cajones drawers tiroirs cuarzo

The holders of postwar fascism in Japan, such as Kakunosuke Akiyama and Shōji Aoyagi, whom I have introduced in Chapter 1, represent the petty bourgeois class. The petty bourgeoisie consists of small industrialists, teachers, tradesmen, artisans, carpenters, clergy, and others, who are more or less independent of big corporations and creative in the nature of their trades. When the monopoly economy was established during the Great Depression and has been fortified throughout the postwar and especially in the current global recession, the autonomous business bases and idiosyncratic rhythms of working that the petty bourgeois members enjoy might pro- vide impressions of delays. Their labor power being derived from what appears to be inalienable resources of humanity, such as dexterity, talents, or religiosity, the petty bourgeoisie might seem to be outside and behind the world trend, in which humanity and originality exist only as the nos- talgic traces of mass reproduction.

The petty bourgeois delay has supplied inspirations to culturalist theories of Japan as non-fascist. In these theorists’ portrayals, the petty bourgeoisie embodies “premodern” Japan or the time-resistant “Japanese culture.” According to these theorists, it is the non-linguistic vio- lence supposedly embodied by the petty bourgeoisie, which caused, or at least supported, what they call the imperial absolutism or the fascism of the emperor system or other presumably Ja- pan-specific regimes prior to and during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945). Since fascism to the- se theorists is an advanced, modern phenomenon, these supposed regimes maintained by the “feudalistic” petty bourgeoisie and emperor should never be regarded as fascism, according to them.1

1 _{See for instance, Masao Maruyama, “Nihon Fascism no Shisō to Undō,” in his Gendai Seiji no Shisō to}

My position admits the delay and difference of the petty bourgeois class. I also agree that the temporal and spatial difference of theirs explains their affinity with fascism. Unlike the cul- turalists, I suppose that the petty bourgeois difference has been historically and economically, versus culturally and traditionally, created. The petty bourgeoisie has been created as the neces- sary other of the mass-reproducing economy. In 1950s Japan, the petty bourgeoisie as a class was made to absorb tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians repatriated from the country’s former colonies and occupied territories; during the 1980s, that class was needed as the manufac- turing basis for the country’s new economic phase of the “small lot production.”

At the same time, the aforementioned, culturalist production of the petty bourgeoisie as the quintessential “people” (minshū) or “folk” (minzoku) of Japan intervenes in reality. The fan- tasies of the people or folk are powerful, carrying nostalgic desires of the original and the au- thentic, which incessantly arise in the late capitalist everyday. The petty bourgeois enclaves of fascism, which I have called death spaces in democratic Japan, are subsequently created and mis- recognized to be the manifested surface of the Japanese ethno. The task of this chapter is to dis- entangle the dialectic between the fantasy of the Japanese ethno and the reality of the petty bour- geois class, between the levels of language and materiality, on order to understand why fascism remains and emerges in these death spaces.

I will accomplish this task by using my ethnographic data as well as written materials on a death space of fascism, Yasukuni Shinto Shrine, Tokyo. If Akiyama’s suburban apartment is a secretive tomb of postwar fascism, the Yasukuni Shrine is a sensational stage of international controversies on the country’s unresolved past. By folkizing the shrine, one is ultimately able to exonerate the Japanese of their political and ethical accountability for their past fascism and the

war. The issue of politico-ethics will be the guiding thread of my two-tiered (textual and materi- al) discussion of fascism’s agent, the petty bourgeoisie.

The Setting: A Death-Space Resounding with War-Heroes’ Voices

“Good morning,” I say, approaching the first veteran that I encounter in this “Shinto shrine” Yasukuni. He is “Shōji Yamada,” an 81 year-old (as of 2008) veteran of the Asia-Pacific War and a retired police officer. In the last summer when I conducted my preliminary fieldwork, he was one of the most cooperative informants. Today, he envelops his lean, tall body with a light blue shirt, grayish pants, a white baseball cap, and black leather walking shoes. On his left sleeve is pinned a navy blue armband, on which white letters read the Association to Respond to the War Heroes’ Spirits (Eirei ni Kotaeru Kai). Good-postured and easy to talk to, the only out- ward signal of his age would be a white tank-top (called “running”) worn under his thin shirt— for some reason, most Japanese males of his age have to wear one.Among several other male elders present, who all wear similar running, caps, and the same armbands, Yamada blends in well.

