 Okay, we're back. We're alive. It's 5 p.m. on a given Tuesday. We are so happy to be here. History Lens with John David Ann. May I call you a professor? You can, Jay. Of HPU. Happy holidays, Jay. Happy holidays. Shinyan Kuala coming soon, yeah? Oh, okay. Yes. So we're here and we seem to be in the middle of a mob of people. Who are those people, John? In the background, these are actually protesters and riot police in Japan, in Tokyo, in May of 1960, when Japanese students and housewives and grandmothers take to the streets in the millions to protest changes to the security treaty between the United States and Japan. So the protesters believed that the changes to the security treaty were not enough. They felt like the United States was still too dominant in Japan. Ah, interesting. So control over Okinawa was still in place. The Americans still had troops in Japan, which of course never changed. We still have that today. But they were protesting against too much American control over Japan in this new treaty that was supposed to be signed. I can hardly wait to find out more about this. So of course, this is history lens and we're talking about the elements of John's book, which is on the table in front of us. Quick picture of book. There, that book, okay? It's called The Limits of Westernization Part 5, Roman 5. Is that book available on Amazon? It is, yes. Absolutely. Just want to check. Alright, and the tagline for this is East Asian modernity, which is a term of art we've threaded through all of these parts after World War II. Right. So interesting. We know so little about this. So walk us through it, John. Okay. So first of all, we have to go back into World War II, and I want to talk about an intellectual named Takeuchi Yoshimi. So if we could bring up, there he is, Takeuchi Yoshimi. Now in this picture, he looks pretty somber, more like an intellectual. But there are many pictures of him being smiling and laughing. He's kind of a, he's a jokester as a young student at Tokyo Imperial University. He never went to class. He was always skipping class. He was above that. He thought he was lazy. He admitted later on that he was just plain lazy. So he goes to China in 1932 on a study abroad trip for the summer. And he's not planning on doing a thing. You know, he's not going to attend classes in China either. But he goes up to Manchuria. And this is like, this is the summer after the Japanese invaded Manchuria and took control of Manchuria in the Manchurian incident of September 18th, 1931. And so he goes in summer 19, pardon me, 1931. In 1932 he goes and he falls in love with the Chinese people, Manchuria and elsewhere. He believes that they are more authentic. They're more honest about their feelings and their thoughts than the Japanese. So he becomes a sinologist. He starts this Chinese studies group back at Tokyo Imperial University. And so he becomes really focused on that. He becomes very anti-Western, very much opposed to Westernization. And during the war he actually serves in the army in China at the end of the war. In Manchurian. I think in Manchuria, yeah, in the army. And so he has this very interesting career trajectory where he's right in the middle of this moment where the Japanese become so anti-Western that some Japanese intellectuals begin to call what they're doing is not over, not just rejecting Westernization, but rejecting modernity itself. There's a conference in Tokyo called Overcoming Modernity. Now Takeuchi, overcoming modernity, yes. Right? The idea is to get rid of westernized modernity. And go back. Not go back, but to exist in a kind of universal, timeless space with the emperor in charge, the military in conquest, and the Japanese people in submission. The essential model without Westernization. Right, right, but out of time. This is interesting about this whole conference. The argument is that the Japanese have to move out of time because that will take them out of this process of Westernization. It's false. Oh, it's false. It's not sustainable in any way. Right, that's right. It's totally false and it's not sustainable. So Takeuchi does not go to these conferences. He's not a big enough big shot to go to these conferences. But what he does is after the war, he goes back and looks at these conferences and critiques Japanese intellectuals' participation in these conferences. So what's really interesting about his comments about these conferences is that, first of all, Takeuchi admits that intellectuals himself included kept their heads down during World War II. They were not willing to protest, to criticize the government, to dissent in any way. Well, why? Because they knew that they might end up in jail. They would lose their careers. They'd get fired from their jobs. It was dangerous. It was very dangerous to criticize the government. Let me ask you the flip side. Had they done that? Right. Had they protested what they thought? And it's probably right through the entire group of them. What they thought, namely this was not a good idea. Imperialism all over Asia and, for that matter, all over Hawaii, was not a good idea. Right. Would it have changed anything? Would it have stopped the militarism juggernaut? Right, right. So actually, I think so. Because there were moments in the 1930s where liberals, liberals who still wanted empire, but they rejected the military's approach, liberals, it looked like they were going to come back into power. And if some of these intellectuals had said, hey, we need these liberals to come back in power, the military's doing the wrong thing. If they had had the guts to do that in the 1930s, I think it might have changed. They might have changed the