Sociology 2018 Sampler by Cornell University Press

SO CIO LO GY •

Romain D. Huret, The Experts’ War on Poverty: Social Research and the Welfare Agenda in Postwar America, available October

SAMPLER 201 8

This sampler contains short excerpts from the following forthcoming and recently published books from Cornell University Press. Full details about each book are available on our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan, available October •

Jennifer M. Dixon, Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan, available November Anna L. Bailey, Politics under the Influence: Vodka and Public Policy in Putin’s Russia, available September Noelle K. Brigden, The Migrant Passage: Clandestine Journeys from Central America, available December Sayaka Chatani, Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies, available December

CORNE L L PRE SS.CORN ELL.EDU

CORNELLL UNIVERSI TY P R ESS

Darius Ornston, Good Governance Gone Bad: How Nordic Adaptability Leads to Excess, available October

SOCIOLOGY SA MP LE R

2 01 8

[FREE]

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Experts’ War on Poverty Social Research and the Welfare Agenda in Postwar America

Romain D. Huret Translated by John Angell

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Originally published as La Fin de la Pauvreté?: Les experts sociaux en guerre contre la pauvreté aux Etats-Unis (1945–1974) (Éditions de l’EHESS, 2008). Copyright © 2018 by Éditions de l’EHESS All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP to come]

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Contents

Introduction 1

Part I. A Science of Poverty (1945–1963)

1. The Poverty Paradox

2. The Poverty Culture

3. The New Wisconsin Idea

4. Beyond the Affluent Society

Part II. From Science to War (1963–1974)

5. An Economist at War

6. A Pyrrhic Victory

115

7. Uncertainty of Numbers, Certainty of Decisions

131

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v iii Conte nts 8. A Doomed Alternative

154

Conclusion 176 Acknowledgments 185 Notes 187 Bibliography 215 Index 225

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Introduction

In 1983, at the same time that the conservative president Ronald Reagan was lamenting the presence of “welfare queens” on inner-city streets and of “poverty traps” inherited from idealistic 1960s reformers, the Wisconsin economist Robert Lampman was recalling the heady days in 1964 when President Lyndon Baines Johnson launched the War on Poverty. Persistent, grinding poverty in such a prosperous country came as a surprise to many Americans, who believed that such a plight had disappeared amid the postwar economic boom. Lampman candidly acknowledged that even economists had been blinded by the feverish economic growth and seemingly unlimited abundance of the 1950s: “We never used the word ‘poverty.’ We used other words. And so it was something of a shock to an economist to have the word poverty suddenly remerge. It had been consigned to the dustbin. Other words like . . . Low-income population is one phrase for the poor. So it wasn’t fashionable to talk about the poor or talk about the poverty problem.”1

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2 Introduc ti on Prosperity had caused an overall increase in wealth, relegating poverty to the background and, in people’s minds, to the distant prewar past. Advertising and television reinforced the image of an America abandoning itself to “fables of abundance,” in T. Jackson Lears’s eloquent words. In the early days of the Cold War, material comfort defined the daily lives of most Americans. Amid rising anti-Communism and McCarthyism, anyone who dared to suggest that misery and suffering were present on American soil or questioned prevailing patterns of income distribution was immediately suspected of being at best unpatriotic.2 Lampman, however, along with a team of like-minded men and women, eventually managed to make it “fashionable” to talk about poverty, and they nudged their fellow citizens into waging war on it. As a close adviser to Johnson in the mid-1960s, Lampman famously proclaimed that by the year 1976, poverty would be a relic; two hundred years after the Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness, at least on a material level, would represent something besides mere words for legions of urban and rural poor citizens. A book by Michael Harrington, The Other America (1962), is often cited as an important turning point in popular histories. Harrington’s sensitive portrayal of the poor, as well as the review of the book by Dwight McDonald in the New Yorker, ignited a political reaction that eventually culminated in the War on Poverty. But the individuals who did the hard work that eventually brought the problem of poverty into the national limelight have been largely unrecognized; they include Robert Lampman, Mollie Orshansky, Ida Craven Merriam, Herman Miller, Dorothy Brady, Helen Lamale, Selma Fine Goldsmith, Alvin Schorr, and many lesser-known bureaucrats and academics. The stories of these middle-class Americans—economists, home economists, social workers, and statisticians—have remained in the background despite the fact that they were the driving force behind a vast postwar reform project to eradicate American poverty.3 The rise of such a nationwide effort involved a conjunction of two elements: first, scientific evidence that, even in affluent, postwar America, rampant poverty persisted and, second, a functioning federal system capable of aspiring to eliminate this social and economic blight from the national landscape. In the postwar United States, achieving this conjunction was far from easy, both because prosperity was so pervasive and because

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I n tr o d u ctio n 3 there was powerful, widespread opposition to federal intervention in the social arena in the 1950s. In other words, the War on Poverty was not created out of thin air; nor was it a product of the zeitgeist. Instead, it was the result of an extended scientific, bureaucratic, and social process that drove a generation of middle-class bureaucrats and academics to extend and expand upon the idealistic, reformist zeal of the New Deal. This book conjures these key figures back into existence. All of them were professionals with similar personal and professional backgrounds, and many had experienced poverty first-hand as children. They were all educated in American universities in the 1930s and 1940s and were influenced by intellectuals and philosophers for whom social justice was a moral, and often religious, imperative, among them Richard Tawney, Otto James, and Elizabeth Brandeis, to name just a few. They all supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and were impressed by the massive growth of the federal government, especially during World War II. To some extent, though, historical scholarship has demonstrated that these same reformers are part of a lost generation who struggled to make themselves heard between the New Dealers of the 1930s and the New Leftists of the 1960s. They constitute a cohort of scholars and officials who belong to the shadowy 1950s that has so often been taken for granted by historians.4 Our understanding of this community of poverty experts is obscured in part by the common portrayals of the decade as a period of consensus and complacency under the influence of McCarthyism, the Cold War, and domestic conservatism. The idea of a consensus, however, needs to be challenged. Postwar liberalism was defined by conflicting views and a growing awareness of the social and economic costs of the nation’s stark inequalities in the midst of rapid economic growth and rapidly rising mass consumption. While liberals shared many white middle-class values, believing in the primacy of a male breadwinner, the importance of a classless society. and the assimilation of minorities, they disagreed about the ultimate shape that reforms should take as well as the means of achieving those ends. Some continued to believe that the reformist impulse of the 1930s had not ended with World War II, particularly at a time when conservative thought and activism were on the rise. As they questioned the postwar affluent society, poverty experts looked closely at the flaws of the welfare state created in the 1930s and 1940s.5

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4 Introduc ti on When he signed the Social Security Act in 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt made a clear distinction between insurance and welfare programs, reinforcing to some extent a timeworn distinction between the “deserving” poor—orphans, single women, and the elderly—and the “undeserving” poor, mostly able-bodied men of working age. After World War II, this two-track system led to a crisis of legitimacy in the welfare system, which was sometimes labeled a “welfare mess.” One problem was the poverty paradox of the 1950s: the persistent presence of so many poor people in spite of widespread mass consumption and steady economic growth. Although conservatives interpreted this paradox as evidence of fraud and laziness, poverty experts offered a compelling, different narrative, according to which economic growth failed to eliminate poverty. The welfare state needed to be redesigned to reduce ingrained inequalities and cope with the new faces of American poor.6 As liberals very well knew, New Deal policies situated security at the center of American political and economic life. But this did not imply a welfare state that paid for social benefits by using the tax system to redistribute resources, because economic security would be exchanged for full-time employment. Both pensions and unemployment compensation were therefore to be paid for by employer and worker contributions. This also meant that New Dealers never regarded the benefits of means-tested programs as a basic right but saw them as a temporary form of charity for women and children living outside traditional breadwinner families. New Deal social policies—whether they doled out relief or conferred new social rights—targeted accidental poverty and were not implemented without heated debate. Historians have noted that a number of far-reaching ideas, from health care reform and equitable tax plans to full employment, were discussed beginning in the 1930s. FDR’s famous Economic Bill of Rights speech captured this reforming spirit, but his ideas and policies had a hard time gaining political traction.7 After the war, a generation of experts tried to transfer the security promised by prevailing politics to welfare programs after their research revealed a growing atmosphere of insecurity around the country. A citizen’s basic right to welfare lay at the heart of their scientific and political agendas. By promoting universal entitlement to government assistance, they were following in the footsteps of welfare officials who were committed to honoring FDR’s promise that freedom from want was the right

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I n tr o d u ctio n 5 of every citizen. Policy change on this scale would mean reforming the entire federal welfare apparatus, which was widely criticized in the 1950s. Poverty experts believed that the responsibility of welfare programs was, not to moralize assistance, but to help the poor meet their basic needs. Many of these experts were white male veterans who benefited from specific postwar provisions through the GI Bill—guarantees of health care, education, tax breaks, and home loans, to name just a few. It came as no surprise that they sought to include low-income families in a comprehensive welfare state.8 There was consensus among them that the federal government possessed the necessary tools to solve the poverty dilemma. In the years immediately following the war against Germany and Japan, a victorious afterglow elevated the status of public experts, who became central figures in American public life. Their knowledge had played such a decisive role in winning the war—one significant example being the Manhattan Project—that it seemed reasonable to believe that they could help defeat social inequalities. Within the context of the Cold War, the country was fertile ground for this modernist faith in applied expertise, as the expanding federal bureaucracy gave rise to a “proministrative government,” a term used by historian Brian Balogh to describe the postwar alliance of academics and administrators. Once they concluded that their research provided the foundation for progressive policies and programs, poverty researchers who were invisible in the 1950s were catapulted into the role of public experts. “Ending poverty” was no longer a mere slogan; the concept had been transformed into a political proposal that, pending government support, could offer meaningful ways to implement experts’ dreams of eradicating poverty.9 Poverty researchers tended to see the poverty paradox primarily in terms of income distribution. Their objectives were to locate the mechanisms causing poverty and establish a poverty threshold to distinguish the poor from the rest of the population. The findings of this growing body of groundbreaking social science research gradually filtered into the public sphere from the confines of government offices and universities. In January 1964, after President Johnson launched the War on Poverty in that year’s State of the Union address, previously unknown researchers were suddenly asked to develop practical solutions to the poverty paradox, occasionally thrusting them into public view. Although the poverty

