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Shortly after the Treaty of Kanghwa was executed in 1876, a few Japanese moved to the Korean peninsula to take advantage of the provision that permitted Japanese to reside and conduct trade in three newly opened ports. They were the pioneers of a community of Japanese settlers in Korea that by 1945 came to number over 700,000 (a figure that excludes 200,000 Japanese military in Korea).

Jun Uchida rescues these settlers from historical obscurity in her impeccably researched monograph Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945. The word “brokers” in her title signals her thesis: these ordinary people acted as intermediaries in many of the transactions that determined the political, economic, and social development of Korea from the end of Chosŏn rule through the era of Japanese colonial government. This book goes a long way toward correcting a distortion in previous accounts of this period. With very rare exceptions, the settlers have been overlooked. Researchers have focused on bureaucrats, policemen, and expatriate business leaders on the Japanese side, and indepen-dence activists, ethnic nationalist passive resisters, and collaborators on the Korean side.

“Tremendous diversity”—in class, social status, income, and occupation—character-ized Japanese migrants to Korea (p. 64). Uchida came to appreciate this by reading deeply and widely in published and unpublished sources in both Japanese and Korean. Her stag-geringly extensive bibliography will impress the most exacting of professional historians, and she marshals it masterfully. Moreover, she writes from an informed comparative perspective, having steeped herself in the literature on European imperialism, particularly recent work on settler colonialism. Brokers of Empire speaks directly to researchers on European inter-ventions in Africa and Asia as well as to historians of East Asia.

Japanese on the peninsula, “like the French in Algeria, stood out in fully replicating the metropolitan social hierarchy (including its lowest strata) in a single territory” (p. 66). While they mirrored the society of the homeland, however, settlers were inevitably affected by the different milieu. From 1910 to 1945, Korea was a space where “the colonizer and the colonized adopted each other’s customs, habits, and values, transforming each other’s culture, if unevenly and unconsciously, in the process” (p. 85). Many settlers became concerned about preserving Japanese identity, fearing that their community might fall into a “hazy, intermediate realm” that was neither Japanese nor Korean. Self-conscious efforts to maintain a Japanese lifestyle culminated, in extreme instances, in some settlers living in a sort of quarantine from the surrounding Korean society and economy.

Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialismin Korea, 1876–1945

Jun Uchida

Harvard University Asia Center, 2011 xviii + 481 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-06253-5

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In the “period of imperial consolidation” from the establishment of the protectorate in 1905 through the March First Movement in 1919, tensions emerged between settlers and the state. Politically ambitious settlers conceived of themselves as partners in the project of placing Korea under Japanese tutelage and civilizing it. The authorities in Korea saw them differently. Settler activists “unanimously welcomed” annexation when it occurred in 1910 (p. 115). Quickly, though, differences emerged between settlers and Governor General Terauchi Masatake over the issue of Koreans’ assimilation (dōka) into the Japanese nation. In principle virtually all Japanese agreed that assimilation was desirable. Settlers, however, keen to preserve the privileges of extraterritoriality, felt aggrieved by Terauchi’s professed policy of impartiality.

Throughout the period of colonial rule, conflicting notions of the meaning of assimila-tion, and of its feasibility, divided settlers and officials—and settlers among themselves, and Japanese and Koreans. Uchida identifies the key players and exposes rifts and changes of opinion about what was in the best interests of the imperial state, the settler community, and the Korean people. She provides the highest resolution image we have ever had—certainly in English writing—of the complexity of relationships between the colonizer and the colonized.

One way settlers enacted the role of brokers of empire was in the establishment in the 1920s of pro-government organizations with membership that was largely Korean. In most of these organizations the top positions were held by Koreans, but actual operation was managed by settlers. Uchida shows us how “settler leaders effectively coauthored [with colonial bureaucrats] strategies of rule” in their work in such organizations. Especially in the most influential of these, the Dōminkai, “the brokers of empire played a critical role in reconfiguring dōka as ethnic harmony, and colonial Korea as a multiethnic polity” (p. 186). Of course by no means all settlers, let alone all Koreans, were won over by the Dōminkai vision.

In the economic sphere, the government after 1919 began to adjust its view of Korea as solely a producer of agricultural products for the home market, and opened the way for limited industrialization. The Government General in 1921 invited twenty prominent businessmen, ten of them settlers and ten Korean, to participate in an Industrial Commission along with a number of bureaucrats. Both settlers and Koreans demanded more than the state was ready to provide, for instance in infrastructure building. The settlers’ positions showed that they “had evolved from agents of metropolitan capital into local actors with their own vested stakes and interests” (p. 260). For their part, the Korean businessmen acted out of economic self-interest and for the purpose of ethnic national strengthening. As in her treatment of civic organizations in which Koreans cooperated with Japanese, Uchida demonstrates that it is overly simple to dismiss these Korean business leaders as craven collaborators. Although they were working within the imperial system, often they were pushing for Korean ethnic national interest.

Uchida writes perceptively about politics in the colony, which unlike the Japanese homeland had neither system of local autonomy nor colony level deliberative body. Settlers could not participate in elections for the Japanese Diet, either, although they were Japanese subjects. Basically settlers took one of two positions, advocating either extension to Korea of the system for electing Diet members from the metropole (naichi enchō) or establishment of a system for colonial autonomy. Korean activists split between the same two poles.

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With the outbreak of war in China in 1937, settlers, like people in the metropole, be-came objects or agents of wartime mobilization. For some, especially members of the Ryokki Renmei, which traced its origin to an esoteric Buddhist study group formed in the mid-1920s, the project of homogenization of the homeland and Korea (naisen ittai) gained new, preternatural urgency. By energetic proselytizing, the Ryokki Renmei enrolled over 4,000 members by 1941, including some Koreans who became “fanatical ideologues of naisen ittai” willing, as one put it, to “abandon themselves and dive into the Japanese state” (pp. 365–66). The Ryokki Renmei position was too extreme for many other Japanese residents, however. For those settlers, “naisen ittai policy was a mixed blessing: while mitigating their old fear of Korean unrest, its promise of equality also stoked new fear about Korean empow-erment. The mass inclusion of Koreans into the ‘Japanese,’ many settlers worried, threatened to undermine the colonial hierarchy, destabilize their nationality, and contaminate their purity” (p. 392).