emperor's mind. I don't know so much about the emperor, but they might have changed the public's mind. And of course, Japan was still a democracy with elections taking place. Even then. Yes, in the 1930s, right through 1940. Then it stopped. Then the military began running. Well, in the 1930s, the military and the militarists, those who supported the military, won election after election. So that by 1940, they continued to have elections, but then they got rid of the political party. Are you saying that the emperor was not influential in these things? Well, it's up for debate. I've reviewed books that have said the emperor was totally in charge. And I've reviewed another book that said the emperor was off studying fish. He was a zoologist. And he liked to study. And he wasn't much interested in politics at all. So we don't know, honestly. In either event, they used his name. Absolutely. The imperial household was right at the center of it. And so there were some very powerful people in the imperial household who used his name. And so maybe he approved it, maybe he didn't, but it really didn't matter. Because they used the emperor's stamp, the emperor's seal, to approve the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the invasion of Southeast Asia. And to the West, people saw the emperor as a center leadership figure and all this, right? They wanted to bring him down. No, that's right. So what's interesting is that these intellectuals, when they're at their most honest, are saying, you know what, we don't know what to do. We're kind of paralyzed by the actions of the Japanese military and the Japanese state. And we're afraid. There must have been a fair amount of repression, just as it was in Europe. Oh, absolutely. There was all kinds of censorship. And if you said the wrong thing at a minimum, you would get an interview with the Kempei Tai, which was the Japanese thought police. And you might end up in jail. Or at least lose your, you would lose your status in your position. Would they torture you and kill you, too? That didn't happen much to intellectuals, but yes, once in a while. So Takeuchi's reflecting back on this. And what he says about this conference is that essentially the intellectuals who were giving papers and talking about overcoming modernity at this conference were full of crap. To put it bluntly, they were... You saw there was unsustainable, right? There was a lot of empty air talking about the magnificence of the Japanese empire and how this would change everything. There was no overcoming modernity. There was no Japan out of time. It never happened like that. So what's interesting about Takeuchi is he's honest about this. And that really kind of sets him apart. Makes him a very interesting intellectual. Well, to have this realization, it would have been better if he had this realization and made these statements and conclusions before the war got serious. But after the war, what effect? It was just an intellectual historical remark, right? No, actually I don't think so because the Japanese intellectual... This is one of the things that we'll talk about with the next intellectual as well. Japanese intellectuals are grappling with their role in the war. After the war, they're grappling with this. They're like, what happened? How could have we let this happen? They should have. Just the way the Germans did. Absolutely right. So Takeuchi is grappling with this in a very honest way and I think very respectful way. But there's another intellectual, Maruyama. Now if we can bring Maruyama's picture up, he's also very interesting. There's Maruyama Masao who becomes the premier Japanese liberal intellectual in the post-war period. Now Maruyama is interesting because he comes from a family of liberals on his father's side. His father was a journalist and criticized the government all the time. So he kind of had this idea of criticism and opposition baked into himself. And his mother was actually descended from a very important line of people who helped to found the Sayukai which was the patriotic party, political party of Japan at the turn of the century. So he had this very kind of prominent lineage. Maruyama gets involved in a Marxist study group in the 1920s as a very young man, as a high school student. And he gets a visit from the Kempeitai. They knock on his door and they enter. He's a teenager and they're interrogating him. Later on he admits that it felt like the Japanese thought police were stamping on his soul with their jackboots. So he felt this like this. They were trying to tear his soul apart. I mean when they took him down for interviews. Well they interviewed him. Yeah they interrogated him at his house. So they interrogated him on his philosophical source. On his mark his connection to Marxism. And so he abandons that although you could argue that Maruyama is kind of, he uses Marxism as part of his methodology. So Maruyama during the war, he becomes, without getting a PhD or anything, he becomes a professor at Tokyo Imperial University. And then during the war he writes some very influential articles which are not censored. Interesting. They're not censored and he also writes about another intellectual who we've talked about, Fukuzawa Yukichi. Who is this intellectual who said Japan needs to become more independent, late 19th century. More independent individuals will equal a more independent nation. Will avoid western imperialism. So why does Maruyama go back to Fukuzawa? Why does he go back? Because Maruyama is thinking about the war. Especially at the beginning of the post war this time period. Maruyama is confronting this question. What happened? Why didn't intellectuals