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6 Introduc ti on community later became divided internally over specific approaches, with some backing a negative income tax and others preferring a system based on family allowances or reforming the existing welfare system, they concurred that an effective antipoverty program would mean some form of income redistribution.10 Persuading the public and the federal government to support the idea that such income transfer was inevitable for curing poverty entailed facing a huge obstacle: the predominant belief that individual behaviors and culture were the basic explanations for poverty. Amid the prosperity of the times, this behaviorist vision, combined with a venerable and deeply held distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” populations of poor Americans, fueled suspicion about low-income segments of society. These views supported explanations for the poverty paradox that blamed personal pathologies and that tended to focus on African Americans, particularly in the context of the civil rights movement. Philanthropic organizations supported a behavioral paradigm that blamed social problems on a lack of opportunity, coupled with psychological impediments to motivation that disproportionately afflicted certain social groups. The idea of a “culture of poverty” gained momentum in the early 1960s, further undergirding behavioral views among President Johnson’s staff holding that that low-income people needed to be empowered rather than enriched. Poverty experts were forced to take it upon themselves to broaden these key players’ narrow understandings in the name of reform.11 Unsurprisingly, interactions between experts and policymakers quickly became complicated. President Johnson adamantly refused to consider any proposal to directly redistribute income. He eventually backed a plan to establish a network of Community Action Programs (CAPs) in poor areas to provide targeted social services on a local level. This empowerment strategy sidelined experts at a crucial moment during the War on Poverty, unleashing a quiet, internal struggle in the poverty community to keep promoting income transfer. This struggle eventually took public shape as a proposal for a universal guaranteed minimum income.12 This book is intended to correct the negative image of unelected social policy experts by telling their story. It is a story of the failure of grounded professional expertise that resulted from a large body of social science research and the efforts of numerous committed public officials to shape public policy at a critical historical moment. The scholarly gaze of experts

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I n tr o d u ctio n 7 has long been directed toward “authority” and power. According to one view, an expert is responsible for offering an empirical foundation for policies that serve his or her own social and professional interests, albeit cloaked in universal rhetoric. This book focuses instead on the failure of experts to influence the political process of helping the poor at a major moment in postwar American history.13 After the war, the professionalization of the reform movement and the rise of powerful federal agencies paradoxically widened the gap between experts and society at large. This meant that experts’ strengths ultimately became their main weaknesses. Unlike what had happened in terms of social policy in the 1930s and 1940s, the idea of a direct link between citizens and the federal government through income distribution prevailed over a system of matching funds with the individual states. This tendency of the federal government to become isolated increased tensions. After the mid-1960s, this trend aggravated growing mistrust between citizens and institutions. In other words, this book also tells the story of the failure of governance that grew out of a division between professionals and citizens.14 In fact, the experts were unable to form a strong enough coalition to support income redistribution. Their inability illustrates how conflicting strands of postwar liberalism became particularly strong in the 1960s, ironically resulting in strengths being transformed once again into handicaps. Experts were to some extent prisoners of their own views of society, family, and minorities, that had evolved in the span of twenty years. While strongly advocating for broader access to welfare benefits, experts found it difficult to create an alliance with the welfare rights movement that developed later in the decade. The Poor People’s March in the spring of 1968, led by civil rights groups, demonstrated their failure to effectively communicate with the very people whom their research and policies were supposed to help. The crisis of “racial liberalism” exacerbated race- and gender-based tensions among liberals. George McGovern’s proposal in 1972 for a universal guaranteed minimum income, a proposal inspired by the poverty community, epitomized the experts’ incapacity to persuade Americans to back the experts’ empirically solid and well-conceived program. Simply put, the War on Poverty was ultimately a Pyrrhic victory.15 The defeat of McGovern’s initiative is an example of the “path dependency” process used by political scientists to explain institutional

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8 Introduc ti on limitations on the best-laid plans of policymakers. For the poverty community, the dependency phenomenon was twofold. First, they overestimated the central authority of the federal government, and second, they shared traditional views of the family and minorities that led them to frame issues in an involuntarily contradictory way. These two worldviews collapsed in the 1960s, contributing to insufficient support for the experts’ innovative proposals. While questioning the liberal consensus and enriching our understanding of postwar liberalism, this book also underscores the conflicting and even contradictory views that prevailed—and continue to prevail—among liberals.16 In examining the agency of key players in the poverty community, I have tried to address a methodological problem by situating individuals at the core of my narrative. Their publications, initiatives, and even names appear only as footnotes in the literature. Because they were relegated to the background during key moments in twentieth-century American history, the influence of these dedicated bureaucrats and scholars has been greatly underestimated. Many experts were successful in promoting activism and concerted action despite being small cogs in large, anonymous institutions. From a functional point of view, the federal government is too often characterized as a vast, cold, inhuman behemoth, particularly in the area of social policy. Scholarship on the Social Security system is an excellent example of this tendency. With some notable exceptions, most historians have tended to focus on institutions and congressional debates, neglecting the actual men and women who built up the Social Security program.17 One purpose of this book is to enliven the often-dry history of social expertise and policymaking. The men and women portrayed here were members of what the French sociologist Christian Topalov calls a “nebula”—an informal and often invisible community of reformers who were briefly able to attract policymakers’ attention. I have used a synchronic rather than a diachronic approach to describe the contours of such a community, particularly in the book’s early chapters. This is partly related to the fact that federal agencies, philanthropic foundations, and universities, and the researchers and experts themselves, were sometimes working toward a common purpose but in the absence of any formal connections, especially in the 1950s.18 To ensure that agencies and institutions did not overshadow the story’s true protagonists, the early chapters begin with detailed portraits of

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I n tr o d u ctio n 9 key figures from the expert community. This approach has allowed me to situate each of them within his or her social and professional context and, in turn, to give life to these forgotten players or “indecisive shadows,” as French historian George Duby has called women in the Middle Ages. Ironically, maintaining their institutional roles and low profiles enabled the experts, and their ambitious social engineering projects, to remain relatively independent. The book’s first section, “A Science of Poverty (1945–1963),” illustrates how the poverty “black box” successfully emerged despite low-level postwar distrust of the social sciences among politicians and the public. Poverty researchers focused on defining and quantifying the paradoxical persistence of grinding poverty during a period of unparalleled American prosperity in an effort to solve one of the country’s greatest social difficulties. The book’s second section, “From Science to War (1963–1974),” takes a more traditional narrative approach to describe how the president’s advisers appropriated the question of poverty and how experts’ proposals for eliminating poverty failed to survive the resulting public and ideological challenges. In the end, the experts, as well as their monumental, progressive, and well-conceived proposals, were blindsided by a public debate that they were able to avoid as long as they operated inside their respective institutional shadows. The second section also shows how experts proposed viable alternative plans for eliminating poverty when their initial proposals were blocked. After poverty took center stage in the explosive public debates that followed, experts scurried to create workable alternative solutions that would have a better chance of surviving the firestorm. Unfortunately, this second wave of frantic activity within the poverty community eventually produced internal divisions that became public.19 Poverty experts pushed their ideas for definitively eliminating poverty to their political and institutional limits. Although their efforts proved to be almost entirely futile, the poverty community nevertheless represents a singular achievement that deserves to be better understood. The historical record of mid-twentieth-century America was made brighter by this doomed but singularly well-intended proposal within an affluent society. This book contributes to our understanding of this period by tracing the unprecedented efforts of men and women who paved the way to the War on Poverty.

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WASTE Consuming Postwar Japan Eiko Maruko Siniawer

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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ITHACA AND LONDON

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Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of a subvention from Williams College that aided in the publication of this book. Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Siniawer, Eiko Maruko, author. Title: Waste : consuming postwar Japan / Eiko Maruko Siniawer. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018000104 (print) | LCCN 2018000993 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501725852 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501725869 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501725845 | ISBN 9781501725845 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Consumption (Economics)—Social aspects—Japan—History. | Waste minimization—Japan—History. | Refuse and refuse disposal—Social aspects—Japan—History. | Japan—Economic conditions—1945– | Japan—Social conditions—1945– Classification: LCC HC465.C6 (ebook) | LCC HC465.C6 S745 2018 (print) | DDC 363.72/80952—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000104

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Meaning and Value in the Everyday

Par t I R E-CIVILIZATION AND RE-ENLIGHTENMENT: TRANSITIONS OF THE EARLY POSTWAR PERIOD, 1945–1971 1.

The Imperatives of Waste 2. Better Living through Consumption

19 44

Par t II S HOCKS, SHIFTS, AND SAFEGUARDS: DEFENDING MIDDLE-CLASS LIFESTYLES, 1971–1981 3. 4.

Wars against Waste A Bright Stinginess

93 133

Par t III A BUNDANT DUALITIES: WEALTH AND ITS DISCONTENTS IN THE 1980 s AND BEYOND 5.

Consuming Desires Living the Good Life? 7. Battling the Time Thieves

161 193 209

Par t IV A FFLUENCE OF THE HEART: IDENTITIES AND VALUES IN THE SLOW-GROWTH ERA, 1991–PRESENT 8. 9.

Greening Consciousness We Are All Waste Conscious Now 10. Sorting Things Out

223 241 266

Afterword: Waste and Well-Being

295

Notes 307 Bibliography 355 Index 389

vii

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Introduction

MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY

A teenage girl stands in a train on her morning commute to school, her eyes fixed impassively on the smartphone in her hands. In front of her sit two passengers, asleep, catching whatever rest they can. This sense of fatigue and weariness follows her as she goes through the day, at one point standing alone in a stairwell with her face buried in her hands and at another gasping, “I can’t do this.” A teenage boy in his work uniform slumps back against the shelf of a convenience store stockroom, staring blankly in front of him at a long row of brightly lit refrigerators filled with an array of bottled and canned drinks. When the words of a co-worker nudge him to sit up, the distant expression on his face shows a hint of resignation. These two youths were the creation of an animated public service announcement which inscribed on the screen one word that encapsulated its message: “wasteful,” or in the original Japanese, mottainai.1 The ad, a high-quality production in the style of a movie trailer, promised nothing less than the potential of mottainai to transform melancholy about daily routines into contentedness with a life worth living. This theme was crafted jointly by the nonprofit Advertising Council Japan (AC Japan) and the national broadcaster NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation, or Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai), and was promoted through the television spot in the summer of 2015 and online for months thereafter.2 Its ultimately hopeful note was expressed through the arc of the visuals, as the early scenes of youth dejected with school, sports practice, and work gave way in the second half to a montage of more heartening moments like playing at the beach with a friend and taking time for contemplation. This optimism, subdued and restrained, was underscored by the wistful soundtrack 1

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2 INTRODUCTION

FIGURE 0.1. Public Service Announcement about Mottainai. An early scene from the AC Japan and NHK public service announcement about mottainai. From “AC Japan CM mottainai,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXODCN6rfTc.

of piano and strings, joined in the second half by the sparkling of chimes. The motifs of promise and renewed search for purpose were emphasized by the intentional focus on young people with so much of their lives ahead of them. And they were well suited to a time when Japan, tested and tried by a series of challenges, was setting its sights ahead on recovery and revitalization. That the torpor of the present could somehow give way to a better life was explicitly expressed in a line presented over the closing scene: “With mottainai, the future will change.” Mottainai here meant more than just being wasteful. This was not an explicit definition or pedantic enumeration of practices that should be considered a waste; it was not that the teenage girl’s absorption with her smartphone or the teenage boy’s part-time job was being labeled wasteful.3 Rather, what this take on mottainai urged was serious and purposeful reflection about what was wasteful in one’s day-to-day life. Throughout the spot, the voice-over listed in a steady cadence all that could be realized just by being attentive to this single word: you could be rescued and revived; become courageous, serious, introspective, and kind; rediscover yourself; figure things out; feel at ease; embrace aspirations; and start moving forward. What the announcement encouraged was consideration of the motivations, purposes, and desires of one’s daily life. It was the absence of such self-reflection, if anything, that rendered one’s time and energy wasteful. This was a public service announcement not about a discrete social problem but about the idea of waste—about deliberately figuring out what is wasteful so as to discover what is meaningful.