Brokers of Empire is a magisterial work. This is a lavish compliment, but Uchida deserves it. Her book is grand in the sweep of its reinterpretation and in its command of information about a huge cast of actors. Viewing the Korean colonial experience through the lens of the all-but-forgotten settler community, she compels us to rethink the empire-building process.

Reviewed by James C. Baxter

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While lagging significantly behind research on Nazi human experimentation, over the last twenty years, no less than four full-length monographs in English have appeared in print on Japanese experimentation on human subjects during the Second World War.1 As evident from the extensive bibliography in Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities, this is only the tip of the iceberg of related publications since the 1950s, mostly in Japanese, with some notable contributions from China. Given the dramatic decline in Japan’s global status and the steady slide of World War II into distant memory, however, one might ask: why a new edited volume in English on one of the most sordid chapters of Japan’s wartime past?

The turbulent legacy of the Vietnam War spurred the initial wave of scholarship on Japanese human experimentation and biological warfare in the early 1980s, followed quickly by a flood of testimonials by former Japanese participants. In the 1990s, the story of Unit 731 and its notorious director, General Ishii Shirō, gained wide currency in Japan through a two-part NHK documentary (1992), an exhibit that toured 64 Japanese cities for eighteen months (1993–1994), a Sino-Japanese symposium in Harbin (1995) and new evidence from the grounds of the former Japanese Army Medical College in Tokyo (1989) and military records in the Japanese National Archives and National Defense Agency Library (1993).2 Since 1993, lawsuits against the Japanese government by former Chinese victims have kept interest in the history of Japanese biological warfare alive in Japan and spurred a steady stream of new evidence and testimonials from China.

Aside from the notable exception of Tsuneishi Keiichi, none of the remaining ten contributors to this volume has played a role in this critical thirty year effort to unearth evidence of Japan’s wartime medical atrocities. Nor do these essays reveal much that has not already been reported in the extant English language scholarship. The self-proclaimed central theme of the volume to explore the ethics of Japanese experimentation and implica-

1 Daniel Barenblatt. A Plague upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan’s Biological Warfare Program. Harper Collins, 2004; Hal Gold. Unit 731: Testimony. Charles E. Tuttle, 1996; Sheldon H. Harris. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932–45 and the American Cover-up. Routledge, 1994; Peter Williams and David Wallace. Unit 731: Japan’s Secret Biological Warfare in World War II. Free Press, 1989.

2 For an analysis of these revelations, see Frederick R. Dickinson. “Biohazard: Wartime Biomedical Experimentation in the Politics of Postwar Japan.” In Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research, eds. William R. LaFleur, Gernot Böhme, and Susumu Shimazono. Indiana University Press, 2007.

Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics

Jing-Bao Nie, Nanyan Guo, Mark Selden and Arthur Kleinman, eds.

Routledge, 2010254 pages. ISBN 978-0-415-68228-2

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tions for “the contemporary moral experience of physicians, researchers, and patients” (p. 3) also has a formidable antecedent in the celebrated 2007 comparative study of Japanese, American and Nazi experimentation by LaFleur, Bohme and Shimazono.3

There are, however, three reasons to take note of this new focus on Japan’s dark medi-cal past. First is the convenience of chapter-length surveys of specific components of the story. Tsuneishi offers a succinct summary of the wartime activities of the principal locus of Japanese human experimentation in Harbin, Unit 731; Suzy Wang chronicles the history of postwar revelations through coverage of court battles from 1946; Boris Yudin introduces the 1950 Russian trial of Japanese war criminals in Khabarovsk; Till Barnighausen assesses data generated by Japanese experimentation; Nanyan Guo probes the conscience of Japanese participants; Jing-Bao Nie analyzes the state’s role in human experimentation and the postwar cover-up; Ole Doring identifies former German concentration camp, Ravensbruck, as a model effort to learn from a dark past; Peter Degen tells an absorbing tale of German racial hygienist Otmar von Verschuer; David MacDonald analyzes the U.S. record of own-ing up to its own past bad practices; and Mark Selden details Japan’s Nanjing Massacre and wartime civilian bombing by the U.S.

Perhaps even more immediately useful for researchers and undergraduates alike will be the informative tables that accompany these handy snapshots. These include a list of Japanese biological warfare attacks in China between 1939 and 1944, charts of human experimentation conducted by the Nazis from 1939 to 1945, Imperial Japan between 1932 and 1945 and in U.S. prisons from 1906 to 1973, and a short table on postwar use of Nazi and Japanese data. Most valuable is the extensive annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources on Japanese experimentation currently available in Japanese, Chinese and English.

Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities does also make a significant conceptual contribution to our understanding of Japanese experimentation. LaFleur, Bohme and Shimazono made the first important departure from an exceptionalist narrative of Japanese evil by incorporating Japan in a nuanced discussion of comparative bioethics. This volume challenges the image of a deviant Japan even further through a more explicitly historical discussion of compara-tive complicity and humanity. In terms of complicity, Tsuneishi, Wang and Nie indict American authorities for protecting Japanese perpetrators in return for their data; Yudin locates as damning a Faustian bargain in Khabarovsk, where Russian authorities granted light sentences to Japanese criminals in return for test results; Barnighausen highlights bad science in both Germany and Japan; Nie faults both Nationalist and Communist China for not aggressively pursuing Japanese perpetrators; Doring and MacDonald condemn the U.S. for particular difficulties in dealing with its own dark past; Degen locates unpunished criminality in Germany mirroring that in Japan; and Selden finds equivalent “state terror-ism” in American civilian bombing and the Nanjing Massacre. In terms of humanity, Wang highlights efforts by postwar Japanese lawyers to promote Chinese victims’ rights; Guo locates pangs of guilt among Japanese perpetrators; and Selden credits Japan with a vibrant postwar debate, both internal and external (principally with China and Korea), over Japan’s dark wartime past.

3 William LaFleur, Gernot Bohme and Susumu Shimazono, eds. Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research. Indiana University Press, 2007.

