 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. The picture behind me is, wait, I got it, it's... Lu Shan. Lu Shan. Lu Shan. Okay, and we talked about him before, and we meaning I wanted to find everything this time. Yes. Professor John Davidan, a history professor at HPU, and he's the author of a book he's been working on for some time, which is The Limits of Westernization, which is on the table, you can see it, okay? And this is very important, and I guess a core part of this whole investigation is what we're going to talk about today. Yeah. We talked about World War I, we talked about what I would recall as a sort of vacuum after World War I, and we had all these people trying to figure out where do we go now? What do we do? How do we fill the vacuum globally? Right, right. You know, it's sort of a really interesting time in the 30s, an intellectual moment, if you will, and I have this vision of these guys sitting around in coffee shops, sipping coffee with spectacles, talking about intellectual... Actually, no. No? In the period, especially in East Asia, in the period of the 1930s, especially in the late 1930s, to be an intellectual in either Japan or China is a pretty dangerous business. Yeah. Government didn't like it. No, not the Japanese government, not the Chinese government, so many of them were thrown in jail, some of them were killed, they were beaten up. Why at the wrong end? What was wrong with it? Why was it so threatening? Well, I mean, they said the wrong things. They criticized governments. That's probably the biggest thing. So last time we talked about, who's sure, this major intellectual who became the Chinese ambassador to the United States in the 1940s during World War... Very westernized type of guy. Well, he was, but he was... So he was an intense critic of the Guomandong, the Chinese government, the nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, and so they didn't like... They never threw him in jail. He was too powerful to throw in jail. But they hated the criticism, and he was just harping on them constantly because the Guomandong was corrupt and all kinds of problems with their rule. So... But so up to this point, in the 1910s and 20s, then what you have is East Asian intellectuals constructing a modernity which is... Looks actually a bit different from Western modernity. The sources are different. They're looking at Confucianism. I remember Wang Yongming, the old guy in one of our previous... Yeah, you mentioned all of these names. It's so interesting. But you know what I get is after the turn of the 20th century, after the war, and the vacuum of the war, and the tumult in China, and the spheres of influence that had such a threatening effect on China from the west, people there and here and in Europe were looking for a better world. It was Wilsonian, you know, and it's looking over for a better world. And these guys were bent on that. Yeah. So, well, you have these different views. But you also have some agreement about basic principles of modernity, progress, scientific rationality, and human liberation. We can only have them today. Right. Right. They're nice ideas. They're good ideas. And Wilsonianism is, of course, a part of that. But what happens in the 1930s? So you've got that platform. You've got these differences. But you also have the similarities of these intellectuals. Both east and west, they agree upon these three ideas. Were they in touch? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So they agree upon them. In the 1930s, their faith in basically these, what I would call the articles of modernity, those three ideas, you know, progress, human liberation, scientific rationality, right? They begin to lose faith in those ideas. Or they reconfigure them in such a way that they don't even resemble the kinds of notions that we were thinking about earlier. Why act with the things that make them give it up? Right. Why do they move on? Obviously good principles. Yeah. So a lot of reasons. It's complex. History is complex. You've heard that before. So in order to understand that, we have to go to Charles Beard. And if we can bring up a picture of Charles Beard. Beard is maybe the most famous intellectual in the history of the 20th century in the United States. He represents all of the three ideas. He's a progressive. He believes that science can solve the problems of humanity. He's a political scientist. And he's a historian. And he's the only person in the history of really well the history of the United States who serves as the president of both the American Historical Association and the president of the American Political Science Association. That's how important he is. He's this huge figure. And so this will be in the 30s. This is this is his scholarship starts really in 1913. He publishes his first major book. He's a professor at Columbia University. Okay. This is his first major book, a critique of the Constitution making of the country, saying that it's all the Constitution was a compromise made on among economic elites. It wasn't this idealistic document that, you know, so so he's a he's a major critic and he's a skeptic from the beginning. But he also believes in these three things. He believes in progress, scientific rationality and human liberation. Right. So he's he's working he's