“Good morning,” I repeat. It is about 10:30. The August sun is already scorching, but the air is fresh and propitious with a feeling of unborn futures. These veterans are not tired yet, even though they must have already finished about two hours of their ad-campaign for the Association. The Association (otherwise called Ei Kai by its younger supporters) was established in 1976 by the Imperial Army and Navy’s Veterans’ Associations (Riku Kaigun Taieki Gunjin Kai), the Headquarters of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Hon Chō), and other religious organizations. Immediately after its establishment, the “Association to Respond” claimed it had 1.2 million members mainly

among veterans and other rightists.2 Collectively, they have tried to “respond” (kotaeru) to the Japanese “war-heroes’ spirits” (eirei)⎯that is, to remember and memorialize the fallen Japanese

soldiers of the Asia-Pacific War and prior imperial wars that Japan forged. There is a moral sense in their wording; they believe that the fallen soldiers “sacrificed” (gisei ni shita) their lives for the survivors of the wars and the subsequent generations. The Association’s ad-campaigns and lobbying activities are supposed to be their moral responses to the favor that they think was thus given to them by the soldiers. “Lend your ear to the heroes’ voiceless voices” (eirei no koe-

naki koe ni mimi wo katamukeyo) is their motto; they come here to the Yasukuni Shrine, where

the soldiers’ spirits supposedly reside, in order to listen.

Having learnt to speak clearly and loudly among these veterans, not only due to their age, but due to their conservatism (articulate speech or haki haki-toshita hanashi-kata supposedly shows the speakers’ respect to the listener), I raise my voice and repeat my greeting to Yamada for the third time. Surprisingly, he is not even looking at me. There is no sign of recognition in the face of this 81-year old. Looking into his eyes, I introduce myself again—likely for the first time in his perspective.

“Ah,” says he finally. “I’m sorry. I was just absent-minded...wondering if I have such a beautiful acquaintance as you.” An apparent lip-service to compensate for his being “absent- minded.” But at the same time, his empty words here perform. “Performative” speech, according to J. L. Austin’s categorization, is a speech act in which “the issuing of the utterance is the per- forming of an action.”3 Different from “constative,” i.e. descriptive, enunciation, performative

2 _{About the history of the Association, see an article by a leftist activist, Satoshi Uesugi, 2006; p.16.} 3 _{J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2}nd _{Edition, eds. by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà}

(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997(1962)); p.6. Strictly, the performative should be limited to only those verbs that are in the first person singular present indicative active. Yet, as Austin admits, even descriptive enunciation can produce as much social force and (unintentional) results as strictly performative speeches.

remarks subject themselves to the category of felicitous/infelicitous, instead of true/false.4 In this current case, Yamada’s speech performs to render me a felicitous existence in his kind of mascu- line world, that is, a female, the supposedly aesthetic object that exists only at her surface level. On my part, even a single word of a circumstantially appropriate response would suffice as the sign of my interpellation. It is true that this type of creation, repetition, and confirmation of gen- der relations are a matter of everyday life in contemporary Japan, the United States, or anywhere else.5 The difference is probably that here in the Yasukuni, the idea of gender difference is more positively asserted as part of a certain moral system, a system that claims to efface the problem and jouissance of females’ commodification. As an ethnographer from the larger society, who is facing this moral enclave, I could be either offended by the heightened gender difference and leave, or ignore the politics and enter the enclave. But like most other situations, the choice is not a real choice, since it is already compromised by other necessities (e.g. the research, the norma- tive concept of sociality, and so on).

“Ha ha,” I ambiguously laugh and change the topic. “Have you gotten a lot of visitors today?”

“So, so,” Yamada mockingly frowns. Behind us, several other veterans are indeed idly seated in front of the two folding tables, which are placed parallel to the Approach (Sandō) to the Hall of Prayer (Haiden). The Approach is a straight thoroughfare that has about five-lanes-worth of width and two traffic-lights-worth of length. Its destination, the Hall of Prayer, is the supposed house of the soldiers’ “spirits” (rei). Three or four middle-aged staff members of the Association

4 _{Austin, Ibid.; pp.18-20.}

5 _{About the relation between gender and performativity, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the}

Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). Rosalind Morris, “All Made Up: Performance Theory and the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 1995.24: 567-592 is helpful in

distinguishing performativity from performance. Whereas performance theorists tend to develop their discussions around the motif of inscription of difference, the concept of performativity considers the “origins of difference itself,” according to Morris (p.573).

are standing near the tables, handing their pamphlets to visitors. On ordinary Sundays like today, about a dozen Association members come here and campaign for fallen Japanese soldiers, raising awareness of the small number of Yasukuni visitors. While the Association is a powerful lobby- ist, the Sunday campaign itself is politically meaningless, given the number of the visitors. The veterans and other supporters come anyway, as it provides them with the precious time and space in which they gather and unite together.

