Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young
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of unified markets, globalized mass communications, and the exposure of the individual to multiple systems of meaning, it is impossible to look at the economic without considering the political, to study the cultural without thinking about the social, to discuss the national without reference to the international. Therefore we need to look at ways in which economics, politics, culture, and society work together as a unit and the ways in which national systems are integrated into international systems. We need, in short, a total theory of imperialism.
TOTAL IMPERIALISM
Like many abstract concepts, imperialism is a term that resists concrete definition. Most historians deploy the term to describe the annexation of territory and imposition of alien rule over the peoples that live there: domination formalized in the creation of institutions of direct colonial administration. More problematic are instances of informal domination—where a country retains nominal independence, but falls within another nation's “sphere of influence.” Historians agree that the colonization of Senegal by France or Ceylon by Great Britain were expressions of imperialism. But whether Soviet influence in Eastern Europe or American interventions in Indochina are properly characterized as “imperialism” is a subject of debate. My own definition of imperialism, designed to characterize Japan's relationship to China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accommodates both formal or direct, and informal or indirect, mechanisms of domination. Imperial domination implies that the dominated society not only is altered by the interventions of the dominating society, but loses its ability to reject those interventions. The Chinese, for example, were not in a position to tell the Japanese to go home in 1907 or 1932. By contrast the Japanese could and did send their European advisors away in the 1890s. The former was a relationship defined by imperialism, while the latter illustrated Japan's measure of independence from European control. A further characteristic that distinguishes imperialism from other forms of influence is the scale of the disparity of power between the two societies and the one-sided pattern of intervention that emerges. In this way, imperialism is different from interdependence. Japanese influenced basic decisions which structured the economic and political conditions of Northeast China, but Chinese had no such power in Japanese government circles. Such interventions, moreover, may be effected through both formal and informal channels. Hence, the term imperialism is not synonymous with colonialism, but rather subsumes it. Japanese conditioned social life in Northeast China both through formal colonial institutions—the Kwantung governor general and the Manchukuo government—as well as through such informal methods of control as military threat, market dominance, and the cultivation of a collaborative elite.
A final distinction may be added here between imperialism as process and empire as structure. Imperialism is empire building; it represents the process of constructing a relationship of domination. Empire signifies what is built—the structures that produce and reproduce dominance. For Japan and Manchukuo this distinction captures both the mercurial dynamism of the process as well as the ossified weightiness of the structures that together, incongruously, characterized the imperial project.
The phenomenon of imperialism can be traced back to the beginnings of recorded history; its early modern period began with the European voyages of exploration at the turn of the sixteenth century. Here I address imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the features identified with modernity inscribed themselves on the processes of imperialism and created what I call total empires. Conditioned by the advent of the nation-state, industrial capitalism, and other revolutions of the modern age, imperialism became increasingly multidimensional, mass-mobilizing, and all-encompassing. The relationship between modernity and empire, moreover, was dialectical: just as modernization conditioned the growth of empire, the process of imperialism shaped the conditions of modern life. An attempt to puzzle out the evolving relationship between modernity and empire occupies the theoretical heart of this book.
The political revolution of the nation-state represented a key element in this relationship, transforming the meaning of imperialism in the nineteenth century. The rise of nations and nationalism meant that imperialism was increasingly an enterprise of both nation and state, in contrast to the crown colonies of the Americas and the trading factories of Asia that were established under the charter of the absolutist monarchies of early modern Europe. Indeed, imperialism became fundamental to modern projects of state making and nation building, both in Japan—as the government's designating itself “the Great Empire of Japan” (DaiNihon teikoku) and the patriotic popular response to the Sino-Japanese War suggest—and elsewhere around the globe. Moreover, the articulation of constitutional contracts that bound states to represent the interests of society meant that imperialism henceforth would be a joint endeavor. If a faction within the government—such as the Japanese Army—-sought to expand the nation's power overseas, it needed to mobilize social support for the task. Similarly, private groups with imperial ambitions—such as Japanese business organizations—pressured their governments to lend state support to their plans. Such developments led to the emergence of an imperialized nationalism, while making imperial policy the crucible of a growing intimacy between state and society.
All of this was occurring, of course, in the midst of the global expansion of industrial capitalism. The advent of the industrial revolution in Europe stimulated integration of colonial markets into the world economy in a manner that facilitated the export of colonial wealth and resources to the industrial metropole and tended to hinder the development of industrial capitalism in the colonial periphery. Although Japanese colonial policies stimulated economic development in Manchuria and Korea, Japan, too, sought access to colonial export markets and colonial sources of cheap raw materials in order to maintain its own industrial production. Moreover, industrial capitalism not only produced a new form of economic integration between metropolitan and colonial societies, it also stimulated the emergence of what is known as social imperialism—that is, the projection overseas of the social discontents and dislocations engendered by industrialization at home.8 In Japan's case, social imperialism operated both to diffuse radical demands of factory workers and to deflect class tensions in a rural economy battered by the effects of industrialization. Finally, industrial capitalism was responsible for the mass production and commodification of culture, and, hence, the invention of what we know as mass culture. The mass production of culture transformed the nature of the imperial project because it created new vehicles for the mobilization of popular support. In Japan and elsewhere, war fevers, yellow journalism, and what J. A. Hobson called in 1901 the “psychology of jingoism” became familiar features of modern empires.
In these ways the revolutions associated with modernity revolutionized imperialism. I have named the new imperialism “total” both to describe the phenomenon itself and to suggest a methodology for its study. The term does not signify absolute or totalitarian, but is used, rather, as an analogue of “total war.” Like total war, total empire was made on the home front. It entailed the mass and multidimensional mobilization of domestic society: cultural, military, political, and economic. The multidimensionality of total empire relates to the question of causality as well. Manchukuo emerged from multiple, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing causes; it was an empire propelled by economic forces as well as strategic imperatives, by political processes and cultural determinants, by domestic social forces as well as international pressures. In themselves, none of these variables explains or determines imperialism; rather, their synergy or concatenation is what gave total imperialism its peculiar force. Empire in this sense is overdetermined. Finally, in using the term total I want to convey the widespread, even comprehensive, character of Manchukuo's impact on Japanese society. The process of empire building in Manchuria touched the lives of most Japanese in the 1930s in one way or another.
This is not to suggest that all modern empires were total in this way. All overseas interests, whether formal colonies or informal spheres of influence, held the potential of becoming total empires—but not all did. By my definition French Algeria and British India were almost certainly total empires, and perhaps others were as well. But without careful comparative research it would be reckless to venture a taxonomy of total empires or to hypothesize more precisely about the common historical conjunctures that bring them about. In Japan's case it is clear that some imperial projects were more important than others, and that imperial interests in the Nan'yo (Pacific Islands), Taiwan, and Korea all meant different things at different times. Japan's experience suggests, as