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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 3

This conception of wastefulness bore the marks of its time. In a long and shifting past reaching back many decades, waste had not always been understood this way. As we delve into the history of how waste and wastefulness have been thought about in Japan, from the immediate aftermath of devastating world war through the more recent past, we will see how malleable and capacious these ideas were and how deeply they were etched by the priorities and aspirations of their historical moment. What the announcement also illustrated so pointedly and elegantly was a fundamental quality of waste: its remarkable capacity to reveal what is valuable and meaningful. A historical examination of waste can thus be a story of people’s many and ever-changing concerns, yearnings, disappointments, and hopes. This history of waste is at its heart a history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday in postwar Japan.

Waste and Everyday Life To ask what has been considered waste and wasteful is to venture into various facets of day-to-day life, following the traces of people’s expressions about what they do and do not value. When attuned to waste, we find its presence in so many questions asked in the course of modern living. Should this tired sweater be thrown away? How should all my stuff be organized? Can these old leftovers in the fridge be eaten? Is it justifiable to spend money on the latest smartphone? Is it possible to be more efficient and productive at work? Can this evening be spent playing video games or hanging out at the neighborhood bar? The ubiquity of waste comes into focus when its conception is broad and inclusive of its many manifestations. Garbage, with all of its materiality, may be the most visible and tangible incarnation of waste. As many who study it have written, to categorize a thing as garbage, however mindlessly, is to implicitly reject it as valueless.4 Once the tattered shirt, used plastic wrap, or paper coffee cup is discarded, it joins on the rubbish heap all of the detritus cast aside as useless. The amount and composition of trash itself is a mirror of the society responsible for its creation, and discussions about what to do with garbage and how to handle the afterlives of stuff suggest much about people’s relationship to material things, what they want to own, how and what they choose to consume, and how they treat their possessions. But waste need not be thought of just as discarded matter; it can also be understood more expansively as anything, material or not, that can be used and disused. Electricity, food, money, and time can all be wasted. Indeed, there is a parallel between deeming something garbage and deeming anything a waste, be it

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4 INTRODUCTION

of energy or money or time. All are determinations of value. This wider conception of waste allows us to see a fuller swath of what might be considered wasteful. Rubbish, such as a broken refrigerator or outdated videocassette recorder, can tell us about the societal context in which the decision to discard was made, about opportunities for repair, attitudes toward disposability, or planned obsolescence. Other versions of this kind of judgment—to deem the use of a clothes dryer a waste of electricity or a lengthy meeting a waste of time—can further open the field of historical vision. They raise questions not just about clothes dryers or meetings but also about understandings of electricity and of time, household responsibilities and practices, and attitudes toward work. Thinking about waste writ large makes more evident the trade-offs in decisions about what to expend and what to save, like whether money and electricity should be spent on a washing machine to spare physical labor and time. Highlighted too is how a thing or action could be wasteful in more ways than one, how a television set could be a waste of money, electricity, space, and time. Time is a purposeful inclusion, even though it is distinct in some ways from its material counterparts. Time cannot be accumulated like money or things; it cannot be reused or recycled like resources; it cannot be discarded; and it is always, continuously, and necessarily being expended, whether deliberately or not. Yet time is similar to things, resources, and money in its finite character, and in the linguistic possibility of its being “used,” “saved,” and “wasted.” The categorical boundaries between waste of different sorts can also be porous, as time can be seen as a resource or converted into money. And it is interconnected with the material. Not depleting natural resources can extend time horizons, being efficient can translate into earning more money and buying more stuff, and throwing things away can mean mortgaging the future for the present. Precisely because the material is so bound up with modern, industrial, and capitalist notions of time, it should not be surprising that garbage, resources, money, and time have all been sites of anxiety about and hopes for daily life. Across the various kinds of waste, the question of value remains central. And these determinations of value are not fixed: no object, use, or expenditure is inherently and unequivocally a waste.5 To treat or describe something as a waste, be it pantyhose or buffets or long commutes, is to make a judgment or implication that is thoroughly subjective.6 Because these categorizations are not stable or universal, something thrown away as garbage could, by a different person or at a different time, be recharacterized and repurposed as valuable. The washing machine, the disposable diaper, beer in a can, or golf club membership could be seen as indispensable, innocuous, or superfluous. It is because these determinations of value have been made in and shaped by a particular context that

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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 5

examining what has been considered waste and wasteful can reveal the social and cultural concerns of that historical moment. In addition, explicit conversations about what should be regarded as a waste, how to distinguish between undesirable stinginess and desirable frugality, how to draw the line between necessity and excess, and what should be thought of as a luxury have also reflected historical misgivings and desires. It is these historical, subjective definitions of waste that I am trying to capture, so my concern is not with what I (or you) might find wasteful in postwar Japan. That would be a very different book. This story is about how various Japanese people at various times thought about the waste they saw and experienced in the world around them. Such ideas about waste were usually forged in and about the everyday, through the seemingly unremarkable regularity of the day-to-day that in postwar Japan as elsewhere was a principal domain of experience.7 It was often in and about the mundane that people expressed their attitudes toward waste as workers, consumers, household managers, community members, and citizens. Questions of waste were embedded in the small decisions of daily life—about what you might do with a spare ten minutes between meetings; whether you should try to get the last bit of lotion out from the bottom of the container; how much effort you should put into fixing the toaster before you throw it away; how hot you need to feel before turning on the air conditioner; and when to upgrade to the latest computer model. For some, these questions elicited opinions, reflections on one’s own behavior, and advice for curbing waste that were explicitly voiced. For others, it was their acts of the quotidian, intentional or not, that revealed how they wanted to spend their time, what they thought was worth purchasing, what material things they wanted around them, and what principles or causes they viewed as worthy of their dedication. What people needed and wanted was reflected in what they said about and what they did with their things, resources, money, and time. That people respond to larger existential questions in the everyday was incisively expressed by the sociologist Anthony Giddens, who argued that “the question, ‘How shall I live?’ has to be answered in day-to-day decisions about how to behave, what to wear and what to eat—and many other things.”8 Or put another way, the assumptions, habits, and decisions about waste and wastefulness were fundamentally about what people found meaningful and valuable in their daily lives. Given the centrality of the everyday to shifting constructions of waste and wastefulness, the various kinds of physical waste that did not intersect visibly and regularly with day-to-day life appear little in the pages that follow. Industrial and nuclear waste, for example, were not only categorized differently from household rubbish by professional managers of waste, but also were not terribly

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6 INTRODUCTION

relevant to understandings of waste, as pressing an issue as they were to certain people and communities. For most of the postwar period, their meanings were fairly consistent in popular imaginations as dangerous and undesirable substances that required containment. Human excrement also said little about the individual decisions of the day-to-day and, unlike with household garbage, its per capita volume neither changed significantly nor could be controlled much. The relatively straightforward challenge posed by the feces of increasing urban populations was one that could be addressed with the development of sewer systems. So it is touched upon only in the context of modernizing efforts around sanitation, health, and hygiene.9 That these kinds of refuse receive scant attention should indicate that this book is not centrally about physical waste. Issues of garbage, or municipal solid waste, will certainly be discussed at length because it was understood as a by-product of a mass-consuming society and of a culture of disposability, and as a barometer of economic growth, views of material things, attitudes toward the environment, and more. But there will not be a march through the history of various categories of waste, be it medical, chemical, radioactive, or otherwise. What is of interest is the idea of waste more than physical waste itself. To write a social and cultural history of waste requires creating one’s own eclectic archive of sources and drawing from them attitudes and sentiments about wastage. A wide range of materials about the everyday forms the basis of this volume, revealing how day-to-day life has been at the crux of different and shifting thoughts about waste and wastefulness. Some of these sources could be characterized as mass-market, popular, even lowbrow, be they television programs, newspapers, weeklies that border on the tabloid, women’s magazines, and so on. These kinds of materials are quite prominent in the pages that follow; they are usually named to make clear who was presenting certain ideas about waste. Ideals of waste consciousness have often been articulated in the form of advice, doled out in newspapers, magazines, and mass-market books, about topics ranging from time management to electricity conservation to decluttering. Such advice literature has presented conceptions of waste and wastefulness more than it has described actual acts of waste consciousness. Advice manuals and books are articulations of aspirations, consumed by those whose lived experiences can be quite distant from what is depicted in their pages. As observed by the historian Catriona Kelly, “the relationship of behaviour books to real-life behaviour is complex and oblique.”10 The connections between the constructed ideal and actual practice have thus been probed carefully and skeptically, with no assumption that the world of the reader mirrored the world of the advice literature.

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Fictional literature has served, depending on the work, as social commentary, an artifact marked by the economic and societal concerns of its time, or an articulation, sometimes fairly opaque, of an author’s views of waste. Whenever possible, information has been presented about how a work circulated and by whom it was read so as to situate it in the social and cultural landscape of its time. And, following Michel de Certeau’s urging, some attention is given to the ways in which ideas in texts were consumed and used.11 In fact, one chapter is dedicated entirely to the themes of, and responses to, a single work of fiction so as to examine the contours of discussions about waste and to explore how ideas could assume different shades of meaning in different hands. Fictional stories have also been told through various media, with some manga taking up the topic of waste. The translation of manga as “comic books” or even “graphic novels” does not adequately convey their scope, richness, or artistic and literary depth. Manga have been written in many genres, enjoyed a readership of all ages, and constituted a lucrative industry. They are approached here like other works of fiction, but with due attention to and analysis of their visual element. Children’s stories and books have offered clear, didactic lessons about how not to waste. Most that have taken up this topic are nonfiction, and their numbers and popularity have swelled in the 2000s. Such works have defined aspirational values for and attempted to shape the behavior of children, though their parents have been secondary targets. Because most of their attention has been focused on influencing the values and lifestyles of adult generations to come, they have been by their very nature oriented more toward the future than to the past or the present. The same could be said of junior high and high school textbooks that address issues of waste for a slightly older readership of teenagers. Typically assigned in home economics or sociology classes, these course materials explain how and why young people should think about waste. And these messages have had an official quality to them, presented as they were in textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education. The interests of the government have been patently apparent in its many large surveys that were dedicated to, or asked about, waste and everyday life. There were questionnaires about free time, daily life, resources, a culture of things, consumer issues, environmental problems, energy saving, and garbage. In addition to those conducted by the government, others were administered by citizens’ groups, corporations, marketing firms, and research associations about environmental consciousness, attitudes toward saving, time use, energy consumption, recycling habits, and garbage management.12 That there were surveys and survey questions about waste reflects the significance of the topic. Even more revealing

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8 INTRODUCTION

is the wording of questions and options for multiple-choice answers, which illustrates the extent to which the surveys were exercises in moral suasion, consciousness raising, and the dissemination of information. When it comes to the survey results, in some cases they indicate what respondents thought the appropriate answer might be, while in other cases they suggest how survey takers wanted to see themselves. Responses that flagrantly buck the slant of the question or contradict the initiatives of the group administering the survey give a possible hint into how actual attitudes and behaviors deviated from the ideal. From surveys to children’s books, advice literature to newspaper editorials, these varied and sundry materials forged the many meanings—the norms, aspirations, purposes, and practices—of waste in everyday life.