The Association’s political power is that of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The al- most single-handed ruler of postwar Japan until recently, the LDP has sat on the Association’s board since its establishment. In return, the Association and other veterans, as well as like- minded families gathering in the Association of Bereaved Families of Japan (Nihon Izoku Kai), have been some of the biggest constituencies of the LDP.6 Representing these conservative in- heritors of the war, the LDP submitted to the national Diet the Bill to Nationalize the Yasukuni (Yasukuni Kokka Goji Hō An) five times over the 1969-73 period. Initially, “nationalization” of the shrine was to secularize the shrine, so that the state could own and run the shrine as a war- memorial. For these rightists, the shrine should be respected at the international state-level as “the Japanese version of the U.S. Arlington National Cemetery or Westminster Abbey of the U.K., where the Japanese prime minister, emperor, and international representatives can official- ly visit without any reserve” (their cliché). To them, the “reserve” (wadakamari) that these state representatives were supposed to have should not be related to the war-crimes, atrocities, and other controversies surrounding the Japanese soldiers, but to the issue of the church-state separa- tion. Once the shrine abandoned its position as a private religious organization and became a secular state-apparatus, the state-representatives (especially the Japanese PM and emperor)

6 _{When the families’ association was established in 1947, their number was said to be 8 million. Even as of}

1994, the association claims it has 1 million members. See Nobumasa Tanaka, Hiroshi Tanaka, and Nagami Hata, Izoku to Sengo (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995); p.44 and 76.

would not have any reserve (or rather legal problems) visiting it, according to the LDP and its supporters.

The LDP bill to secularize the shrine was lastly rejected in the 1973 Diet without a possi- bility of re-submission, due to leftist opposition. The leftists found the bill historically and con- stitutionally problematic. The constitutional principle of the church-state separation (Article 20, Clause 3) should still matter, even after the proposed secularization of the shrine, particularly when the shrine had been adamant that the fallen soldiers should remain in a Shinto-designated spirit existence. The leftists also problematized the history of the shrine, in which the shrine as a religious organization had been established in 1869 and maintained by the prewar state. Accord- ing to them, as a result of this church-state convergence, the prewar state could mobilize the Jap- anese in both their public (political) and private (religious) aspects. Due to this history, even if the shrine should ever be secularized, the leftists say, people would still be finding a statist, in addition to religious, significance in the shrine; the state could use this political-religious conflu- ence at the shrine whenever it conceives “theocratic” ambitions, the leftists claimed. For these two reasons, the leftists argued that their rejection of the LDP bill was a historical result of dem- ocratic Japan.7

The conservatives though, went under the table, establishing a powerfully staffed and budgeted lobbyist organization—the Association to Respond to War-Heroes’ Spirits, as I cur- rently observe in Yasukuni. From the start (1976), its political purpose was to otherwise realize

the rejected LDP bill—to officialize the shrine. Various strategies have been taken⎯most recent-

7 _{The representative of this line of argument will be Shinobu Ōe, Yasukuni Jinja (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,}

1984). “Religion” is a highly problematic category to be applied to the shrine, as I will discuss later. Nonetheless, when it comes to legal strategies that can be adopted against the shrine, leftist activists have only a few choices, of which the reference to the church-state separation has turned out to be a somewhat potent one (several winning cases at local levels). About the numerous relevant lawsuits brought against the shrine and the state, see Ōe, Ibid.; pp.154- 160, 190-197 and Nobumasa Tanaka, Yasukuni no Sengo-shi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002). More discussion to follow in Chapter 3 of the current dissertation.

ly, the endeavors to build up popular support for the shrine in its current (religious) status. So far, the Association has mobilized local affiliates of Japan Bereaved Families Association, in order to facilitate the issuance of the “resolution to urge the prime minister to formally visit Yasukuni Shrine”; allegedly 37 out of 47 prefectural assemblies have actually issued such a resolution.8 In this resolution, the prime minister is supposed to visit shrine as a religious facility. The Associa- tion has also been collecting relevant signatures from ordinary Japanese; as of 2006, it claims it has obtained 10 million supportive signatures.9 This trend radicalizes the previous LDP’s efforts, which sought to secularize the shrine in respect for the Constitutional framework; now, revising the Constitution is within the Association’s scope. Still, the old and new efforts are the same in their insistence on the moral national remembrance of the war.

