Force of arms

It's been nearly a year since I last posted anything, even though I've slithered back into Japan. I don't even know if anyone still reads this. If you do, I'm sure you're just lazy with cleaning out your RSS subscriptions.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is I got bored at work today and translated the last few paragraphs of an essay from a magazine I've been reading. So:

Questioning War and Literature, SEKIYA Hiroshi

I’d like to touch on the continuity of the Edo and Meiji periods, but not on how high literacy rates or a developed commercial economy prepared Japan for modernization. Rather, I’d like to talk about the continuity of political culture. 

Japanese society during the Edo period was marked by the expansion of military rule after Sekigahara, which gave way to a period of sustained peace under a national government. Taxation and compulsory government service were ultimately justified by being of  “use to the country” [國の用 kuni no you]. People deemed not “of use” were labeled as such, and if even now, when a public figure is called “useless,” it is taken to mean not a specific deficiency in a certain area but a condemnation of their character as a whole, we are still living in the Edo period in at least that respect. [The literary scholar] Maeda Tsutomu calls the Tokugawa system a “garrison state”[兵営国家 heiei kokka] (Heigaku to shushigaku rangaku kokugaku, Heibonsha). 

In a “garrison state,” the source of political legitimacy is neither a concept of “statehood” nor “virtue.” Political legitimacy comes from (post-Sekigahara) absolute military superiority, as represented by the concepts of “force of arms” [武威 bui] and “authority” [御威光 go-ikou]. The Tokugawa regime quickly collapsed when its “force of arms” was threatened by the landing of Western ships, and the Meiji government that arose in its place took the introduction of Western political systems as its mission, pressing slogans like “enrich the country, strengthen the military,” and “civilization and enlightenment.” 

Yet,  “enrich the country, strengthen the military” is necessarily little more than a modern attempt at acquiring “force of arms.” And what of “civilization and enlightenment?” Perhaps it was simply a declaration that until this point we as a country had been an uncivilized and barbarous. No, in actuality the substance of this “civilization” really didn’t matter. If we take it as instead saying that “for a long time China had been ‘of use,’ but from now on it’s the West, so let’s Westernize!’” then a clear continuity between Edo and Meiji political culture emerges. If that, then, is the case, how do we understand post-Meiji, particularly post-war concepts such as freedom and equality, that is, human rights? 

War is a tired subject, but it is my opinion that this is the question that should really be asked of so-called "war literature."

Sekiya, Hiroshi/関谷博. "Sensou to bungaku wo tou shisen"/「戦争と文学を問う視線」. Kokoro/『こころ』 30 December 2011: 203