he's involved in reform efforts and he's trying to make this happen in his world right to make the reforms that will will that will solve the problems that will bring on modernity. Right. So he goes to Japan in 1922. He's by this time he's resigned from Columbia University. He resigns in World War One. This is really amazing. He resigns in protest because some of his colleagues have been criticized and have been released or fired from Columbia University because they refused to sign loyalty pledges concerning World War One. I got to say that I so admire a guy who would do that. You don't have that so much. His job was not threatened. Yeah. I mean, it was so selfless and courageous. Yes. So so by this time, Beard is actually is working for the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, which is an organization that studies cities and and tries to reform cities to make them more modern. Beard is invited to Tokyo to study Tokyo and recommend reforms that would modernize Tokyo. This is watershed right there that I can. I can tell you what you're going to tell me. Okay. Okay. So he gets to Tokyo and what he realizes after his trip is that Tokyo is actually a very modern city already. Was that the answer? Yes. That was the answer. So so what happens is Tokyo actually modernizes over a very long time period. Their transportation systems, their sewage systems, their water systems, they're actually built in way back in the 16 and 1700. They've got they're actually a more modern city than many western cities interesting in that time period. But nonetheless, you know, Beard goes there and he gives lots of lectures and everything and he makes a few recommendations which they mostly ignore. What were the recommendations that he might have given to them, which they didn't know about and which they ignored? Right. So one of the things is in Japan generally and in the Tokyo politics, the political system was weighted toward elites. The way the mayor was chosen, the way council people were elected, there were a lot of people who weren't allowed to vote. Women were not allowed to vote. And so Beard said, hey, you've got to get women involved in municipal governance. That was one of his recommendations. Yeah, that's a pretty feisty recommendation. Which they ignored. So Beard goes home and then in 1923 the Kanto earthquake takes place and it destroys much of Tokyo. And so the mayor and the council invite Beard back to help in the reconstruction of Tokyo because of course the destruction of the city is a major opportunity to build it in a way that is more modern. Sure. So Beard makes a few recommendations the second time he's there, but honestly he doesn't have much of an impact. This is the limits of westernization. Right. Americans, back in the U.S., there's a New York Times article that talks about how Charles Beard will rebuild Tokyo after the Kanto earthquake. Americans think that he's going to lead this rebuilding effort. Beard actually has to put an editorial in the New York Times saying, no, no, actually none of that's true. I'm here to help. When's the last time you saw that? But Beard says, you know, the Japanese have very good engineers. They know what to do. And so there's this, there's in a nutshell part of the problem is the Americans assume that they're going to be front and center in shaping East Asian modernity in Tokyo in this case. Yeah, yeah. So Beard says, no, no, no. Okay. So he knew a lot more about Japan than they did. He did. Yeah, yeah. And so, so Beard is, so, so, but he's still this proponent of reform and progress and scientific rationality. But Charles Beard goes through an evolution which, which really causes his own intellectual crisis in the late 1920s. One of the problems you mentioned, Wilsonianism. Beard was a big proponent of Wilsonianism before World War II. But after the war, Beard realized that Wilson's call to democratize the world was taken by the European powers as a call to grab more land, as a call to, to take more. I think he was right. More colonies. Well, so what happens in, in the Middle East is the Ottoman Empire falls apart. And the Europeans sign a secret treaty called the Sykes-Picot Treaty, 1916, right in the midst of the war. Well, no one knows about this. But after the war, it divides up the Middle East into French and British spheres. So he wasn't kidding. It's imperialism. Yeah. This was, this was real. This was true what he said. So the only way that, that everyone knows about this treaty is, this is complicated, but it's interesting. The Bolsheviks win the revolution in Russia. The Bolsheviks have decided that these Western imperialist powers need to be outed. So the Bolsheviks released these secret documents that the Russian government was in on, including the Sykes-Picot Treaty. So Beard is outraged. He said, oh, this is not Wilsonianism. This is Europe. This is just more European imperialism. And I aided and abetted it by supporting American involvement in World War I. So he reverses himself. So he being, he begins to be skeptical. Now his skepticism on international relations is accompanied, of course, in the early 1930s. You have the Japanese becoming very aggressive in East Asia. He had been a big proponent of Japan. But with Japan's takeover of Manchuria in 1931. They could turn you off. That's right. He got turned off at that. He, he began to denounce Japan. Then of course, in the United States, there's the economic crisis. The Great Depression. What a great time to have a break. Okay. Okay. So we can just sort of dwell on that language. Okay. And then fill up the chasm of history in the 30s. Yes. That's John David Ann, history professor at HPU. We'll be right back after the short break. I can hardly wait. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Hello. I'm Yukari Kunisue, the host of the Japanese broadcast of Think Tech Hawaii. I'm from Niijikara on Monday, every Monday. In the Japanese community, in the Japanese community, I'm hosting a program where I can share useful information, news, and guests. Hello. I'm Yukari Kunisue, the host of the Japanese broadcast of Think Tech Hawaii. Hello. I'm Yukari Kunisue, the host of the Japanese broadcast of Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Yukari Kunisue, the host of the Japanese broadcast of Think Tech Hawaii. John David Ann, history lens, the crisis of modernity, East and West, the 1930s, and what you're describing, John, you can still see elements of these things today. It's a very formative process in this period of time that you can still see. Absolutely. Anyway, we left it with a cliffhanger. So the Great Depression crashes the American economy. And it also, so Beard was this guy who believed that science, and for him, political science would deliver an economy that grew and grew. Historical progress, the line going up all the time. Well, the Great Depression, the line started going down. But if you were there, or if I were there, 1930, before the Depression actually began, you'd feel the same way. Yes. And of course, today we still feel the same way. Right? There's not going to be a recession. The economy's going to keep going up. Science will carry us through. Right. So Beard becomes a skeptic of progress, of science. And he has his own ideas about human liberation. Beard, Charles Beard becomes, so he critiques science. He gives a talk at the American Historical Association when he's the president called history as an act of faith. Let's show that picture of Beard right now. If we can see what he, we can look deep into his eyes. There it is. There's Charles Beard. And you can see he's got a collar like a preacher. Charles Beard, he's a professor of history, but he really is in many ways like this. A great statement about Columbia. Yes, right. Well, Columbia had its own problem. It had its own problems in the morning paper today. But anyway, go ahead. So Beard becomes a skeptic. He also begins to believe that the international system is very dangerous and he becomes an isolationist. He argues that the only trade the United States should have is essential articles. Everything else should be done on barter and the Americans should not be interacting with the outside world. The budget of the military should be cut to the bone. We only have 14,000 troops in the army at that point. He has compared to the millions who were in uniform during World War I. That's right. And Beard thinks he has the ear of Roosevelt in the early 1930s, a big supporter of Roosevelt in the first election. Roosevelt disappoints him, bigger government, bigger military, especially the Navy, which Roosevelt builds out in the 1930s. And so Beard becomes a fierce critic of Roosevelt and maintains this position that isolation of what Beard calls American continentalism. That sounds like isolationism to me. It is, but basically the argument Beard has is that we can get everything we need in North America. Nationalism? Yes, nationalism, but also an idea that the Americans North and South America should be self-reliant and should stay away from this very dangerous international system. Was he known? Was he famous? Did he have traction in the American community? His books were the best-selling books of his generation. He was the dean of American historians. So yeah, he was the best-known historian of his generation. So yeah, he had a lot of traction, actually. So Beard becomes terribly disillusioned and at the outbreak of World War II, he accuses the Roosevelt administration of having known about the Pearl Harbor attack beforehand. He's the one who starts this conspiracy theory about the Pearl Harbor, which is alive today. Oh yeah, a lot of people repeat that. Right, so there's no truth in it, but Beard believed that the Roosevelt administration knew and just kept it from the American people because they wanted war against Japan. So that's Charles Beard. And honestly, this last act of Charles Beard, the conspiracy theory, really destroys his career. I mean, he's quite old at this point. He dies in 1948. Oh, he does a long career from the 1913, you said, 1948. He does, and he writes throughout that career. So he's really a remarkable intellectual. Why do you say it destroyed his career? Well, because other historians say the guy is crazy. The guy has lost his mind. So yeah, he's really discredited. The other problem is we don't have any evidence that that's true, so this is a big problem for Beard. This is a big problem for any academic, isn't it? You can't make a statement like that. You can't come to a conspiracy theory like that without any evidence. But Beard, of course, he didn't have a job at