Philosophizing 'Japan': The Genri Nippon Society and the question of Japaneseness.

摘要

This dissertation is an examination of the intersections between philosophy and politics in modern Japan, conducted through an analysis of the writings and activism of the notorious wartime ideologue Minoda Muneki (1894–1946). Analysis has been directed at engaging two problems in particular. First, I call into question the traditional right/left political spectrum by retelling the historical narrative of political ideas in Japan from a perspective that sheds light on common intellectual and political contexts. Second, I cast a critical eye on past assumptions concerning the notion that interwar rightwing ideologues had succeeded in leading a rightward shift in the politics of Japanese society. Through my treatment of Minoda and his Genri Nippon Society (Japan Principle Society), I offer a more substantive narrative of Japanese nationalist activism as an alternative to the historiographical language of "fanaticism," which tends to inhibit critical engagement with the politics of ideas altogether.;The first chapter examines the literary theory of Minoda's mentor, Mitsui Kôshi, whose romantic calls for the liberation of poetic impulse became the very basis for his rigidly nationalistic theory of poetry. Chapter two argues that Minoda's dissatisfaction with Taisho Marxism hinged on points of contention shared with a new generation of Marxist theorists: determinist economism and the issue of human agency. Chapter three returns to an analysis of Mitsui, this time re-contextualizing his nationalistic theory of political participation in the main ideas that characterized Taisho Democracy, to reveal that national identity served as a necessary basis for most dominant theories of democracy. In the fourth chapter, I problematize the narrative of rightists as anti-heroes by revealing the contingent factors and the multitude of agents that played a role in the major academic censorship scandals of the 1930s. Chapter five examines the Genri Nippon Society's experiences during the height of the state's mobilization policies, which it approached with surprising ambivalence. With the increased prestige of technocratic knowledge most embodied by the Renovationist bureaucrats and military officers, members of the Genri Nippon Society, like many of their more left-leaning contemporaries in the humanities, were quick to assert the unifying, synthetic power of the human sciences, which they perceived as sorely lacking in the new intellectual culture of the late 1930s and early 1940s. As Minoda and his allies grew increasingly critical of the state's policies, many of the allied organizations were forcibly shutdown and its members arrested. With Minoda in a crippling state of depression and retired to his hometown in southern Japan, the Genri Nippon Society published its last magazine in January of 1944, over a year and a half before the war ended.