Waste Consciousness in Japan It may be tempting to assume at the outset that the history of attention to waste is unique to Japan, that there has existed a uniquely Japanese culture of frugality. Such a presumption would be understandable given American media stories and mass-market literature on efficiency in Japanese manufacturing, especially in the 1980s, when there was much fascination with the country’s successes in the automotive industry. More recently, there has been journalistic coverage of exacting systems for recycling that require residents to sort their trash into numerous categories, and popular enthusiasm for a decluttering method expertly promoted as being Japanese.13 Some of these examples of minimizing waste resonate, I suspect, with vague impressions of Zen and its association with clean aesthetics and simplicity. In scholarly circles, research on generally high rates of monetary saving relative to the United States has encouraged a focus on Japanese thrift.14 These characterizations have been perpetuated by various Japanese themselves who have suggested, with heightened enthusiasm since the early 2000s, that waste consciousness is a distinctively Japanese trait. Yet waste consciousness in postwar Japan was forged largely and primarily by the logics of phenomena—mass production, mass consumption, economic growth, affluence, material abundance, and environmentalism—that assumed certain forms but were not unique to Japan. The equation of waste management with modern civilization; the importance of productivity, efficiency, rationalization, and profit; and the indispensability of natural resources have been assumed and experienced globally and with shared intensity in the developed world. Ideas and practices like Taylorism, planned obsolescence, recycling, reuse, and decluttering have circulated widely, through and beyond national borders. Attention

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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 9

to waste in Japan was not singular, even if configured and expressed in particular ways. The simplistic notion of an inherent and enduring waste consciousness and frugality also collapses when we consider that there has been no such thing as a “Japanese conception of waste.” What becomes apparent when we think about waste more capaciously, when the focus is not solely on the shop floor or the Zen temple or monetary savings, is that different and often contradictory understandings of waste and wastefulness have existed in Japan at the same time. Furthermore, the postwar history of waste is one of change more than continuity. It is about how waste consciousness waxed and waned; how what was considered wasteful sometimes endured and sometimes shifted; how individuals, groups of people, and governments attempted to establish new norms and practices around waste for many and diverse reasons; and how waste assumed different meanings, be they practical, didactic, economic, psychological, moral, spiritual, or emotional. However complex and familiar, the history of waste in Japan also has its particularities. Certain kinds of waste were the object of especially acute attention. The disposal of material waste was one such issue of special concern, in part because of the country’s relatively small geographic area. Discussions of household garbage gained an urgency as space in landfills was depleted and the need to build incinerators intensified. Of relevance too has been the scant use of limited domestic natural energy resources, especially after the decline of the domestic coal industry and the demonstrated insufficiency of hydroelectricity in the 1950s. Over that decade and in the 1960s, reliance on foreign oil surged such that by the time of the global oil crisis in 1973, the country was the world’s largest petroleum importer.15 With comparatively little domestic coal, oil, and natural gas, and the oft-repeated mantra of Japan as a “resource-poor country,” a sense of insecurity informed experiences of shortages and emergencies, and calls to not waste resources and energy could be especially insistent. These two aspects of the physical landscape go some way toward explaining why concerns about the waste of material things, resources, and energy became so tightly interwoven at formative moments in the construction of waste consciousness.16 Who took up the mantle of promoting waste consciousness, and whose behavior was the target of waste awareness efforts, were informed by postwar Japanese understandings of gender roles. Gendered responsibilities and expectations often gave waste consciousness different meanings for women and men. The figure of the housewife loomed large when it came to the management of waste in the household. When advice was offered and entreaties were made about minimizing household waste, the targeted readership was typically

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10 INTRODUCTION

housewives. But the boundaries of who was considered a housewife were flexible. Forming the backbone of this category were full-time housewives, but they were rarely the sole intended audience for messages about waste, which tended to be quite inclusive and sought to establish widely accepted norms. To have addressed only full-time housewives would have been limiting because of their small numbers, especially in rural areas, in the 1950s. And in the entirety of the postwar period, the full-time housewife married to a salaryman was an idealized norm but never constituted, as actual lived experience, a majority among married women.17 The implied definition was thus usually broader, with “housewife” referring to a married woman who ran the home.18 It was the status of marriage, more than that of part-time or full-time employment, that defined a woman as a housewife. Expectations that a housewife run the household persisted even as the percentage of women in the workforce increased from the late 1970s onward. A wife continued to be considered, and to assume the role of, the primary manager of the home.19 Part and parcel of keeping the household humming along, it was usually wives who dealt with household waste in its various incarnations, be it the scheduling of time, household finances, garbage and recycling, or electricity use.20 This gendering of the household as a female responsibility was reinforced by the sheer volume of suggestions and expectations about waste management in one’s family, home, and nonworking life geared toward women. Additionally, the realm of the household often extended beyond the home to include the local community. The neighborhood or residents’ associations, consumer organizations, parent-teacher associations, and citizens’ groups that took up questions of waste usually consisted mainly of women.21 A good number of these organizations had connections to or had the ear of municipal government officials, and served as sites of citizen activism around issues of waste.22 Juxtaposed with the construction of the household as the domain of women was that of the workplace as the domain of men. When advice was offered and entreaties were made about minimizing waste in the workplace, the intended readership was typically male managers or white-collar workers, especially through the 1980s. Expectations of waste management for men assumed the predominance of work in their daily lives and tended to superimpose the goals of the workplace on the male worker. Office supplies were to be used thoroughly, electricity was to be conserved, and time was to be spent efficiently for the sake of the financial bottom line. Gender was thus salient in differentiating not just realms of waste consciousness but also the purposes of attention to waste. The centrality of the housewife, business manager, and white-collar worker in ideas about waste created normative conceptions of gender and waste

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consciousness that did not acknowledge diversity in lived experiences of the home or of work. The same could be said of the related construction of the middle class. Much of the discussion regarding waste and wastefulness, be it about work, leisure, or consumption, imagined a virtually universal and relatively homogeneous middle class. In some ways, this was not without basis. What could be called a middle-class life started to become a majority experience in the late 1950s as urban and suburban areas expanded, metropolitanism reached the countryside, employment in agriculture declined markedly, the number of nuclear families ticked up, and high school graduation rates rose.23 These developments helped reinforce the notion that almost everyone was part of a fairly undifferentiated middle class. Much has been made of the question, posed annually since 1958 by the Prime Minister’s Office in its survey of people’s lifestyles, about the social stratum in which respondents would place themselves. Roughly 90 percent of people have identified themselves with three of the five options, as being in the lower-middle, middle, or upper-middle class. This consistent result has fed the presumption that there has existed a large chūryū, usually translated as “middle class,” though it could mean something more like “mainstream.” As the anthropologist William Kelly has argued, this image of the middle class or mainstream has elided socioeconomic difference and “does not refer to a class category but to a category that works to transcend class.”24 It also does not posit the existence of a lower or working class against which the middle is defined.25 Even with increasing concern in the 2000s about Japan becoming an “unequal society” or “society of disparities” (kakusa shakai), self-identification with the middle has persisted such that worries about societal and economic gaps might be interpreted as those of and about the middle class.26 Discussions about waste and wastefulness for much of the postwar period have been predicated on this vision of Japan as a middle-class society and have perpetuated this assumption through the definition of practices, values, and aspirations of a middle-class life. Most people who concerned themselves with waste did so as middle-class women and men, appealing to an audience of the same. Those outside the imagined mainstream and those on the socioeconomic margins have made few appearances in the construction of waste and wastefulness and thus also in this book. This relative absence is certainly not to suggest that socioeconomic disparities have been historically unimportant, nor is it intended to perpetuate their erasure. It speaks instead to how tightly ideas about waste and wastefulness were interwoven with middle-class hopes and expectations, such that it would be only a slight exaggeration to contend that waste consciousness was constitutive of middle-classness in postwar Japan.

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12 INTRODUCTION

A History of Postwar Japan This book is at once a history of waste and a history of postwar Japan. By the very definition of its chronological scope, it makes a case for thinking about the entirety of postwar Japan as one coherent and cohesive period. This is not to downplay the premodern history of concerns about waste, consumption, and luxury. Nor is it to diminish the importance of prewar precursors for many postwar approaches to waste and wastefulness. Continuities and persistence in what some historians have come to call “transwar Japan” are acknowledged, and historical debts to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are given their due.27 But the postwar period is now longer than the one that stretched from the Meiji Restoration to the outbreak of the Pacific War. And it can be distinguished not just by the longevity of conservative political rule and an international position at once weighty and subordinate, but also by a level of affluence that was previously unimaginable and a society of mass consumption that was virtually inescapable, both of which are so central to a history of waste.28 Historians of Japan have not yet offered many narratives of the postwar as a whole, especially apart from some notable edited volumes, even after the groundbreaking call in the early 1990s to treat “postwar Japan as history.”29 Only by examining the entirety of this period might we have more productive debates about its persistent challenges, moments of fracture, and defining qualities. As one step in this direction, this book offers a history of the long postwar with its enduring continuities, relentless struggles, and pronounced shifts. In the years after war’s end, in the late 1940s and 1950s, the country embarked on a project of re-civilization and re-enlightenment, the postwar version of modernizing efforts past. Language familiar from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about health, hygiene, efficiency, and rationalization was used to urge waste consciousness in the workplace and the home. And waste was to be managed not only to tackle the challenges of survival just after the war, but also to make Japan civilized and modern once again. When economic recovery shifted gears into rapid growth in the latter half of the 1950s and the 1960s, societal and cultural adjustments were profound but not sudden or smooth in these years of transition into an era of unremitting mass consumption. In the late 1950s, as the financial and material exigencies of the immediate postwar began to ease, there was both discomfort and excitement about a burgeoning society of consumers. Different attitudes toward wastefulness took shape as people considered what was acceptable to purchase, which consumer desires were appropriate, and how tightly to embrace a more convenient and more comfortable life.