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Readers may not find all of these efforts to contextualize Japanese sins compelling. But Nie et al. have done a valuable service in making the story of Japanese human experimentation widely accessible and ensuring that English speakers do not easily dismiss it as an aberrant history. Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities demonstrates with painful clarity that, much more than merely someone else’s problem, Japan’s wartime medical history must serve as a lesson in past crimes, historical truth and justice for all.

Reviewed by Frederick R. Dickinson

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Books on Shinto used to be scarce. Walk into a bookshop, and you were lucky to find one at all. If you did, it would be Sokyo Ono’s Shinto (1962). The view it put forward was of a uniquely Japanese tradition that had existed in one form or another since time immemo-rial and which, in Meiji times, had been liberated from its Buddhist yoke to return to its original independent role. It is a view Breen and Teeuwen are eager to challenge in this thought-provoking book. The agenda is made clear in the opening chapter, in which the term “Shinto” is said to have been retrospectively and falsely applied to the distant past. The modern religion is, in short, an invented tradition dating from the nineteenth century when building national consciousness was a prime concern. “The crux of the matter is that kami shrines, myths, and rituals are a great deal older than their conceptualization as components of Shinto,” write the authors.

The book impresses throughout for the wealth of detail and depth of research. Much of the information is unavailable elsewhere in English, and the extensive use of primary material enables those without Japanese ability to gain insight into scholarly work in the field. Influential figures are introduced, such as folklorist Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) and scholar Kuroda Toshio (1926–1993). The latter argued that there was no such thing as “ancient Shinto” in the sense of an independent religion, since kami worship was subsumed into esoteric Buddhism until Meiji times. Breen and Teeuwen follow in his footsteps but with a difference, since they identify the roots of modern Shinto in the medieval period, particularly the fifteenth century thinking of Yoshida Kanetomo. “Before Kanetomo’s time, Shinto had no currency in a sense at all recognizable today,” the authors emphasize.

So, how about ancient times? How does one explain, for instance, the usage of ‘shintō’ in the Nihon shoki of 720? The argument put forward is that the term was borrowed from the Chinese to refer to such activities as the placation of kami. Practitioners would have had no sense of identification with anything called Shinto; furthermore, the authors suggest, pronunciation at the time was probably jindō and denoted the Buddhist worship of kami. Along with this went a jingi court cult that sought to bolster the emperor and his allies by incorporating shrines and manipulating the mythology. For the authors, neither jindō nor jingi can be considered an indigenous tradition, since both inventions were largely based on imported notions. In order to demonstrate this, there then follow historical case studies

A New History of Shinto

John Breen and Mark Teeuwen

Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 280 pages. ISBN 978-1-4051-5516-8

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of a shrine (Hie), a myth (Amaterasu’s Rock Cave), and a ritual (daijōsai). These form the heart of the book, and collectively they illustrate how such items have been constantly reinterpreted over time.

The chapter on Hie Shrine forms almost a third of the book, and for all the fascina-tions (at one time it was the biggest in Japan), one wonders about its selection over Ise given the obvious match with the imperial themes that underlie the other chapters. The authors respond by saying Ise is unrepresentative, though the charge could be more tellingly laid against the daijōsai as the choice of ritual, since it is used only at the time of the emperor’s inauguration. The murky origins and development of Ise offer material well suited to the book’s “alternative approach,” and with the shikinen sengū rebuilding due for completion in 2013, it would seem an opportunity lost not to capitalize on the attention the shrine will get. It would have allowed, too, for discussion of Watarai Shinto, which is strangely missing from the book.

But this is in no way to detract from the many strengths of the book. Curiously for a history, it provides a particularly useful survey of the contemporary scene, in which the reader learns about such matters as the financing of shrines, the number of visitors, and the percentage of the population that partake in Shinto rites. There is talk, too, of the shortcom-ings of the Jinja Honchō (abbreviated by the authors as NAS or National Association of Shrines), which include a relative lack of concern with environmental matters and an Ise campaign that causes friction with local shrines. The suggestion is of a disconnect between policy makers and ordinary practitioners. Non-mainstream Shinto is also featured, with illuminating sections on Fushimi Inari, the Yasukuni controversy, and sectarian Shinto. There are important matters discussed here that feature in no other book in English of which I know.

It is a credit to the New History that it leaves one pondering so many questions. How to explain the Nihon shoki focus on Takami-musubi rather than Amaterasu as instigator of the descent from heaven? How come there is a mirror in the imperial palace said to be that of Amaterasu, when the general understanding is that this acts as the goshintai (spirit body) of Ise? Why do the authors presume ancient usage was jindō rather than shintō? Why aren’t imperial themes celebrated at Fushimi Inari? What is the significance of the “golden rock” at Hie, where worship originated? Why, intriguingly, did a junior member of the shrine set about the chief priest with a metal pipe in the 1990s? And how about Yoshida Kanetomo, who emerges from the book as virtual founder of Shinto? He comes over as a somewhat dubious figure, who drew on esoteric Buddhism and Daoism to promote the Yoshida shrine as pre-eminent in the country at large. He even had the gall to claim that the holy relics of Ise Jingū had miraculously flown to Yoshida hill, then duped an emperor into certifying them.

At the end one can not help wondering what exactly is this puzzling thing called Shinto. Traditionalists see it in terms of continuity, but for Breen and Teeuwen it is characterized by change, conflict and construct. “Shinto in our view appears not as the unchanging core of Japan’s national essence, but rather as the unpredictable outcome of an erratic history,” they write. As such, this revisionist book is much in keeping with the work of leading scholars such as Allan Grapard, who has suggested the need to talk of “Shintos” rather than a unified Shinto. It is a measure of the book’s achievement that it has managed to introduce such scholarly notions in a way that is at once accessible and instructive. Even

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those skeptical about its claims would have to admit the solidity of the research, and the book renders valuable service by opening up debate about Shinto’s origins to a general readership. Its influence is likely to be long lasting.

Reviewed by John Dougill

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During his long career of studying the history of the press, Peter O’Connor has become well versed in the history of the media in East Asia, particularly Japan. His object of interest in this study is the English-language press in East Asia. The result is a comprehensive study, which, together with its many appendices, is actually a handbook like treasure trove of information. The book gives the reader an entirely new perspective on the history of East Asia, as it examines the relationship and political rivalry between Western and Japanese cultures through the English-language press. The English-language press in East Asia has already been studied considerably, but there has not existed till now a comprehensive study of their mutual relationships.