Given the whole Japanese population of about 100 million, Yasukuni supporters are in- creasing, yet still in the minority. On regular Sundays like today, what might strike a visitor of the shrine would be its emptiness. Standing at the First Gate (Dai Ichi Torii), which is two 37 yard, horizontal steel poles, lifted and supported by 27 yard-high steel pillars (27 yards in diame- ter each), one can take in the whole vista that leads to the Hall of Prayer through the concrete Approach. Only a small number of visitors would interrupt the view.

Even to these few, potentially conservative visitors, the Association’s radicalized nation- alism might seem to be too extreme, judging from how they pass by its tables. Today for instance, the tables are flanked by those paper panels that read, “The Lie of ‘The Nanjing Massacre’— There Were No Slashers of One Hundred”;10 “We Can’t Stand Any More! We Won’t Forgive!

8 _{See the Association’s leaflet, “To Be Our Member” (unpublished).} 9 _{See the Association’s “To Be Our Member,” Ibid.}

10 _{The Nanjing Massacre was committed by the imperial Japanese army between December 1937 and}

February 1938. Many Chinese civilians were robbed, killed and raped, while their exact number is still being debated among historians. See Joshua A. Fogel ed., Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, forwarded by Charles S. Maier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and Takashi Yoshida, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Memory: Japan, China, and the United States, 1937-1999 (Ph.D. dissertation; History Department,

Stand Up Against China’s Egoism!—Grab one of our fliers about the demonstration NEXT Sun- day”; and “The Channel Sakura Will Change Japan—the New Satellite TV Channel, the Japa- nese Cultural Channel.” Some of the visitors though, might be attracted by these very slogans and stop at the tables. Guarded by the staff in the same black T-shirts, the tables look outstand- ingly Gothic. The T-shirt has the Association’s name in the back, along with imperial Japan’s rising sun flag (kyokujitsu ki) and such slogans as “Do Not Let the Glory of the Great East Asia War (Dai Tōa Sensō) Wither.”11 A few would buy the T-shirts, which come in different sizes and also have a dark blue version. The price is 3,500 yen (about 35 U.S. dollars) each. In this morn- ing, a middle-aged man wearing a light, moss-green suit and tie hands a 10,000 yen (100 dollar) bill for a black shirt and adds he needs no change.

According to the members, donations and signatures are made mainly by Japanese males. This is the category of people that dominates the Association’s membership (an exception is “Misa,” a middle-aged, Japanese female staff, who performs a perfect secretarial role). Among the visitors, I see some Japanese females. Foreign visitors are predominantly males, who would occasionally sit with the staff and discuss the Asia-Pacific War and other controversial topics.

Columbia University; 2001). The “slashers of one hundred” are Second Lieutenants Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, who were found guilty and executed in 1948 in the Kuomintang Military Tribunal, Nanjing, of using their nihon tō swards and murdering more than 100 Chinese civilians each. According to propagandist articles published by Japanese newspapers then, Ohsaka Nichi Nichi Shinbun and Tokyo Mainichi Shinbun, Mukai and Noda had been competing with each other about which one of them could kill one hundred first. Since 2006, when Mukai and Noda's families sued the newspaper companies and others on account of defamation, the two have been brought to a new attention of Japanese rightists. The families lost their lawsuit in the Supreme Court (2006).

11 _{The rising sun flag was used by imperial Japan and replaced by the current flag of the sun (nisshō ki). In a}

Chinese movie, Devils on the Doorstep (dir. by Jiang Wen; Home Vision, 2005), and other victims’ representations of the Asia-Pacific War, the rising sun flag is a symbol of the Japanese invasion and atrocities. Due to that history, display of the flag today is a taboo even within Japan. A similar thing is true with the term, the Great East Asia War,