do more? And his conclusion is that there was a failure of civil society. That intellectuals and bureaucrats educated people in Japan were too traditional in their consciousness. They didn't think enough for themselves so that they could oppose the state was running towards imperialism and war in the 1930s. Essentially the Japanese middle class was too conservative and too connected to the state. So when you say a failure this is really an interesting term because we still have this issue around the world these days. A failure of civil society means that people don't speak their minds. They don't do critical thinking. Exactly. They want to engage with the government to have some effect on the government and therefore they let the government take it by default. Exactly. A sense of citizenship. A sense of civic virtue. Civic duty. And so Fukuzawa was very big on civic duty. He believed that the Japanese people needed to become more independent in their thought so that they could do their civic duty for Japan. And this is relevant for the post war period in general because Japan was remaking itself as a democracy in those years. Exactly. It's relevant for us today. Should we sit on the sidelines or should we speak our minds? When you say us you mean Japan or... I mean Japan. I mean the United States. I mean Hungary. I mean Poland. I mean much of the world. We need to have a better sense of what citizenship means and what the responsibilities of citizenship are. I think we need to let that settle in. We're going to take one minute to let that settle in here with John David Ann. History professor at HPU will be right back. Settle in. Aloha. I'm Wendy Lowe and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii and on our show we talk about taking your health back and what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier mental health, mental health, fashion health, beautiful smile health whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha. Aloha. This is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at 3 we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation and world and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. You know what he was doing? Maruyama was his name. What he was doing is looking at issues that really pervade all of society in the world from and after the end of World War II. Exactly. Really important. A war like that you have to learn from and we still have to learn. Exactly. I think we haven't learned enough from it. So Maruyama emphasizes this idea of civic activism and he goes back to Fukazawa and he finds Fukazawa saying you know what, in the 1880s Fukazawa is writing and saying the Japanese people do not have much capacity for democracy or for this new kind of modern nationhood because they don't have an experience of representative government but they were at least trying to do that before the war, right? Right but so what Fukazawa says is they have lots of capacity lots of strength to endure through the time that's needed to become a democratic society. Come on. This idea of endurance. It's a very important concept in Japan even today. The idea of gambare do your best, persevere endure. It's a very important concept. It's true, that's right. So Maruyama takes that and says, ah, here is what Fukazawa is talking about and this means that the Japanese still have the possibility of building democracy after World War II and this is what they do. So in the late 40s the occupation forces put out a statement on the UNESCO Charter. UNESCO of course is the United Nations education arm, right? It does good work. The Americans founded it. The Americans wrote the Charter. The Americans funded 25% of it. But in that Charter there is a statement to the effect that war starts in the minds of men and so peace also must be built, the defenses of peace must also be built in the minds of men. It's right. So Maruyama founds an organization of intellectuals taking off from this idea that peace has to be built through the education of people and begins to argue that Japan needs to become more democratic. And this goes to the same point you made before the break, that is we have to achieve a civil society. Right, exactly. So Maruyama wanted to finish the project that I think was really never, that at least it was believed was never finished under Fukazawa. And so by the late 1950s then you have this ground swell of support for protests and against what the government is doing. It's felt that the government is giving too much ground to the United States and so then you have this explosion of protests in May in 1960 and this culminates when Eisenhower flies into Japan with the intent of going to the residents of the Prime Minister and signing this new treaty. There is so much protest that it's decided that Eisenhower should not come into Tokyo. He cancels his trip into Tokyo and flies back to the United States. Really? Yes. Well, the new treaty is signed later on. So it is signed. Is the new treaty a concession to the protesters? No, it's why the protesters are protesting. I mean, there are changes and there are changes that benefit Japan in the new security treaty but there are also lots of outstanding questions. As I said before the question of Okinawa, the question of U.S. forces on Japanese soil, the question of whether nuclear weapons should be brought onto Japanese soil. All of those questions remain. Wouldn't you anticipate this as a kind of growing pain out of the MacArthur end of World War II? You take control, you try to help on your own terms and you build democracy and you want to see it build and then people begin to get more conscious of it and they say wait a