The author’s purpose is to indicate that the English-language press played an important role in shaping international conceptions of Japan and East Asia. O’Connor identifies three unofficial press networks, each with a substantially uniform stance in its articles. The networks comprised newspapers, magazines, news agencies and, naturally, people. O’Connor refers to the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s network, the Japan Advertiser network and the Japan Chronicle network. At times he also brings up the Guomindang network. The main newspapers in the networks were the Japan Times (established in 1897), the Japan Advertiser (1890–1940), having an American background, and the Japan Chronicle (1891–1942) with a British background. All had their own connections to opinion shapers and official bodies in China, the U.S.A. and Britain. In addition, the networks included many publications that appeared especially in China. They were characterized by a pronounced multi-nationalism. The images of Japan’s role in East Asia that were conveyed to the world from the beginning of the 1900s to the Pacific War held a central position in the rivalry between the networks.

The first chapter of the study covers the history of English-language publications that appeared in Japan, China and Korea. The next three chapters explore the networks and their publications, news agencies and people. The following four chapters then examine the actual rivalries between the networks as they developed over diverse commentaries on Japan and China and the mutual relationships that emerged between 1918 and 1945. The author actually threatens to overwhelm the reader with people, publications and details, making it difficult at times to piece them all together and connect them to the broader entity. On the other hand, this indicates that the study is based on thorough work, and the result is without a doubt a classic in its field.

The English-language Press Networks of East Asia, 1918–1945

Peter O’Connor

Global Oriental Ltd., 2009405 pages. ISBN 978-1-9052-4667-0

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From the beginning, the mutual relationships between the networks and with British and American officials in East Asia were confounded by personality clashes. For example, some of the British, American and Australian correspondents who worked within the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s unofficial network enjoyed better relationships with local British and American officials than did the correspondents comprising the networks with American or British backgrounds.

Peter O’Connor demonstrates how, from the 1920s, the rivalry between the networks, which he even refers to as the “cold war,” began to increase, and how for this reason the Japanese Foreign Ministry became even more distrustful and worried about the image of East Asia being conveyed to the leading Western newspapers. The most significant contrast existed between the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s network and the Japan Advertiser network, while the Japan Chronicle network was more conducive to Japan’s official views. The Japan Advertiser was noticeably more American than the Japan Chronicle was British. Yet, it must be noted that even quite contrary opinions were at times voiced within the same network. The situation was further muddled by certain publications’ support for the emerging Communist movement in China.

In the 1930s, Japan’s policy had a significant impact on the activity of the American and British networks. After the Manchurian Incident in 1931, it was more difficult for them to obtain information about what was actually happening under the Japanese flag. Journalists’ work was hindered by both censure and general uncertainty about the authenticity of informa-tion available. As a result of Japan’s aggressive policy, the networks were forced to merge with the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s network, whereupon the information and image of East Asia conveyed by the English-language press became monotonic. Although the war ended in 1945 with Japan’s defeat, the network that fared the best in the end was the Foreign Ministry’s network, or rather its flagship, the Nippon Times.

As a whole, Peter O’Connor’s study constitutes a thoroughgoing evaluation of the relationships between the English-language press networks in Japan and China. The author groups the publications into three networks, but in fact the stances taken by the publications and their correspondents did not often follow such strict boundaries. Indeed, in many instances, both the foreign networks collaborated quite closely with the Foreign Ministry. One must also remember that the Japan Times, as the Foreign Ministry’s unofficial representative, did not always support the government, which often adopted an aggressive foreign policy and a domestic policy that favoured totalitarianism. For the sort of “image research” that concerns the author, this sort of press material offers excellent possibilities. Nevertheless, the material presented here has not permitted as deep an analysis as the reader might have hoped for.

Peter O’Connor’s significant contribution to the field is also interesting because the re-sults can be linked to broader entities when information networks are examined as promoters of globalization. The Japan Advertiser and the Japan Chronicle operated as opposite extremes of the American and British information networks built in the 1800s; at the same time, they provided additional resources for their promotion of globalization and their struggle for influence in East Asia. For its part, the Japan Times, as information channel, constituted an additional Japanese resource in Japan’s struggle for control over international opinion, as well as the direction of globalization.

Reviewed by Olavi K. Fält

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In Defining Engagement, Hellyer examines three key actors of Tokugawa Japan’s foreign rela-tions: the bakufu, Satsuma, and Tsushima. This approach stems from his observation that the central government, the bakufu, did not hold complete authority over foreign relations and that the maritime borders in which Satsuma and Tsushima were situated were not rig-idly fixed. Indeed, Tokugawa Japan’s foreign trade thrived through the flow of silver, copper, raw silk, ginseng, marine products, medicinal roots, sugar, and other valuable commodities; this was a space in which multiple actors, agendas, and diverging interests and rivalries were in constant competition.

In understanding this intriguing web of interactions between the central and local agencies that shaped the changing contours of Tokugawa Japan’s foreign relations, Hellyer shows that “Japan’s foreign relations were not defined by an overriding ideology of seclusion.… Tokugawa leaders consistently made pragmatic decisions, especially concerning foreign trade, in accordance with global commercial contexts” (p. 4). Hellyer does an excellent job in ascertaining how pragmatic interests permeated into Tokugawa Japan’s foreign relations.

The strengths of Defining Engagement are threefold. First, Hellyer defies the tendency of current scholarship, which is compartmentalized into three groups of researchers working on Nagasaki, Satsuma, and Tsushima, respectively. For example, scholars who focus on Tsushima-Korea relations rarely attempt to explore the issues of Satsuma-Ryukyu trade. This kind of hairsplitting yet segregated specialization in the field often prevents readers from surveying the whole forest, revealing only some tall trees. Hellyer skilfully integrates the local perspectives of Satsuma and Tsushima into the overarching structure of foreign trade loosely guided by the bakufu. This approach allows readers to see clearly that “Satsuma and Tsushima leaders staked out places and roles for their domains in the overall system of foreign relations” (p. 50).