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The achievements and changes spurred by high growth were brought into immediate question in the early 1970s, a sharp pivot point in the postwar period which sparked ambivalence about affluence, reflection about national goals, and diversification of individual values and commitments. Concerns about waste became acute as worries about garbage and resources inspired responses to the costs and consequences of mass production, mass consumption, and preoccupation with gross national product. With questions about whether the country had overextended itself, waste came to be equated not with civilizational backwardness but with excess. At the same time, the desirability of a middle-class life had become so deeply fixed that its conveniences and comforts were not to be sacrificed but defended. The prospect of scrimping or going without came to be considered anathema to the better lives that people had come to expect. Consciousness of waste was thus both to change priorities and practices and to preserve the hard-won gains and pleasures of daily life. The 1980s, often excised from a longer history as an aberration because of the singularity of the bubble economy, should rather be treated as inextricable from the tapestry of the postwar. The need for the defensive posture of the previous decade did ebb, waste consciousness was muted, and what in years not so long past would have been considered luxuries became normalized as markers of the middle class. At the same time, the 1980s stoked not just exuberance but also dissatisfaction and unfulfilled desires. Questions were asked about what life should be about in a Japan of financial and material plenty, about the place of both things and time in a better life. Sometimes coupled with these reflections, waste consciousness came to be conceived in new terms of psychological, spiritual, and emotional satisfaction. The convention of characterizing all of the years from the early 1990s onward as “lost” is intellectually inadequate, given the languorous shift into economic malaise over the course of the 1990s and the distinctive notes of optimism in the 2000s. As societal architecture was strained to reveal and create precarity of various kinds, there was a pervading and disorienting sense of retrogression and loss.30 Yet moored by the endurance of relative affluence and mass consumption, there gradually opened a space for more expansive and variegated hopes for individual and societal futures. A more global environmentalism took firmer hold, and the broader conception of waste and meaning that had emerged in a previous time of economic confidence carried over into subsequent decades of economic malaise. In the 2000s, a broad definition of mottainai captured imaginations, supplementing more prosaic terms that meant waste or wasteful. The word mottainai, with its alleged Buddhist origins, became an umbrella term for waste of many different kinds, and came to appear with greater regularity than

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14 INTRODUCTION

rōhi (which implied a criticism of extravagance and had declined in use since the early postwar decades) and as frequently as muda (which connoted uselessness and was a conventional way to express wastefulness). At the same time, challenges to the purported virtue of mottainai began to appear as people reconceived their attachments to material things and their very sense of self. In twenty-first-century Japan, the idea of waste expanded to encompass environmental commitments, a search for individual and national identities, and attempts to define anew relationships with things and with time in continued pursuit of an affluence of the heart, mind, and spirit (kokoro no yutakasa). This constructive and forward-looking orientation should expose the laziness of continuing to extend with each passing year the chronological reach of the so-called “lost decades.” In time, we may come to better understand millennial Japan in terms of its various attempts at redefinition and at finding itself anew in a world of stagnant affluence. Bringing this history as far up to the present as possible is intended to illustrate the persistence of postwar Japan as a historical phenomenon and an analytical apparatus, but there are real challenges with writing such a contemporary history. It is not clear what the implications and impacts of the disasters of March 2011 will be, and how they will fit into the narrative arc of millennial Japan. Without the benefit of hindsight, it is not evident whether something like the new minimalism will prove to be a quickly passing trend or a phenomenon with lasting influence. That politicians and scholars have repeatedly declared the postwar over has indicated instead that there has been no unequivocal point of closure, and it is hard to tell a story with no apparent end. History keeps unfolding, sometimes in ways that contradict what was written not long ago.31 But I would suggest that histories, perhaps especially of the modern, never really end and that hindsight can erase the important contingencies and ephemera of the past. In the case of postwar Japan, we cannot artificially truncate the period and claim its end because we continue to live in the postwar; there has been no resolution to the complicated legacies of war, defeat, and occupation; and there has not been a catastrophic experience on the scale of another world war to mark unambiguously the period’s conclusion. Nor can we wait until the period seems somehow over before we attempt to understand the larger stories of postwar Japan. At this present moment, many people—not unlike the fictional teenagers in the public service announcement about mottainai—are grappling with how to live in, and make sense of, a postwar Japan built on the pillars of economic growth, financial affluence, and mass consumption.32 This has been a struggle familiar in some form since the late 1950s and a defining characteristic of these many decades. Even as people came to marvel at the astonishing availability of

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products to consume and new amusements to pursue, they considered the disappointments, challenges, and unfulfilled promises of economic growth. Even as the country’s wealth reached levels unrivaled by most in the world, there were ways in which it was seen to have fallen short in the ways people lived and in their sense of security and fulfillment. Desires to achieve and defend the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence have existed right alongside discomfort and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension has long endured in postwar Japan, as utterly inconceivable as it would have been to people in late 1945, who could imagine little beyond the exigencies of daily life in the aftermath of war.

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GOOD GOVERNANCE GONE BAD How Nordic Adaptability Leads to Excess Darius Ornston

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Nordic Paradox

Good Governance Gone Bad: Overshooting in Nordic Europe

Manufacturing a Crisis: Planning in Sweden

Connecting People: Innovation in Finland

4. From

Banking on Fish to Fishy Banks: Liberalization in Iceland

101

Overshooting in Comparative Perspective: Contrasting Cases

141

Overshooting beyond Nordic Europe: Ireland and Estonia

160

Conclusion: Lessons for Large States

180

Appendix 1: Measuring Cohesive, Encompassing Networks Appendix 2: Characterizing Economic Adjustment Notes References Index

203 211 215 227 253

vii

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Introduction

THE NORDIC PARADOX

The Nordic states have attracted attention for their capacity to adopt best practice in a wide variety of policy domains. The Economist recently labeled the region a “supermodel” (Economist 2013), as organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the OECD have singled out Nordic achievements in labor-market policy, education, and innovation policy, among others (Dahlman, Routti, and Ylä-Anttila 2006a; OECD 2010; Zhou 2007). Partly as a result of these reforms, Nordic countries have seized leadership in a diverse array of dynamic knowledge-intensive industries including biotechnology, financial services, software, and telecommunications equipment. Rapid innovation has, in turn, contributed to robust economic growth and low unemployment, with the result that these economies are routinely ranked among the most “competitive” in the world by organizations such as Institute for Management Development and the World Economic Forum. Although illuminating, these laudatory accounts often overlook the region’s inconsistent and troubled economic history. Contemporary high-technology leaders such as Finland and Sweden were heavily dependent on low- and mediumtechnology industries such as metal-processing and papermaking in the early postwar period. Policy makers and business leaders were slow to adapt to new challenges in the 1970s, and the decision to double down on established strategies led to unsustainable fiscal and trade deficits by the 1980s. By the end of the century, the diminutive Nordic region had generated three of the “big five” postwar banking crises (Rogoff and Reinhart 2009, 160). The Nordic countries responded 1

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2 INTRODUCTION

effectively to those shocks, but they continue to exhibit similar vulnerabilities. Sweden fueled one of the largest ICT bubbles in Western Europe in the late 1990s, Denmark created an American-style housing bubble in the mid-2000s, and Finland proved exceptionally susceptible to a single technological innovation, the iPhone, in 2007. Not to be outdone, Iceland managed to establish a new standard for economic mismanagement by inflating bank assets from 100 percent to 800 percent of GDP between 2000 and 2007. These crises are even more perplexing because they cannot be attributed to “crony capitalism,” rent-seeking, or the other ills that commonly plague crisisprone countries. On the contrary, the Nordic countries routinely rank among the most trusting and least corrupt societies in the world (Rothstein and Stolle 2003, 11; Transparency International 2010), with a capacity to deliver high-quality collective goods from education to infrastructure. Naturally, international openness increases their exposure to disruptive economic shocks, and the downturns described above can, to some extent, be attributed to “bad luck” (Schwartz and Becker 2005b, 17). But this book demonstrates that these crises were also shaped by poor policy choices, sharply at odds with the conventional image of the Nordic region. How do we explain this Nordic paradox? Why are the Nordic states so successful economically?1 And why do these paragons of good governance make such terrible policy choices and poor investment decisions? In short, how can we reconcile these two, contradictory images of Nordic capitalism? Nordic economic success is a puzzle in its own right. Often treated collectively, the Nordic countries have thrived in very different ways. Some countries, such as Iceland, have prospered under state intervention. Others, such as Denmark, have favored more market-oriented arrangements. Sweden successfully incorporated organized labor within a generous welfare state, whereas Finland flourished for decades by repressing it. Partly as a result of this, the Nordic countries have excelled in very different industries. Iceland and Norway continue to rely heavily on low-technology, resource-based industries such as fishing and oil, while Finland and Sweden have assumed leadership in radically innovative hightechnology markets and knowledge-intensive services. In fact, the same countries have prospered with fundamentally different institutions and industries, as evidenced by Finland’s evolution from a heavily regulated, labor-repressive, resource-extractive economy into a more equitable, but highly competitive, hightechnology leader (see chapter 3). The most common explanations for Nordic success, focusing on the state, labor, or industry, fail to capture the region’s diversity. The most popular narrative among economists focuses on the benefits of robust market competition, attributing Nordic success to high levels of foreign trade and investment (Economist 2013). Without denying that the Nordic countries have benefited from

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THE NORDIC PARADOX 3

economic openness, it is important to recognize that they also boast some of the largest public sectors in the world. Even more importantly, some Nordic countries, such as Finland and Iceland, thrived for decades under relatively closed economic regimes, with heavily regulated product and financial markets.2 An alternative approach views the public sector as an asset and emphasizes the benefits of universal social policies. Broad-based investments in collective goods such as childcare and continuing education represent a valuable resource for entrepreneurial individuals and the firms that employ them (Kristensen 2011, 221).3 This statist explanation, however, also falters when situated in comparative and historical perspective. As this book relates, iconic welfare states such as Sweden ranked among the most laissez-faire societies in Western Europe before World War II. Theories that privilege social democratic ideology or working-class “power resources” are problematic for similar reasons.4 Finnish political and industrial elites marginalized organized labor until the 1960s and they continued to prioritize industry-friendly instruments such as subsidies for research and development (R&D) over more social democratic measures such as continuing education into the twenty-first century (Ornston 2012a, 694–98). Social democracy played an even more peripheral role in Iceland, where the conservative Independence Party played a near-hegemonic role in Icelandic politics. More recent scholarship has shifted attention away from the size and power of working-class organizations such as trade unions to the organizational capacity of employers (Hall and Soskice 2001, 15). Coordination, where production is influenced by long-term nonmarket relationships among firms and other actors, enables countries to invest in sophisticated collective goods from specialized equipment to vocational training and high-quality standards (Hall and Soskice 2001, 39). The Nordic experience, however, challenges the “Varieties of Capitalism” literature in two ways. First, the literature is insensitive to the diverse ways Nordic firms coordinate economic activity.5 Second, the Varieties of Capitalism framework argues that coordinated market economies compete by gradually upgrading established, century-old industries such as automobiles or machine tools. This works well for Central European states such as Austria and Switzerland (see chapter 5), but it offers little insight into the sharp institutional and economic shifts that characterize Nordic economic history (Ornston 2013, 705). The literature on small states offers an alternative way to understand Nordic success (Katzenstein 1985). Instead of emphasizing the state, organized labor, or employers, this work focuses on the relationship among them. More specifically, geographic proximity and geopolitical vulnerability lead to a high level of interconnectedness and support national cooperation (Campbell and Hall 2017, 6). As I relate in chapter 5, this is not true of all small states. In the Nordic region,