an academic institution, so he didn't have that risk. He was independently wealthy. He had this farming operation in Connecticut that had made him wealthy, and his books made him wealthy. So he didn't have anything to lose by taking a flyer. Except his reputation, unfortunately. And I think he really didn't understand that. But Beard, this fierce guy, very stubborn guy, high collar, like a preacher, unwilling to compromise. Now, when we think about Beard's kind of his crisis in terms of modernity, well, that also happens in East Asia. It's a different kind of crisis in East Asia. So what happens in East Asia is, especially with the relationship between China and Japan, Japan is increasingly aggressive with China. China is increasingly falling apart in this time period. There are concerns about Western imperialists taking even more control than China, maybe once again threatening Japan. So in this atmosphere, you have two important intellectuals. You have Yoshino Sakuzo. We showed the picture, but we can bring that picture up again. Yoshino Sakuzo is a, he's an intellectual in, there he is, dapper in his suit and tie. He is the foremost democracy advocate of Japan before World War II. Yoshino is a professor at Tokyo Imperial University. He leads protests in the late 1910s and the 1920s. And he was not thrown in jail? No, not in that time period. Maybe there was a certain swell of support for that idea. There was a lot of millions of people joined in his protest. Was that really for democracy? I may have a definitional problem if you use that term. Or was that just to be Western? No, this is actually the key to Yoshino's thought because Yoshino looked at Western style democracies and said, you know what, this will not work in Japan. And so his idea of democracy is what's called Minponshugi, which is the people's sovereignty, which is kind of not a completely accurate translation. But so what Yoshino said is, you know what, Western system, the sovereignty is located in the people. But in Japan, we have an emperor, so we can't locate sovereignty in the people. The emperor is still sovereign. But the emperor, in Minponshugi, the emperor should, by virtue of his position as emperor. Should listen to the people. Should care for the people. And then what you can do on the bottom, the people themselves, you can push for all kinds of, the same kinds of democratic reforms that are taking place in the West. But with the understanding that this is a kind of functional democracy, it's not sovereign democracy. So that's a key insight. It's a little thinking in Europe, you know, that if you had the power and had the money, you had an obligation to take care of them. Right, right, right. Yoshino's very serious about the democracy part of this. Now, Yoshino, he's a very popular guy, he's a very important guy. The Taishou Democracy Movement is really, he's the head of it. But he makes this terrible mistake. He knows that he has enemies and he knows that he would like to speak out even more freely and have more power. And he's not paid very much at Tokyo Imperial. So he quits his job at Tokyo Imperial University, takes a job at one of the major Tokyo newspapers, begins to write these scathing editorials. Against the government. Against the government, very critical of the government. He had been, all along, been critical of the government, especially the government's, you know, lack of democracy in response to the, to its rule in Korea, its empire. So Yoshino, so somebody high up in the government calls the editor of the newspaper and says, this guy has to go. And they fire Yoshino. Well, he didn't kill him. Well, yes, it's good that they didn't kill him, but honestly, he becomes impoverished, he loses his influence. And he dies poverty-stricken and ill in 1931. Interesting, because he had no platform to advance his theory. He had no protection. He had some protection in Tokyo Imperial University. He had none there. The interesting thing about Yoshino's ideas is, Yoshino believed that within the, what he called the international system of democracy, because he believed the world was going in the direction of democracy. He believed that Japanese democracy would be unique. It would involve their empire, their trade system within their empire. And then, of course, this functional, Minpon Shugi functional democracy back in Japan. Where the emperor takes care of the people. That's right. So he believed that there was this unique system that Japan was building. Now, his student, Royama Masamichi, now we can bring up a picture of Royama. He's, let's see if he shows up here. There he is. So Royama Masamichi is, he's a student of Yoshino. He comes to mature, he takes a job at Tokyo Imperial University. He becomes this very important guy in the, in the 1930s because he is a part of, of Konoe Fumimaro's informal cabinet. Kind of the cabinet of intellectuals. He's the head of that cabinet. Student of Yoshino. Royama argues, you know what? Yoshino's idea about a Japanese unique sphere. Let's take that further. And he argues that Japan is building a unique, regional civilization in East Asia. And even more, because of this, Japan, because of the unique nature of the development of modernity in East Asia, with Japan at the head of this empire, do not need to follow international