Second, Hellyer overcomes another tendency in current scholarship that rarely synthesizes Japan’s relations with Asia and the Dutch to the eighteenth century and those with Russia and the West from the late eighteenth century. The chronological divide between them still behaves like oil and water. Unlike many scholars in the field, Hellyer explores how Satsuma and Tsushima conducted trade, negotiated with the bakufu, and

Defining Engagement:Japan and Global Contexts,1640–1868

Robert I. Hellyer

Harvard University Asia Center, 2010300 pages. ISBN 978-0-6740-3577-5

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promoted their local agendas in their own way through the 1860s. Situating Satsuma and Tsushima in the context of the overall bakufu policy, Hellyer clarifies “a ground-level view on how and why the system of Japanese foreign relations was on the verge of change in the 1860s” (p. 233).

Third, Hellyer brings the local as well as central agendas of foreign relations into an integral framework of understanding by focusing on Japan’s connections with the China market. Examining from this angle, Hellyer finds that “while Western power was gradually emerging, Japan’s foreign trade and its overall system of foreign relations continued to be dominated by its connections with China” (p. 148). The China market, in Hellyer’s view, remained the most important factor of early modern Japan’s foreign relations, and occupied the minds of the policy makers of Satsuma, Tsushima, and the bakufu. Hellyer concludes: “The trade battle between the bakufu and Satsuma also occurred within the larger context of intercourse with the China market” (p. 148) to the end of Tokugawa Japan.

Despite these strengths, Defining Engagement is essentially based on secondary literature, not on original analysis of primary materials. It is noteworthy that Hellyer thoroughly scans through a wide range of works by Japanese scholars, gleans relevant data from them, and skilfully constructs a synthetic framework of understanding. But it should also be noted that his work, which is grounded in patchy and selective arguments, could be debunked when original research based on a range of rich extant primary materials brings up new findings and theories.

Another issue that makes Defining Engagement vulnerable is the author’s Japan-centered outlook. Needless to say, foreign relations involve more than one country. This book lacks the voices or agencies of Japan’s counterparts whose actions and reactions affected Japan’s foreign relations. In the early eighteenth century, notes Hellyer, Amenomori defined “a language of domain agency that Tsushima officials would utilize over the next 150 years” (p. 65). In this language, Tsushima posited itself as the collector of intelligence on Korea and the continent, as well as a defensive bulwark of Japan. Does this mean that Korea posed a threat to Japan? Why did Korea then annually offer hundreds of bags of rice and beans to Tsushima? Hellyer continues: “In 1748, the Nagasaki magistrate characterized Satsuma’s defensive role as ‘containing’ Ryukyu” (p. 68). Again, this defensive role, which Tsushima and Satsuma played, remains enigmatic as long as the counterparts of their national defense are kept in darkness.

Similarly, Hellyer rarely traces how the China market, the focal point of Japan’s foreign trade, behaved over time. Throughout the book, the China market is presented as something rather passive, invisible, and static. Hellyer says: “Overall this study demonstrates that because the system of foreign relations was divided among several actors—the bakufu, Tsushima, and Satsuma—it included multiple voices and agendas which went beyond a single and commonly held ideology of seclusion” (p. 12). But these multiple voices and agendas are all squeezed into a Japan-centered perspective. Bilateral perspectives, which are supposed to constitute foreign relations, are in short supply.

Reviewed by Nam-lin Hur

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Tomoko Iwasawa’s Tama in Japanese Myth enhances the rapidly growing list of Shinto stud-ies in English. More philosophically informed than most other works in the field, it focuses on tama (rather than, say, kami) as the core of Shinto myth and experience. In developing her arguments, Iwasawa draws on the philology of ancient Japanese terms, theories of myth, hermeneutics, ritual studies, and history. Although there are weaknesses in the analysis, they do not significantly undermine the importance of Iwasawa’s general conclusions about how to study Japanese myth.

The book has two halves. Part I, “Tama in Japanese Myth—Historical Investigations,” introduces Kojiki, the etymology and use of the term “tama,” and some of the major approaches taken by both traditional Japanese thinkers, especially Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane, as well as modern interpreters like Tsuda Sōkichi, Yoshida Atsuhiko, ōbayashi Taryō, and Matsumura Takeo. Iwasawa’s organizing frame for Part I borrows on terminology from debates between Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Jaspers: mythologizing-demythologizing-remythologizing. To mythologize is to take the narratives literally, univocally, and naively—a fundamentalist literalism. By contrast, when scholars demythologize, they undermine that naiveté by situating the text in its proper historical, social, and linguistic contexts. Although no longer naïve, demythologizing still seeks the meaning or the correct interpretation, however. Remythologizing, on the other hand, uses semiotics and hermeneutics to treat the text as polysemous. Its “hermeneutic circle” places the reader inside rather than outside the narrative, engaging reader and text in a mutually correcting and transforming “conversation.” Iwasawa sees remythologizing as going beyond demythologizing in recognizing the religiously transformative value of myth.

Iwasawa’s exemplars for remythologizing are not only the usual suspects from the twentieth century West such as Ernst Cassirer, Suzanne Langer, Mircea Eliade, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur but also, and here is where the book becomes most intriguing, Norinaga and Atsutane as well. The Norinaga connection did not surprise me. He clearly believed his attempt to unearth the Yamato worldview beneath the surface text of Kojiki was not just a scholarly analysis, but also a ritual for participating in the creative power that made our world. By contrast, I found Iwasawa’s interpretation of Atsutane to be more surprising and thought-provoking. She frames Atsutane’s remythologizing as an exercise in “embodying tama,” casting a new light on his interests in agriculture and peasant folklore.