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4 INTRODUCTION

however, late industrialization, external threats, and a common ethnic, linguistic, and religious heritage have led these societies to develop particularly cohesive and encompassing networks.6 Relationships are cohesive in the sense that they are characterized by a high level of trust; they are encompassing in the sense that they transcend regional, political, socioeconomic, and sectoral cleavages (see appendix 1).7 The literature on small states (Bodley 2013), and on political economy more broadly (Ostrom 1990; Putnam 1993), suggests that these cooperative relationships improve economic performance by enabling governments and privatesector actors to invest in collective goods. Widely distributed networks permit policy makers to access high-quality expertise from across society as well as local information from ordinary citizens. The threat of exclusion from dense networks raises the cost of free riding, shirking, and other opportunistic behaviors, which are easier to identify with a relatively small number of actors (Jalan 1982). Finally, the ability to coordinate across multiple policy domains and actors enables these societies to produce complex, sophisticated collective goods ranging from ambitious innovation policies to comprehensive, green infrastructure. These social structures are particularly effective when subject to market competition. In the Nordic countries, international openness acts as a safeguard against economic mismanagement (Andersen et al. 2007, 17). In this book, I argue that this work on small states provides a more compelling explanation for Nordic economic success than theories that focus exclusively on markets, the state, trade unions, or employers. Even as the settings, instruments, and even objectives of public policy and corporate strategy have varied, cohesive and encompassing social networks have remained a defining feature of Nordic economic governance for over a century. These dense relationships have enabled public and private actors to invest in a variety of high-quality public goods, supporting fundamentally different growth regimes. After relying on natural resources to industrialize, the Nordic countries thrived during the era of Fordist-style, large-scale manufacturing, using statist instruments to compete in a variety of heavy industries. In the late twentieth century they again adapted public policy and corporate strategy, liberalizing their economies and redefining themselves as leaders in high-technology manufacturing. When those markets were transformed by disruptive technological innovations and low-cost competitors, they reinvented themselves anew, entering knowledge-intensive services.8 At the same time, this book exposes two shortcomings in the literature on small states. First, even as scholars consistently emphasize flexible adaptation, the transformative capacity of these tight-knit relationships is often understated. Perhaps because cooperation is generally conceptualized as an incremental force in political economy (Hall and Soskice 2001, 39), scholars of small states

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THE NORDIC PARADOX 5

commonly emphasize incremental upmarket movement within established, stable niches (Katzenstein 1985, 79; Kristensen and Levinsen 1983). This work accurately reflects Central European economies such as Austria and Switzerland, but it does not capture the pace and scope of change articulated above.9 The Nordic countries have adapted to disruptive economic shocks by fundamentally restructuring their economies, shifting from natural resources to heavy industry, and then from Fordist-style manufacturing to rapid technological innovation and sophisticated services. I argue that the Nordic countries can do so, because the information-gathering, consensus-building, and coordinating capacities described above are more dynamic than we recognize. Scholars have historically focused on “welfare capitalism,” in part because of their interest in cross-class relations (Katzenstein 1985, 48–53; Thorhallsson 2010, 380). But tight-knit networks can also support investments in innovation or, even more counterintuitively, radical market-oriented reform. Meanwhile, cross-regional and cross-sectoral ties facilitate the diffusion of new business models within the private sector. Far from delaying the pace of restructuring, these cohesive social structures can accelerate it. This more dynamic vision of cooperation illuminates a second limitation. Because cooperation is widely perceived to delay the pace of reform and restructuring, scholars focus on the risk of political paralysis and economic stagnation (Grabher 1993, 260–64). In Nordic Europe, and elsewhere, this danger is addressed by subjecting communities to market competition (Andersen et al. 2007, 17). I argue, however, that cohesive, encompassing relationships can lead to too much change. Widely distributed networks expose policy makers to bad ideas as well as good ones. Even more importantly, the ability to coordinate public and private sector activity can lead societies to scale the best ideas to dangerous and unsustainable heights. In short, the Nordic countries, and tight-knit communities more generally, are vulnerable to policy overshooting and overinvestment. Unfortunately, international markets, the most popular solution to political paralysis, are less effective in diagnosing these problems, particularly during good times. As a result, I argue that cohesive, encompassing social networks lead to a distinctive pattern of adjustment in Nordic Europe. While international markets eventually identify flawed institutions or misallocated resources, this often occurs after the Nordic countries have scaled new ideas to dangerous extremes. Consensus building and coordination enable these societies to respond quickly and effectively to the resulting economic crisis. These societies use dense, widely distributed networks to thoroughly overhaul their policies and fundamentally transform their economies, all within the span of a decade. But with few checks against the misallocation of resources as the economy booms, the Nordic

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6 INTRODUCTION

countries are vulnerable to a new round of overshooting and overinvestment. The result is an admirable but volatile pattern of economic adjustment. The same forces that facilitate rapid reforms and restructuring generate new excesses in a recurring pattern of overcorrection. These findings have important consequences for how we understand and conduct economic policy in small and large states alike. First, the book contributes to the growing recognition that size is an important variable (Campbell and Hall 2009; Katzenstein 1985) and, perhaps more importantly, that state size is socially constructed (Brown and Purcell 2005, 607; Kuokstis 2015, 114). The literature on international relations often defines small states by objective criteria such as population, gross domestic product, or economic openness, and there are advantages to doing so. The case studies in this book, however, suggest that comparably sized countries have responded to similar structural conditions in very different ways. The Nordic countries developed collective responses to capital scarcity and geopolitical vulnerability, whereas similar challenges divided their Southern European counterparts (see chapter 5). The effects of constrained geopolitical space are not uniform. Second, closer attention to cohesive and encompassing social networks demystifies the much-discussed “Nordic model.” By examining different Nordic countries across several different time periods, I suggest that economic growth cannot be attributed to a specific ideology or policy. Instead, I argue that the Nordic region is defined by widely distributed, high-trust social networks, which have enabled these countries to invest in a variety of high-quality collective goods. By isolating the politics of interconnectedness, I suggest how other countries can learn from and copy Nordic strategies. The lessons are most obvious for small countries such as Estonia and Ireland with dense, informal networks (chapter 6), but even large countries can replicate Nordic success by leveraging tight-knit interpersonal networks at the local level (conclusion). Third, I challenge the widespread perception in business, economic sociology, geography, political science, and innovation studies that dense, high-trust networks delay reform and restructuring (Grabher 1993, 260–64; Hall and Soskice 2001, 65; Hommen and Edquist 2008, 477; Katzenstein 1985, 47). I argue that cohesive, encompassing networks can also lead to paradigmatic institutional shifts, from competition to coordination, investment to innovation, and statism to liberalism. These comprehensive reforms have enabled the Nordic countries to develop fundamentally new products, services, and industries within a remarkably short period of time. In other words, nonliberal economies are considerably more dynamic than we recognize, and policy makers seeking to accelerate restructuring may benefit from considering the politics of cooperation as well as the politics of (market) competition.

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THE NORDIC PARADOX 7

At the same time, I seek to counterbalance the celebratory literature on small states and the Nordic countries in particular. To date, this work has been overwhelmingly positive, highlighting their flexibility, pragmatism, and superior policymaking capacity (Bodley 2013; Campbell and Hall 2009; Pekkarinen, Pohjola, and Rowthorn 1992). To the extent that the literature identifies problems, it often focuses on their vulnerability to larger, more powerful actors or external forces (Thorhallsson 2010, 384). By contrast, I argue that many of the crises these societies experience are also self-generated. The same cohesive, encompassing networks that underpin good governance also lead to policy errors and terrible investment decisions. It is important for policy makers to acknowledge this risk, as international markets provide few checks against policy overshooting and overinvestment during good times. Finally, this focus on cohesive, encompassing social networks has important implications for how we understand good governance in all societies. The Nordic countries illuminate a novel problem with the cooperative relationships celebrated in literatures on economic coordination (Hall and Soskice 2001), network-building (Ansell 2000), social capital (Putnam 1993), and associative democracy (Rogers and Cohen 1995). Commonly believed to delay change, dense social networks can accelerate the diffusion of bad ideas and lead communities to scale good ideas to dangerous, unsustainable heights. The Nordic countries represent an important counterpoint to the common argument that more cooperation would help larger countries navigate contemporary problems, from financial regulation (Rosenthal, Poole, and McCarty 2013) to “grand challenges” (Deak and Peredy 2015). The Nordic countries also highlight the very real risk of policy overshooting and overinvestment in tight-knit local communities within large societies. In short, overshooting is not just a Nordic problem. I develop this argument in six steps. In chapter 1 I resolve the “Nordic paradox” by turning to the literature on small states. I begin with the unusually cohesive and encompassing social networks that characterize the Nordic states and explain how this social structure supports effective policy making and successful economic adjustment. More specifically, I discuss how dense, high-trust relationships facilitate reform and restructuring through three mechanisms: the politics of persuasion, the politics of compensation, and the politics of coordination. At the same time, these dynamic forces increase the region’s vulnerability to policy overshooting, overinvestment, and economic crises. For additional information on the measurement of cohesive, encompassing networks and economic volatility, I refer the reader to two appendices at the end of the volume. In chapter 2 I begin the empirical section of the book with the Swedish case. This case study performs two roles. As the largest and most pluralist of the three Nordic countries in this book, Sweden functions as a contrasting case. Readers