minute, that's too much. We want to do our own thing. We've had enough of this so we're going to get back to our Japan democracy and you don't need to be here. And that is some of the sentiment that drives people out of their homes into these protests. Predictable. So if we can bring up, there's another picture of protests which is a pretty good one here. There, this is another protest during May of 1960. You can see I mean, it's young people, they're passionate about what they're doing so Maruyama participates in the protest. Was he an organizer? He didn't actually organize protests but he gave speeches at the protests and by this time, this is a guy with one lung. He loses a lung after World War II. He's actually at Hiroshima when the atomic bomb is dropped and so he's far enough away that he does not die from the poisoning but he does have to have, he contracts tuberculosis and one of his lungs is taken away so remarkably he lives into his 80s but so that's Japanese intellectuals after World War II and they're trying to figure out what happened in World War II and how they can build a better democracy or a more stable democracy which hopefully will prevent that kind of militarism and war and atrocities in the rest of them. Well it did, didn't it? I mean the provision in the Japan Constitution as MacArthur wrote it, you know no more weapons, no more war no more big military it's a defensive only kind of that's stuck for a long time. Yes and it's still there. I mean the Japanese really embraced this and of course that's an American innovation but the Japanese had to indigenize this idea of a peaceful nation and they do so. So yeah I think largely successful although Maruyama doesn't think so at the end of his life he feels like a failure. Why? Well he feels like Japan is still not democratic enough and there's you can say well look the Japanese have a two-party system they have the Liberal Democratic Party which almost always wins the elections. Sounds like Hawaii. Yeah in a way it is actually. Anyway so that's Japanese intellectuals now shall we turn to Chinese intellectuals? Let's look for a moment at Chinese intellectuals. We can bring up a picture of a young Chiang Kai-shek now this is Chiang Kai-shek in his young years when he joined the Nationalist Party under Netanyahu, a very handsome guy. And then this is a picture of him later on when he becomes the head of the Guomandong in China and you can see he's growing older he still has a kind face but underneath that is a brutal dictator in many ways. I like the first picture of that. So Chiang Kai-shek comes to power in China and so the problem for Chinese intellectuals is really it's Chiang Kai-shek that's one of the problems with Chinese intellectuals is he brutalizes. Would you say that he was an intellectual? Well he's strictly speaking not an intellectual but he operates to kind of lead the party in the nation by constructing attempting to construct an intellectual framework. Every political leader needs something. True, every political leader needs that but in the absence of intellectuals who can speak out because Chiang so represses intellectuals in China during World War II then what you really have is Chiang Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang leads a movement in the 1930s called the New Life Movement. This is in China yes mainland China and the New Life Movement to try to force march the Chinese people into modernity. It's like Miss Manners meets the young fascists I'm serious about this it's really interesting. It's a combination of old style Confucianism and Christianity and there's like almost 100 rules that you have to follow to keep from getting into trouble and in 1934 when this is implemented and Chiang sets up what are called the blue shirts which is his paramilitary group which this group they go around the Chinese cities and then they punish anyone who they see who is violating these rules so for instance spitting is considered against the New Life Movement's rules improper dress lack of cleanliness it's a very strange kind of interpretation but it gives them an opportunity to take control of things. That's right. I would call it a coercive attempt at modernizing the Chinese people. What's interesting is the same tension it sounds like a mirror image of what was going on in Japan in the same period. Dealing with modernity one way or the other that was the elephant in the room was modernity. That's right and doing it their own way at least attempting to do it with at least some of their own traditions. Now the thing is Chiang is not always the best leader and the New Life Movement fails miserably but out of the New Life Movement you have the development of the blue shirts society which grows and grows and becomes Chiang it becomes his personal bodyguard and it becomes a kind of alternative army for Chiang during World War II. It grows to over a million soldiers so the blue shirt and it's a kind of neo-fascist movement in China. So this is a kind of modernity that becomes much more much more coercive in this context where you have where China is being attacked by westerners because of western imperialism China is being, there's a civil war between the communists and the nationalists going on in the 1930s so it's very difficult for liberals for those who have a kind of a vision of modernity that's liberating that involves democracy and this kind of more positive view of modernity it's very difficult for those types to get anything going in the 1930s. No, and right and it became very divided between the nationalists and the communists and neither the nationalists or the communists liked intellectual. Yeah. And wasn't it