Tama in Japanese Myth: A Hermeneutical Study ofAncient Japanese Divinity

Tomoko Iwasawa

University Press of America, 2011162 pages. ISBN 978-0-761-85518-7

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Part II, “Tama in Japanese Myth—Concrete Manifestations,” is more free-standing than a direct continuation of Part I and includes some repetition. (The book needs an index. Without it, one might not know the etymological discussion of “musuhi,” for example, begins on page 30, is picked up again on page 34, and addressed further on page 94.) Part II is a detailed analysis of the Kojiki myths in light of Paul Ricoeur’s categories from The Symbolism of Evil. In that book Ricoeur investigates evil in the Near Eastern and Mediterranean myths, identifying three stages of evolution: defilement, sin, and guilt. Iwasawa quotes Ricoeur as saying the myth of evil as he outlines it can be said to “embrace mankind as a whole in one ideal history.” So, Iwasawa asks whether his analysis can apply to the Kojiki myths. Not surprisingly, her answer is “not well.” Her careful analysis concludes that the good-evil dynamic in Japanese myths does not fit Ricoeur’s evolutionary model wherein good (order, life) tries to annihilate evil (chaos, death). At times Iwasawa even slips into claiming something “unique” in the Japanese worldview of complementarity and interdependence (see, for example, page 106). The first problem here is Iwasawa’s not considering whether there might be no Japanese mythic equivalent at all to “good” and “evil,” rather than claiming the relation between the two in the Japanese myths is somehow special. In this respect, she might have alerted her readers to the problems in translating “tsumi” simply as “sin,” not to mention the bizarre designation of Susanoo as the “original sinner” (which she at least qualifies with scare quotes). Secondly, even if one does not buy into Ricoeur’s uncharacteristically provincial hyperbole about discovering the “one ideal history” of “mankind as a whole,” there is still nothing uniquely Japanese seeing order and chaos, good and evil, life and death as something other than simply antagonistic poles. That explains Yoshida Shinto’s seeing opposites in a yin/yang relation, for example. Indeed, outside the Abrahamic traditions, most religions see matters in a way similar to the ancient Japanese.

Three other points of analysis struck me as particularly problematic. First, Iwasawa treats Native Studies as a remythologizing response to a Confucian demythologizing of the myths. The claim is insightful, but its supporting argument is weakened by Iwasawa’s unnuanced tendency to collapse all Japanese Confucians (even Sorai) into a generic Neo-Confucianism that emphasizes “principle.” Moreover, Iwasawa’s characterization of Norinaga’s theory of language ignores his roots in waka poetics, leaving us with an incomplete picture of his overall view. In fact, Iwasawa goes so far as to characterize Norinaga’s idea of kokoro as going in an “abstract, mental direction” (p. 39). In fact, for Norinaga nothing was more concrete and immanent than kokoro.

The second point is Iwasawa’s characterization of Norinaga’s philosophy as “apolitical.” Like Maruyama Masao (whom she follows on this point), that interpretation overlooks Norinaga’s pacifism. He explicitly and sharply criticized the warrior morality and its lofty ideals of loyalty. For Norinaga no principle is worth dying for. Given his times, that hardly makes his position simply “apolitical.”

Lastly, Iwasawa accepts rather uncritically Atsutane’s mixing of rural folklore and ritual. Ritual practices may help inform us about the use of some term in a mythic narrative, but one should not (as both Atsutane and Iwasawa sometimes do) use ritual to supplement the myth with additional ideas and values. There is no a priori reason to assume the meaning of myth and the meaning of ritual are part of a seamless whole. In fact, many ritualists reject the structuralist assumption that rituals have “meaning” at all. And cognitive science has already established cases distinguishing what people think they believe and what they actually believe as revealed in their responses under testing.

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Such minor misgivings aside, I heartily applaud Iwasawa for the boldness of her project. I especially agree with her call for more remythologizing in the scholarly study of Shinto myth, that narrative corpus that was mythologized by State Shinto and then has been so thoroughly demythologized in postwar scholarship. The occasional weaknesses in her evidence and analysis do not undermine the power and timeliness of her overall conclusion.

Reviewed by Thomas P. Kasulis

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The modern category “philosophy” was not introduced in Japan until the Meiji period. Ac-cordingly, the choice made here to define medieval Buddhist devotional texts or Edo period proto-nationalist mythmaking as “philosophy” is by no means self-evident. At the very least, such a choice requires a concise working definition of “philosophy,” as well as clearly defined criteria for inclusion and exclusion. Unfortunately, in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, such a definition and criteria are lacking. In their general introduction, the editors state that “philosophizing,” “the critical investigation of deeply perplexing questions,” “is a widespread and perhaps even universal phenomenon” (p. 17). However, the editors give no clues regard-ing their criteria for inclusion, nor do they acknowledge that “philosophy” is a historically constructed, normative category intertwined with academic and other power structures.

In any case, the editors’ understanding of “philosophy” does not correspond to the modern Japanese academic category tetsugaku. They have included many pre-modern texts not normally categorised as “philosophy” in Japan, excluding those modern philosophers not deemed “Japanese” enough. The underlying assumption is that it is possible to “generalize certain fundamental orientations as commonly or typically “Japanese”’ (p. 21); that, in contrast to Western philosophy, Japanese philosophy “puts the emphasis on being organic, generative, allusive, relational, syncretic, aimed at contextual origins and underlying obscurities, and negation as a way of transforming perspective” (p. 23). This volume thus follows a classical Japan-West dichotomy, which omits modern Japanese philosophers as they “do not regularly analyze or even cite texts from their own tradition” (p. 19, my emphasis)—as if Japanese philosophers cannot lay claim to European traditions simply because of their nationality. Here “Japanese philosophy” is reified as a singular tradition with a unique essence diametrically opposed to “Western philosophy.” The possibility that the abstractions “Japan,” “Japanese” and “Western” may be ideal typical, ideologically charged constructions does not occur to the editors.

There is, nonetheless, no denying that this sourcebook represents a great collective achievement. It consists of more than 1300 pages of primary sources written by approximately 120 Japanese “philosophers,” translated and commented upon by over one hundred scholars. Included are works by such well-known thinkers as Kūkai, Nichiren, Dōgen, Shinran, Ogyū Sorai, Motoori Norinaga, Nishi Amane, Fukuzawa Yukichi,

Japanese Philosophy:A Sourcebook James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis andJohn C. Maraldo

University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011xviii + 1342 pages. ISBN 978-0-8248-3618-4