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8 INTRODUCTION

looking for a more extreme example of reform, restructuring, and overshooting should skip ahead to Finland or, better yet, Iceland. Relative to most other countries, however, Sweden is a cohesive, tight-knit society and the industrial policies of the early postwar period reflect this. Beginning in the 1930s, policy makers across the world turned to credit rationing, state aid, and planning. This volte-face away from free markets was particularly pronounced in Sweden, which could rely on tight-knit networks to implement and scale new ideas through the politics of persuasion, compensation, and coordination. In many respects, Sweden eclipsed even France, the paradigmatic statist economy, both in its capacity to reform public policy as well as its ability to foster the growth of large, capitalintensive manufacturing enterprises. At the same time, state intervention proved increasingly dysfunctional over time, generating unsustainable trade and fiscal deficits and a deep economic crisis. In chapter 3 I turn to Finland, a smaller and more tight-knit society that relied even more heavily on state intervention and low-technology industry in the early postwar period and experienced an even deeper crisis by the early 1990s. To advance the argument, this chapter focuses instead on the emergence of innovation policy and new digital technologies in the late twentieth century. Finland was among the most aggressive and successful countries in the world in converting traditional industrial policies into new innovation policies. I identify the specific ways in which policy makers used tight-knit networks to fundamentally restructure Finnish economic institutions. Together with entrepreneurial private-sector actors, namely Nokia, they transformed Finland from one of the lowest technology economies in the OECD into one of the most researchintensive societies in the world. At the same time, I reveal that Finland relied so heavily on technological innovation that it increased its vulnerability to adverse economic shocks, most notably the invention of the iPhone. In chapter 4 I examine Iceland. Characterized by exceptionally tight-knit informal networks, it developed the most extreme form of statism of these three cases. Although slower than Finland or Sweden to embrace new innovation policies, this is mainly because its policy makers reacted to the failure of statism in a very different way. Iceland instead prioritized liberalization and deregulation, suggesting that policy overshooting and overinvestment is not simply a story about state intervention. On the contrary, Icelandic policy makers used formal and informal networks to liberalize their economy even more rapidly and radically than neoliberal icons such as Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. Institutional reform spurred movement into new industries, such as financial services, partly because of the policy innovations described above and partly because of the speed with which new ideas diffused within dense interpersonal networks in the private sector. At the same time, public- and private-sector actors were slow

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THE NORDIC PARADOX 9

to recognize the ensuing financial bubble, and Iceland suffered the largest banking economic crisis in human history, eclipsing not only financial powerhouses such as the United Kingdom and the United States but also the Swedish and Finnish banking crises of the early 1990s. The book gains analytic leverage by comparing relatively fragmented Nordic societies (Sweden) to tight-knit ones (Iceland), but in chapter 5 I increase the range of the independent variables by examining several small, open societies without cohesive, encompassing networks. Austria and Switzerland have developed a consensual approach to economic adjustment that enables them to resolve basic collective action problems, but these federal, sectorally coordinated societies are also marked by more salient regional, linguistic, and industrial cleavages. These divisions have created a pronounced status quo bias, favoring the gradual modernization of established niches rather than Nordic-style reform and restructuring. In addition to eliminating alternative explanations for Nordic volatility such as economic openness, the Austrian and Swiss cases suggest that countries can prosper without Nordic levels of social cohesion. The Greek and Portuguese cases, however, reveal that excessive fragmentation can also pose a problem. Although small and ethnically homogeneous, these societies are far more polarized than their Nordic or Central European counterparts and have struggled to resolve even the most basic collective action problems such as industrial peace and macroeconomic stability. As a result, these countries experienced recurring economic crises, albeit for very different reasons from those of their Nordic counterparts. Here, the issue has not been too much reform and restructuring but too little. The formidable barriers to cooperation in Southern Europe raise the question whether any country can learn from Nordic Europe. To this end, chapter 6 identifies two non-Nordic societies with cohesive and encompassing networks. I begin with Ireland, a liberal market economy characterized by exceptionally strong informal relationships between public- and private-sector actors. Ireland clearly varies from Nordic Europe in its heavy reliance on foreign direct investment, but I identify a strikingly similar series of abrupt policy reversals and dramatic boom-bust cycles. I then turn to Estonia, where tight-knit relationships among Estonian speakers supported comprehensive reform and restructuring. In addition to outpacing its Central and East European peers in liberalization and deregulation, dense, widely distributed ties also facilitated the exceptionally rapid digitalization of Estonian society. In doing so, they also increased the country’s vulnerability to external shocks, including the 2007–2009 credit crunch and the emerging threat of cyberwarfare. I conclude by examining the lessons for large countries. At first glance, large states such as France, Germany, and the United States appear very different from

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10 INTRODUCTION

their Nordic counterparts. Although these societies have evolved over time, I demonstrate that reform and restructuring has proceeded at a slower pace, overshooting has been less pronounced, and economic volatility has been lower. At the same time, I suggest that even fragmented, polarized countries may resemble the Nordic region at a local level, where individuals are more likely to know and trust one another. Examining the politics of economic adjustment in San Diego, California, and Waterloo, Ontario, I illustrate how local communities can use the politics of interconnectedness to accelerate restructuring, as well as the risks associated with this.

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DARK PASTS Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan Jennifer M. Dixon

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CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS I THACA AND LONDON

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Contents

List of Acronyms Acknowledgments Introduction: Coming to Terms with Dark Pasts?

vii ix 1

1. Changing the State’s Story

2. The Armenian Genocide and Its Aftermath

3. From Silencing to Mythmaking (1950–early 1990s)

4. Playing Hardball (1994–2008)

5. The Nanjing Massacre and the Second Sino-Japanese War

6. “History Issues” in the Postwar Period (1952–1989)

107

7. Unfreezing the Question of History (1990–2008)

129

Conclusion: The Politics of Dark Pasts

162

Appendix 1. Research Conducted Appendix 2. Turkish High School History Textbooks Analyzed Notes References Index

173 177 179 209 000

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Introduction

COMING TO TERMS WITH DARK PASTS?

April 24, 2015, marked the passage of one hundred years since the start of the Armenian Genocide. The centenary was a solemn date of commemoration for Armenians around the world. It was also a focal point for activism and protest against Turkey’s continued denial of the genocide. As the anniversary approached, pressures on Turkey to recognize the genocide ratcheted up, while countries such as the United States and Germany faced pressures to officially recognize the genocide. At the same time, Turkish officials sought to minimize criticisms of the state’s narrative of the “Armenian question” (Ermeni sorunu), taking a number of steps to try to tamp down international criticism.1 A key example of such efforts came a year before the centenary, on the ninety-ninth anniversary of the genocide, when then prime minister (PM) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a statement about the “events of 1915” that was praised as “unprecedented” and “conciliatory” for its expression of “condolences” (taziyeler) to the grandchildren of “the Armenians who lost their lives in the context of the early twentieth c entury.”2 When the hundredth anniversary arrived a year later, however, the limits of Erdoğan’s apparent conciliation w ere revealed. While PM Ahmet Davutoğlu echoed Erdoğan’s wording from a year earlier and offered “deep condolences” to the descendants of “the innocent Ottoman Armenians who lost their lives,” statements by now president Erdoğan and other officials conveyed a very different impression.3 Erdoğan declared: “It is out of the question for t here to be a stain or a shadow called genocide on Turkey.”4 Similarly, the Turkish Foreign Ministry condemned a European Parliament resolution acknowledging the genocide,

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2 INTRODUCTION

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calling it a mistaken repetition of “the anti-Turkish clichés of the Armenian propaganda.”5 T hese statements signaled continuity—rather than meaningful change— in Turkey’s official narrative, which has consistently rejected the label “genocide” and denied official responsibility for the decimation of the Ottoman Armenian community. Turkey is far from the only country to wrestle with a dark past.6 Twenty years earlier, Japan faced a similarly momentous anniversary and a similar constellation of pressures for greater contrition. As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II (WWII) approached, calls escalated within and outside Japan for an official apology and compensation for its WWII-era crimes, including the Nanjing Massacre and the military’s sex slave program (the so-called comfort women program). In the wake of more than a decade of diplomatic tensions and crises over “history issues,” and facing a growing transnational redress movement, Japanese leaders decided that the anniversary would be a good time to deepen official contrition by having the Diet issue an official apology for Japan’s aggression and crimes in WWII.7 Intended as a groundbreaking apology, the resultant resolution turned out to be neither groundbreaking nor an apology. Conservative politicians and nationalist interest groups successfully mobilized against the planned apology, with the result that the resolution the Diet passed constituted no change—and in some sense a reversal—in the content of the state’s narrative. The resolution expressed “deep remorse” but pointedly did not offer an apology. Moreover, the resolution relativized Japan’s war crimes by situating them within the context of other countries’ “colonial rule and acts.”8 Furthermore, as the journalist Wakamiya Yoshibumi notes, by using the phrase “acts of aggression,” rather than the unqualified term “aggression” that had been used by PM Morihiro Hosokawa in 1993, the resolution “was clearly a step backward.”9 Consequently, instead of “settling” the issue, both the ambivalence of the resolution and the right-wing opposition that effected this outcome deepened international dissatisfaction with Japan’s position. Of course, many states have dark pasts, ranging from the violence and expropriation of slavery and colonialism to more contemporary abuses and atrocities. Although such wrongs might have been elided or rationalized in the past, expectations have changed in the past c ouple of decades. This shift is due to the ascendance of h uman rights and the strengthening of norms of l egal accountability and truth-seeking in the post-WWII period.10 With the advent of the “age of apology,” states, political and social organizations, and corporations have been pressured by victims and o thers to apologize and pay reparations for past atrocities and wrongs ranging from the Holocaust to slavery and colonialism.11 In addition, states emerging from conflict and transitioning to democracy are now expected to take steps to bring the truth to light and mete out justice.12

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Coming to Terms with Dark Pasts?

In response, some states with dark pasts have looked into and apologized for past crimes. For example, in 2008 the Australian PM Kevin Rudd offered an official apology to indigenous Australians for their “past mistreatment” and “for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss” on families, communities, and p eoples.13 However, many other states have continued to silence, deny, rationalize, and relativize dark pasts. These trends underscore the complexities and difficulties of truth-seeking and truth-telling. In particular, they raise questions about the persistence of contention over and the difficulty of “coming to terms” with past wrongs: What is it about dark pasts that makes it so hard for states to come to terms with them? Given the apparent challenges of reckoning with the past, what are the sources of continuity in states’ narratives of dark pasts, and when and why do states choose to change such narratives? Or put differently, what are the determinants of—and obstacles to—such change?14

Narratives of Dark Pasts in Turkey and Japan To understand when and why states change official narratives of dark pasts, this book compares and analyzes the trajectories over the past sixty years of Turkey’s narrative of the Armenian Genocide and Japan’s narrative of the Nanjing Massacre and the Second Sino-Japanese War.15 The Armenian Genocide took place in the Ottoman Empire during World War I (WWI) and was organized by the leaders of the governing Committee of Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti). In the genocide, an estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians were killed, Armenians’ property was systematically expropriated, and tens of thousands of Armenian women and c hildren were abducted and forcibly incorporated into Muslim households.16 In this process, the Armenian community that had lived for centuries in Anatolia was destroyed, declining from about 20 percent of the total population in the late nineteenth century to approximately 5 percent in 1923.17 In addition, traces of Armenians’ existence and culture were erased or destroyed. The Nanjing Massacre, which occurred within the context of the Second Sino- Japanese War, began in December 1937, when the Japanese army invaded the Chinese city of Nanjing. During and a fter the capture of the city, Japanese soldiers massacred an estimated one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand Chinese civilians and prisoners of war (POWs).18 The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought on the Chinese mainland between the armies of Imperial Japan and