laws. International laws do not apply to the Japanese empire. How does it play with Manchuria? How does it play with the growing imperialism, violent imperialism that was happening in the 1930s? So Royama's a moderate and he argues, he doesn't like what's happening in Manchuria. He thinks Japan's empire can be peaceable, not with military intervention like in Manchuria. So he argues a moderate position on the Manchurian question in 1932. But his ideas fit with increasing Japanese militarism in, in East Asia because Konoe becomes the prime minister of Japan in 1937. He picks up Royama's ideas and said, you know what we're building in East Asia? We're building a greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere, which is essentially a cover for Japanese imperialism and military aggression in East Asia. So through the 30s, through the 30s it was evolving that way and his sense of moderation was losing out. That's right. And the war hawks. He quits his job at Tokyo imperialism. Because he's frustrated. Well, he's frustrated and a colleague is fired. So it's a little bit like Charles Beer. Really? It's Columbia and Tokyo University. So Royama's a very important guy. He's this bridge to a Japanese empire which is very aggressive. But it still is defining itself as a kind of unique version of modernity, its own version of modernity in East Asia. Yeah. They were ideating Western style. Well, they were, they were, they had accepted the idea of modernity, but they were saying, no, this is not Western modernity. This is Japan modernity. This is, this is our own style of modernity and therefore we do not need to follow international law and follow the rules of international kind of the international system. And indeed they don't. Sounds like China today. Well, this is part of the reason why China can do that because they've for a long time, they've been building something that's quite a bit different than Western style modernity. So yeah, China today in many cases says, well, international laws don't apply to us. It sounds like you're defining the end of the 30s, the end of the intellectual, the intellect process that happened in that period. And so as the co-host of this show, John, maybe you should state where we are. Give us a snapshot of where we are say 1940, the end of the 30s, and tell us what we're going to cover next time. Okay, so one more thing before we do that. Liu Shun, back to China and Liu Shun. So Liu Shun is this intellectual. He's also experiencing a crisis like intellectuals in Japan and Charles Beard in the United States. And Liu Shun believes that the Chinese past is bad, that Westernized modernity in China is bad. He wants to create a kind of nationalist modernity in China. And there's Liu Shun right there. And he's a very important intellectual. He's a writer. He writes a short story which would have won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He refuses. He doesn't want it nominated. He's a critic of the communists. He's in the Chinese Communist Party. He's a critic of the Guomandong or the Nationalists in China. No one escapes his sharp critique. He's a very interesting guy. In this discussion, you've named a number of people who did that sort of thing, including Beard. They stand up for what they believe in. Even at great risk. We need more people like that. No, absolutely. And these are public intellectuals willing to risk their lives to tell the truth. But so all of these guys are suffering from this crisis of modernity. Essentially, their faith has been broken. And so in the 1930s, I think that's what you're seeing. And Liu Shun, he dies in 1937. It would have been interesting to see if he had lived on such a sharp critic, such a strong international figure for China. Maybe he could have helped shape Chinese communism in a different direction, or maybe Chinese communism never appears. That's kind of stretching it a little bit. But at any rate, so you have these intellectuals who are suffering through this major crisis of thought in the 1930s, and modernity really takes it on the chin, so to speak. It seems like progress is dead with the Great Depression. It seems like human liberation has died with the Holocaust in the West and with Japanese atrocities at Nanking and the rest of East Asia. And it seems like scientific rationality, which was supposed to deliver progress and human liberation cannot be trusted anymore. But the war comes and destroys the landscape of East Asia, the people of East Asia, and it really in some ways kind of wipes out this crisis as well. So in the post-war period, you begin to see new narratives about the strength and the progress of modernity and scientific rationality. So it reasserts itself. There's something hopeful there. But where are we leaving this and where are we going next time? That's what we'll talk about next time. We'll talk about the post-war situation and the way that it's both history, the way that intellectuals began to reframe modernity after World War II, but also the way that history began to be written after World War II and written in a way that didn't fully kind of square with the facts and allowed us to think that westernization was the only thing that happened in the 20th century East Asia. Thank you, John. You're welcome. It's always great. History is wonderful.