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Nishida Kitarō, Nishitani Keiji, Tanabe Hajime, Watsuji Tetsurō and Maruyama Masao. It also contains works by a large number of thinkers relatively unknown outside (and even inside) Japan. Some of their work is here available in English for the first time. Regardless of whether or not they count as “philosophy,” some of my personal discoveries included: a treatise on the spiritual ability of women by Zen monk Bankei Yōtaku; well-informed criticism on devotional practices and Shinto nationalist mythmaking by Edo period Confucian scholars Satō Naokata, Ishida Baigan and Tominaga Nakamoto; attempts to reconstruct Shinto as a modern national ideology by Ōkuni Takamasa and Orikuchi Shinobu; discussions on the relationship between “religion” and “philosophy,” and a project to construct a Temple of Philosophy by Inoue Enryō; Mutai Risaku’s social ontology, pacifism and “quest of a new humanism;” Christian philosophies of time, otherness and self-awareness by Hatano Seiichi and Yagi Seiichi; a rich philosophical essay on the topic of contingency by Kuki Shūzō; Imanishi Kinji’s ecological thought, which is similar to yet predates contemporary post-humanist thought by half a century; and last, but not least, Ōmori Shōzō’s deconstruction of established truths concerning “history” and “language.” Other readers will make other discoveries, but the bottom-line is that this work is extraordinarily rich, quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Anyone interested in the history of Japanese thought is likely to encounter any number of unfamiliar texts and authors.

The book is divided into two parts of unequal length. The first, “Traditions,” is by far the longest. It consists of “Buddhist Traditions,” “Confucian Traditions,” “Shinto and Native Studies” and “Modern Academic Philosophy.” The last of these is divided into three: “Beginnings, Definitions, Disputations,” “The Kyoto School” and “Twentieth-Century Philosophy.” Each section begins with a useful overview. This is a conventional categorisation model, but not entirely unproblematic, as many pre-modern intellectual developments cannot easily be categorised as “Buddhist,” “Shinto” or “Confucian.” What is missing from this volume are precisely those texts that fall between categories, such as esoteric medieval proto-Shinto texts.

The second part of the book is entitled “Additional Themes.” One is left with the unfortunate impression here that this serves as a “rest category” for texts not fitting elsewhere. “Culture and Identity” in particular is puzzling. It begins with a lengthy, essentialist yet fragmented introductory essay by Thomas Kasulis, which is followed by disparate texts that have little in common: Christian thought and wartime “overcoming modernity” discourse, for example. Equally fragmented is the chapter “Aesthetics,” comprising several short texts, medieval as well as modern, on various aspects of Japanese “arts.” By contrast, Oleg Benesch offers an excellent introductory essay on “Samurai Thought,” which shows convincingly that bushidō is, to a large extent, a modern romantic invention employed for ideological purposes. There is also a chapter entitled “Bioethics,” which focuses on the Japanese debate on brain death and organ transplants. The chapter cites opponents of organ transplants, but not its advocates, and rests on a simplistic East-West dichotomy. It is even suggested that the practice of donating organs is a product of “individualist values imported along with much of western culture” (p. 1242).

Finally, the sourcebook has a comparatively lengthy chapter on “Women Philosophers,” including texts by Yosano Akiko, Hiratsuka Raichō and Yamakawa Kikue. This was applauded by a previous reviewer as “truly a welcome addition to the grave lack of literature

Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

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on women thinkers in Japan.”1 However, the very fact that these authors are set apart as “women” philosophers paradoxically confirms their inferior status within Japanese academia. (Consider the absurdity of a chapter on “men philosophers.”) The suggestion is that that their gender, not the “philosophical” quality of their writings, explains their inclusion. One also wonders why the overview to this section is twenty three pages, while those of “Confucian Traditions” and “Shinto and Native Studies” are only nine pages each.

The quality of the translations in the volume is generally high, and most texts are very readable. However, there are inconsistencies in translation, which the editors should have noticed. For instance, the term kami has been left untranslated in some texts, while elsewhere it is translated as “gods” or “deities” seemingly randomly. Another inconsistency is the use of italics in primary sources. Usually, they are used for translators’ comments, but in the case of Motoori Norinaga (pp. 472–492), italics are suddenly used for citations in the original text. Such inconsistencies are confusing, and could easily have been prevented. Finally, one wonders how it is possible that in a text first published in 2000, Fujita Masakatsu could refer to a sourcebook published eleven years later (p. 994). Obviously, the translator/editor has added a sentence that was not present in the original, which raises questions regarding proper translation and reference practices.

In sum, this sourcebook has its problems. It rests on an outdated Japan-West dichotomy; the criteria for inclusion and exclusion are questionable; and inconsistencies and errors remain in the text. Nonetheless, this is a very rich collection, which features many Japanese texts available in English for the first time. Moreover, at 35 US dollars for over 1300 pages (paperback), it is very reasonably priced. It is a welcome addition to the bookshelf of any scholar or student interested in the history of Japanese thought.

Reviewed by Aike P. Rots

1 Arisaka Yoko. “Review of Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 38:2 (2011), pp. 387–89.

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On 7 December 2011, the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was commemorated. The solemnization in the same year of the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of “9/11” recalled the plethora of allusive comparisons: both after all were surprise attacks that occurred on American soil and thrust the nation into war with non-Christian enemies.1 However, there has been little comparative analysis of the ideological underpin-nings that sanctified both attacks as a “holy war” against the West.

In Skya’s view, Japan in the early twentieth century saw “a political trajectory from secular to religious fundamentalism similar to that we have seen in the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and in the broader radicalization of much of the Islamic world” (p. 11). He aims to answer “why radical Shintō ultranationalists were convinced of the necessity of waging […] an ‘ethnic and religious jihad’ against secularized Western civilization much like that proclaimed by many radical Islamic fundamentalists today” (p. 4).

Japan’s Holy War provides comprehensive analyses of writings by f ive leading constitutional scholars and political philosophers from late Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa. Ambiguities within the Meiji constitution of 1890 resulted in differing interpretations and opposing theories of state. Most inf luential were Hozumi Yatsuka’s (1860–1912) authoritarian patriarchal family-state theory of absolute monarchy and Minobe Tatsukichi’s (1873–1948) rival interpretation of the emperor as an “organ” of a more liberalistic parliamentary state. A third approach was that of Kita Ikki (1883–1937) who saw the Meiji Restoration as a social democratic revolution and endeavored to formulate the national polity along (national) socialist lines.

Uesugi Shinkichi (1878–1929) and Kakehi Katsuhiko (1872–1961) responded to the rise of political consciousness among the urban masses in the early twentieth century by recasting Hozumi’s hierarchical doctrine of absolute monarchy into a new horizontal form that molded the masses by linking state to ultimate morality.

