolidation, and the welfare state that emerged out of it was un­
imaginable without systematic social integration. In order to achieve that de­
gree of integration, the nation-state has had to differentiate clearly between
those who belong to it and those who do not, and the inevitable result is a
structure of exclusion and discrimination. The recent prevalence of protest
movements based on ethnic identity is closely related to those state structures
of exclusion and discrimination.
We have pursued our research from a standpoint opposed to that which
assumes from the beginning chat Japan, Germany and the United States are
qualitatively different societies as the inescapable result of their divergent
cultural traditions. We begin rather from the perception that all three have
been subjected to the waves of change that have swept over the globe in the
past half-century and to that extent have undergone similar historical experi­
ences. Of course, that does not mean that we find among them no differences
that are likely to lead to conflict. We recognize that they have in many ways
been differently formed through local processes of social institutionalization,
but we have not focused systematically on those processes in this project.
Research from the perspective outlined above is impossible to contain
within the usual boundaries of academic specialization. From the beginning,
therefore, we chose not to define our project in terms of any particular ap­
proach, whether social scientific, historical, philosophical or literary, but wel­
comed opportunities for interchange across these boundaries. This early deci­
sion to disregard specialization in research, as itself one of the many barriers
that have been erected in the late-modern era, contributed greatly to deepen­
ing our mutual understanding. The project’s success depended from the out­
set on interaction among participants from the different social contexts of
Japan, Germany, and the United States as well as from different academic
discipines, but we experienced nothing like the “clash of civilizations” or
viii