This article examines the thought and career of Nabeyama Sadachika (1901-1979) from Communist militant in 1920s Japan, to his conversion to the emperor system in the 1930s and, finally, to his role in shaping the postwar anti-communist movement. Using Nabeyama's recently released private papers, the article shows how he brokered his anti-communist expertise to a range of postwar actors and institutions-the police, the Self-Defense Forces, business circles, politicians-as well as to foreign states, especially the Republic of China (Taiwan). These networks indicate that important sections of Japan's postwar establishment rallied behind anti-communism in the face of reforms that threatened their power at home and their vision for Japan in the world order after 1945. As a transwar history, this article adds to our understanding of Japan's transition from the age of empire to that of liberal democracy by qualifying narratives about the "progressive" nature of postwar Japanese politics. It argues that the vitality of anti-communism is symptomatic of the durability of particular political traditions, and reveals that, despite the significant reforms that Japan underwent after 1945, the Right was able to claim a space in the country's political culture that has been neglected by historians. Link to article: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-asian-studies/article/whats-left-of-the-right-nabeyama-sadachika-and-anticommunism-in-transwar-japan-19301960/AA35EB9B3620D040FF98EE451337BFD2

A paper presented ISA Asia-Pacific Confrence, 25-28 June 2016, City University of Hong Kong The paper proposes to apply the theory of multiple modernities to the study of national identity examining various discourses of modernity that were in circulation in the Japanese empire. As proposed by Shmuel N Eisenstadt, the theory of moderenities is an expression of attitudes to social scientific understanding of the world: conventional theories of modernity and modernisation need to be challenged for their often implicit western-centricity in that all societies in the world are expected to converge on the European model. Apart from a focused critique of the conventional theories’ western-centricity and the suggestion that the analytical focus should be place on human agency, the theory of multiple modernities is rather undefined. However with these two points, it still helps develop new research on identities, and the case of East Asia serves as an ideal context in which identity is investigated from a fresh angle. Set in this broad framework, the paper investigates discourses of modernity that were in circulation in the Japanese empire. As it is well known, intellectuals of wartime Japan were deeply engaged with the question of modernity, and the idea such as the East Asian Community and the event such as the ‘Overcoming Modernity’ symposium of 1942 were expression of their endeavour. These were, needless to say, the ruler’s hegemonic idea but there is some evidence some intellectuals in colonised Korea and Taiwan took them up as the tool of subversion of Japanese imperial rule as well as of consolidating national unity. Drawing mainly from secondary literature on colonial intellectuals in the Japanese Empire, the paper sheds light on the complex interaction among different ideas framed in the modernity discourse which reflect conscious exercise of agency.

Few events have symbolized the interwar Japanese intellectual community’s inability to put up a principled resistance to the Japanese government’s growing authoritarianism like the tenkō phenomenon of the 1930s (the political and/or ideological renunciation of the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations and activities). Instead of eliminating its political dissidents in the 1920s and 1930s, the Japanese state arrested them, placed them in solitary confinement, and then used inducements to encourage them to sign a tenkō statement, hence, rehabilitating and returning them to Japanese society. Previous studies have highlighted the institutional elements of repression, the intellectual’s personal struggles to remain committed to Marxism, or more recently the rejection of Leftist thought as a starting point for the rise of ethnic nationalism during the early Shōwa years (1926-1937). Prioritizing the agency of the individual, this monograph is an attempt to engage the tenkō phenomenon from the intellectual’s perspective, examining the tenkō of writer and literary critic Hayashi Fusao (1903-1975). Hayashi was a member of the Japanese literati whose turn to ultranationalism in the 1930s and 1940s was so extreme that scholars often discount altogether his time in the radical student movement and his participation in the proletarian literature movement. Flipping the mirror on this interpretation, here we examine Hayashi’s tenkō through a close reading of his proletarian short stories. As a result, this work also draws attention to one of the more controversial intellectual and cultural issues during Japan’s “red decade” (1925-1935), the political role of literature in contesting the state’s dominance of state-society relations in imperial Japan.

This paper investigates the risk presumably involved in the narratives of non-Western international relations theory (IRT) by focusing on a similar historical case in Japan. It reveals the risk of uncritically accepted geographical division, and particularly focuses on the discourses of the Kyoto School's theory of world history as an example of non-Western narratives in the past, which was to ‘overcome’ the Western civilization similar to the contemporary non-Western IRT. However, they are also infamous for providing justification for the wartime regime in Japan for their aggression in the Asian continent. What is the connection between their philosophy and support for the imperialist regime? If there is a connection between them, is there any possibility of the resurrection of the same results in the case of non-Western IRT? To answer these questions, the article introduces the philosophy of Tosaka Jun who was critical of the School but, unlike Kyoto School philosophers, stubbornly fought against the mainstream politics of the time.