Having established Uesugi’s thought as the spiritual force mostly resonating with the

1 Besides compelling similarities there are of course also huge differences, and it might rather be the U.S. reaction and attributed symbolisms that provide the most convincing link. John Dower in his recent work Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (W.W. Norton, 2010) juxtaposes both events and their long term implications in a triangular dimension by including all the belligerents in the equation.

Japan’s Holy War:The Ideology ofRadical Shintō Ultranationalism

Walter A. Skya

Duke University Press, 2009400 pages. ISBN 978-0-8223-4423-0

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common Japanese soldier, Skya then focuses on incidents of “politics by assassination.” He identifies a shift “from political terrorism in the Meiji period to religious terrorism in the Taishō and Shōwa periods” (p. 246). The final chapter discusses the government’s publication of Kokutai no hongi in terms of “disenlightenment” of the masses and “orthodoxation” of radical Shinto ultranationalist ideology that now included the idea of an imperial holy war against the outside world.

Skya is to be commended for providing a nuanced picture of the ideological structure of the prewar Japanese state. By succinctly tracing differing theories on state and sovereignty from Meiji to early Shōwa, he counters notions that State Shinto underwent no significant change. Skya also ably demonstrates that no official political or ideological consensus on a state orthodoxy existed prior to the publication of Kokutai no hongi in 1937. He furthermore challenges claims that the patriarchal family-state concept was a core component of State Shinto and a distinctive characteristic of Japanese “Fascist” ideology. Indeed, one of the book’s strengths is its comparative theoretical engagement with European forms of Fascism, while asserting the validity of the “Fascist” label for early Shōwa Japan.

Skya insists that only an examination of the relationship between religion and the political order reveals the transformation “from a quasi-religious or quasi-secular state constructed by the Meiji oligarchs to Hozumi Yatsuka’s traditional conservative theocratic state in the 1890s and, finally, to radicalized and militant forms of extreme religious nationalisms in the state theories of Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko in the 1920s” (p. 10).

However, Japan’s Holy War is pervaded by a multitude of distinctions and convoluted concepts with seemingly random variants: “(ultra)conservative (religious) Shintō (ultra)nationalism;” “counter-revolutionary/reactionary/fundamental Shintō ultranationalism;” “(extreme) Shintō (religious ethno-)nationalism;” “(radical) Shintō (ultranationalist) terrorism;” or his subtitle’s “radical Shintō ultranationalism” that is divisible into a “militarist” or “revolutionary” strand and a “controlled” faction. What leaves the reader further perplexed is Skya’s often interchangeable usage of these vague terms. For example: “Under Uesugi’s state theory, conservative, reactionary, or counter-revolutionary Shintō ultranationalist ideology had become radical Shintō ultranationalist ideology or totalitarian ideology and militant radical Shintō fundamentalism” (pp. 183–84).

Skya’s monolithic labeling of almost all forms of nationalism as “Shintō” or “religious” is problematic, and he does little to clarify these concepts in context. Besides the implicit assumption that State Shinto and Shinto ultranationalism essentially are the same (pp. 183, 261), he conflates theology, ideology, and religion by asserting that “[t]he theology of Kakehi Katsuhiko best represents one form of radical religious nationalism, and the ideology of Uesugi Shinkichi represents another” (p. 11). Skya later contradicts this argument by claiming that religion did not feature prominently in Uesugi’s totalitarian ultranationalist ideology: “The Japanese state, consisting of ethnic Japanese, constitutes one body under the rule of the emperor. Other criteria of the state—[... including] religion [...]—did not constitute a basis on which to establish the value of the state” (p. 173).

Skya asserts that all Shintō ultranationalists “were highly religious people” who “believed in the core doctrines” of the divinity of the living emperor, the divine origin of the Japanese ethnic group, and the ancestral deity Amaterasu as divine source of political authority (p. 324). Shinto indeed is closely connected to the imperial institution and the legitimization of power, but perhaps with the exception of Kakehi, the featured ideologues

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do not seem to base their ambitions intrinsically on “religion.” Instead, their arguments mainly focus on Japan’s Imperial Way and a “holy war” against the impure and morally degenerated Western values of materialist individualism. Skya himself characterizes ultranationalism as a “political phenomenon” (p. 19) that “includes a powerful religious component” (p. 22) and admits that “Shintō doctrines […] were all used to mobilize the nation” (p. 25).2 Thus, at most, Shinto ultranationalism was faith-based secular thinking that used religious rhetoric for political ends.

Furthermore, Skya unfortunately fails to link the ideas of his ideologues with the common people. He argues that “radical militant Shintō ultranationalism proved to be the most powerful ideology in the debate over state and sovereignty and the one used by those who would take over the Japanese state in the 1930s and mobilize the Japanese people for total war” (pp. 95–96). The success of this branch of nationalist ideology was due to it being “mass-based and thus designed to capture the hearts and minds of the masses,” resulting in “radical religious mass politics” (p. 110). Skya remarks that “the militarization or radicalization of the masses did not occur automatically,” but was instigated by “the intellectual elites at the top of Japanese society” (pp. 151–52). Yet, how exactly did intellectual discourse among constitutional scholars directly influence the masses? Skya mentions that the “Shintō ‘orthodox’ kokutai ideology of the state was indoctrinated into the Japanese masses through a national education system” (p. 125). However, this passing explanation fails to clarify the powerful role of mass media in shaping public opinion or to consider socio-economic conditions that made the population more receptive to extreme ideas and radical political change. Also conspicuously absent from Skya’s monolithic view of “the masses” are any patterns of dissent among the people.

In sum, Japan’s Holy War incites new interest in the complex web of competing (ultra-)nationalist ideologies among the nation’s elite. While challenging previously held assumptions, Skya’s thought-provoking arguments provide much insight into the nature and significance of the debates over state and sovereignty from 1890 to 1937. Unfortunately, careless typographical errors, tedious repetitions, redundant footnotes, disorder in the enumeration of arguments, varying translations of words, and incorrect readings of Japanese names overshadow the book’s importance and strengths.

Reviewed by Michael Wachutka

2 Surprisingly, not once throughout the book is the Japanese word for “holy war” (seisen) given.