popular was Chiang's nationalism popular? It sounds like he was pretty tough on people. I wonder how the average Joe would have seen him. There wasn't a lot of public opinion polling he was never there was never a vote to say I'm elected so he was a dictator and so he was pretty unpopular in part because of things like the new life movement but also he was he wasn't himself corrupt but his regime was very corrupt and he had this secret police that would go out and beat people up and kill people and killed intellectuals during the war and then after the war as well the only thing is not the only one Mao, Mao Tse-dung takes power in the 1930s really at the similar time to Chiang Kai-shek Mao is actually out in Yanan by this point by World War II let's bring it there there's a picture of Mao in Yanan you can see he's quite thin because food is hard to come by he has gone through a lot he lost his first wife really by this time it looks that way from this picture and then you see Mao later on this is after he takes control of China and there he's gained his weight back and he looks kind of roly-poly but honestly he's a very dangerous guy he killed a lot of millions of people so here's the interesting thing about Mao is Mao starts out to want to be an intellectual as a young man he goes to Peking and he gets a job in the library at Peking University and he goes to lectures of these famous intellectuals so one intellectual who sure we actually talked about he was the guy who became the ambassador to the United States from China during World War II now who sure is giving a lecture he's giving a talk at Peking University Mao shows up at the back and he raises his hand I have a question I have a question for Dr. Hu and who sure pulls on him and he says are you a student at Peking University and Mao says no and who sure refuses to answer his question it doesn't make friends it doesn't make friends Mao couldn't break into this group of May 4th intellectuals who are trying to transform China into that group and he becomes very resentful of intellectuals interesting how one incident can change the way you think and it was a series of incidents at Peking University eventually he goes back to his hometown near Changsha and kind of admits defeat in his quest to become a teacher and an intellectual and so if we shoot ahead to the time of the Yananyers when Mao was in West and he became the head of the party and ran the communist Chinese Communist Party then Mao begins to attack intellectuals vociferously so first he begins reeducation campaigns for intellectuals so the intellectuals who were interested in communism gather around Mao at Yenan but Mao believes that they're filled with bourgeois capitalist thought and then Mao starts a reeducation campaign and then Mao starts what's called Mao thought and part of that maybe a lot of it is still present in China today you can still read Mao's little red book which he wrote in part in Yenan and if you want to be an intellectual who doesn't agree with that you have a price to pay and you can be reeducated in the process that's correct and even executed so that's the problem with intellectuals in China is it's really hard to get any space, any oxygen to say anything at all or to put forward any ideas it sounds from what you say here today John that the intellectuals had a better reception or at least they weren't treated so badly in Japan they were treated pretty badly in Japan they were marginalized but not decimated that's right but of course the difference is that in Japan if you got in line with the emperor and the military you were fine you might get in line with Mao and then Mao changes his mind the next day because it's Mao thought whatever comes out of Mao's mouth becomes truth that becomes the party doctrine you better be in line with that and so if he changes his mind and you didn't get the latest news about it you could still be in big trouble well these guys are pretty brutal all of them and it's that period of brutality in many ways it's not over I think Xi Jinping carries that around with them and it still exists in Chinese culture it's very hard even today for intellectuals to speak freely although they can but they take risks it depends upon what you're talking about and how influential you are in China if you're just stick with academics write academic books and do academic discussion and not talk about politics in China because and that's not a guarantee either it's not but actually given in my experience in China you're more likely to be just fine if you stay with just academic discussions and academic conferences the party leadership is not going to give you trouble so where are we now in the context of your book we've looked at part 5 here today where does it go from here can we have a further discussion next time no I think we're done actually because what is needed is a second volume so I was at this workshop in Japan over the break in Osaka and the questions that I got about the post-war period made me realize you know what I need to write a second book I'm sure they were very interested in what you had to say telling them things they might not have heard from any other source well these are experts so they had a lot of questions and they had some criticisms and of course that's expected but I think that became clear to me that I have to write a second book okay well then we have to have a second series well it would be a while it could be a few years we'll wait John and the author of The Limits of Westernization part 4 it's on the table another shot of that we're very patient like the Chinese we'll wait for version 2 thank you so much good to be back take care