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4 INTRODUCTION

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the Republic of China. The war unofficially began on 18 September 1931, became official in July 1937, and ended with Japan’s unconditional surrender in August 1945. During this fifteen-year period, tens of millions of Chinese people died; many Chinese POWs were executed; tens of thousands of (and possibly as many as two hundred thousand) Chinese w omen w ere raped by Japanese soldiers; approximately forty thousand Chinese p eople were forced into slave labor, during which about seven thousand died; and Japanese biological and chemical warfare programs killed an estimated one hundred thousand Chinese civilians.19 Over the course of the past several decades, Japan’s narrative has come to acknowledge the Nanjing Massacre and to include statements of regret and apology. In contrast, the extent of change in Turkey’s narrative has been much more limited. Over this period, its narrative has moved from silence and denial to relativizing, mythmaking, and a limited degree of acknowledgment. Meanwhile, Turkish officials have continued to reject official wrongdoing in and responsibility for the genocide, and have developed new rationalizations for and defenses of the Ottoman government’s actions. What accounts for this divergence in the two narratives’ trajectories, in spite of broad similarities in regime type, allies, and normative structures? At the same time, there has been a significant degree of continuity in both narratives. Notwithstanding the greater degree of change in Japan’s narrative, central themes in each narrative have remained unchanged. While both narratives have come to encompass a greater degree of acknowledgment over time, both continue to relativize key aspects of t hese dark pasts. Given these continuities, these narratives represent “hard” cases for analyzing the sources of change in states’ narratives or memories of past wrongs. Extrapolating from these two cases, I argue that international pressures increase the likelihood of change in official narratives of dark pasts, while domestic considerations determine the content of such change. International pressures— which include calls for a state to apologize, demands for a state to change its repre sentation of an event, and actions that bring attention to alternative narratives of an event—can challenge the legitimacy of a narrative and alter the cost-benefit calculus underlying it. In so doing, they can prompt officials to consider changing the state’s narrative. International pressures are only part of the picture. W hether and when change occurs, and what it looks like, are also shaped by domestic political considerations. In particular, whether and how officials respond to international pressures are contingent on four f actors: (1) material concerns, (2) legitimacy and identity concerns, (3) electoral-political concerns, and (4) domestic contestation. First, change in the direction of greater acknowledgment and contrition is less likely when the perceived extent and likelihood of material costs (e.g., reparations, restitution,

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Coming to Terms with Dark Pasts?

territory) of greater acknowledgment and contrition are high. If officials fear that greater acknowledgment or deeper contrition might lead to the loss of territory or to the payment of reparations, they w ill be reluctant to take such steps. The more important and extensive the territory at stake, and the higher the feared reparations, the more reluctant officials will be to express greater acknowledgment or contrition. Second, change in the direction of greater acknowledgment and contrition is less likely the greater the extent to which a narrative is connected with sources of legitimacy or identity for the state, its institutions, or its officials. If a narrative is central to a nation’s founding narrative or forms the basis of state institutions’ legitimacy, officials w ill be likely to resist change. Third, change in the direction of greater acknowledgment and contrition is less likely when political support for the state, regime, or political actors could be threatened or undermined by such action. If key electoral constituencies or political allies are strong supporters of the state’s story, then officials are unlikely to be willing to change the narrative, b ecause they will not want to threaten sources of political support. Finally, change in the direction of greater acknowledgment and contrition is less likely when domestic contestation is trending t oward calls for less acknowledgment and contrition. If activists are pushing for maintenance of the status quo, or for less acknowledgment and contrition, then officials are unlikely to deepen official acknowledgment and contrition. Together, these four factors shape w hether and how government officials change a state’s narrative at a given juncture. At the core, therefore, patterns of change and continuity in states’ narratives of dark pasts are the result of complex and contingent interactions between international and domestic political forces. While international pressures—especially sustained pressures from powerful states and allies—are likelier than other f actors to prompt change in a state’s narrative, they are insufficient for understanding the content and extent of change. In moments when change is considered, the domestic considerations outlined above shape officials’ decision making about whether and how to change the state’s narrative. For example, while the frequency and escalating costs of international pressures, especially diplomatic protests by China and Korea, have led Japanese officials to consider changing Japan’s narrative at several junctures, electoral and material considerations, along with the push and pull of domestic contestation, have repeatedly shaped whether and how officials and politicians have changed the state’s narrative. And although a series of terrorist attacks on Turkish diplomats and the beginnings of international recognition of the Armenian Genocide—both in the 1970s—led Turkish officials to break the state’s silence on the “Armenian question,” when and how they did were shaped by concerns about territorial claims, threats to domestic legitimacy, and domestic constraints on academic and popular discussion of the issue.

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6 INTRODUCTION

This argument also accounts for continuities in states’ narratives. Continuity is more likely if international pressures for greater acknowledgment and contrition are scant, sporadic, or from weak sources. Moreover, when officials consider changing the state’s narrative, domestic considerations can operate as important constraints on change. The stronger, more salient, and more numerous the domestic considerations enumerated above, the more likely officials are to resist pressures to change the state’s narrative and the more likely the state’s narrative is to exhibit continuity. For example, Turkish officials have long feared that genocide survivors, or the representatives or descendants of Armenian victims or survivors, could advance territorial and compensation claims against government agencies, businesses, and properties in Turkey. This concern has been a key constraint on Turkish officials’ willingness to acknowledge the genocidal nature of or officials’ responsibility for the historic violence against Ottoman Armenians. Additional sources of change and continuity can arise over time as states’ narratives are contested, defended, and updated. As a result of feedback effects— processes of “increasing returns” and “path dependence” that “can trigger a self-reinforcing dynamic”—the production of an official narrative, and especially change in a narrative, can set in motion actors and dynamics that influence the narrative and decisions related to it at later points in time.20 For example, efforts by nationalists to limit contrition and acknowledgment can inspire others to take action to push for greater contrition and acknowledgment, which can generate new pressures for change. Alternatively, official efforts to defend the state’s position can mobilize actors who become invested in the status quo. With time, such defenders of the official narrative can constrain officials who might be considering change. In sum, accounting for when and why states change—or do not change— official narratives of dark pasts necessitates an understanding of the effects and limits of international pressures on states’ narratives, and the ways in which such pressures are refracted through the prism of domestic politics.

The Stakes

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Understanding when and why states change narratives of dark pasts is important because of the broader consequences for domestic politics and international relations. At the domestic level, narratives of past events—particularly narratives of glorious victories and ignominious defeats—are often used to construct and reinforce national communities.21 Such narratives help constitute citizenship and belonging, delineate the boundaries of public discourse, and influence the quality

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Coming to Terms with Dark Pasts?

of democracy.22 At the same time, narratives of past conflict and violence can establish or harden boundaries between groups, which can lead to persecution and repression, and can create grievances that contribute to the development of unrest or rebellion. Narratives of past conflicts and atrocities can also be used and manipulated for diverse ends, including stirring up nationalist sentiment and justifying aggression and war.23 At the extreme, narratives of past violence can exacerbate tensions and prejudices that can contribute to future conflict and violence.24 Internationally, narratives of past atrocities and conflicts can influence states’ foreign policies, affect political and economic relations, and increase threat perceptions between states.25 In Turkey, the state’s narrative of the “Armenian question” has facilitated the securitization of important aspects of domestic politics and has contributed to the exclusion and alienation of Turkey’s dwindling Armenian community, justifying ongoing discrimination, expropriation, and violence.26 The impunity at the core of the state’s narrative has facilitated the power and lack of accountability of the “deep state,” undermined the rule of law, and stymied the quality of democracy.27 Turkey’s narrative has also been a complicating factor in its European Union (EU) membership candidacy, and has adversely affected its relationships with key allies. For example, each time the US Congress has considered resolutions calling on Turkey to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, Turkish officials’ negative reactions have strained bilateral relations. In addition, Turkey’s denial of the genocide has bedeviled relations with the neighboring Republic of Armenia since the latter’s independence in 1991. In Japan, contestation over the state’s narrative has reinforced domestic po litical divides, fueled right-wing nationalism and violence, and complicated other political questions, such as the debates over constitutional revision. Japan’s narrative has also negatively affected relations with its neighbors. Between 2001 and 2006, PM Koizumi Junichirō’s repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which w ere perceived as symbolically whitewashing Japan’s war crimes, reinforced Asian countries’ lack of support for Japan’s formal bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Signaling this, in April 2005 China announced that it would “not endorse Tokyo’s UN ambitions efforts [sic] until it ‘clarifies some historic issues.’ ”28 Shortly thereafter, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao warned: “Only a country that respects history and wins over the trust of peoples in Asia and the world at large can take greater responsibilities in the world community.”29 In addition, Chinese officials refused to hold bilateral meetings for Koizumi’s last few years in office. Japan’s narrative has also had economic costs. For example, many Chinese consumers boycotted Japanese products in response to a 2005 Japanese Ministry of Education decision that was perceived to gloss over Japan’s WWII crimes, including the Nanjing Massacre.

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8 INTRODUCTION

Looking beyond these two cases, many other countries have dark pasts that stain the present. In the United States, the destruction and expropriation of Native Americans and the violence, disenfranchisement, and expropriation of slavery constitute foundational violence on which current aspects of US identity rest.30 As a result, narratives of slavery and its aftermath, and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, shape policies and outcomes in areas including education, civil rights, criminal justice, housing, and health care. In Rwanda, to mention a particularly striking case, narratives and myths of past violence contributed to the occurrence of the 1994 genocide.31 And in the post-genocide period, Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame “justifies his stifling of debate, and the suppression of opponents, as a necessary evil in a country where the freedom to whip up ethnic hatred has taken so heavy a toll.”32 Moreover, the state’s narrow and relatively simplified narrative of the genocide—which focuses on Tutsi victims and Hutu perpetrators—silences and alienates those whose experiences and suffering in the genocide do not fit these categories.33 Finally, narratives of past violence have been central to the perpetuation of mistrust and the repetition of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in the conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa.34 Given the importance of t hese issues for conflict and violence, citizenship and democracy, and domestic and international politics, t here are compelling reasons to investigate states’ narratives of dark pasts.

Structure, Agency, and Contingency in the Politics of Memory

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In examining the sources of change and continuity in states’ narratives of dark pasts, this book builds on and contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on transitional justice, the politics of memory, and international norms. Existing work in these fields has tended to focus on collective rather than official memory, on memories as instantiated in particular sites (such as museums or memorials) rather than in overarching narratives, and on the effects rather than the c auses of memory. In contrast, this book focuses on official memories—or narratives— as a whole, and flips the analytical lens to explore the factors that shape and reinforce such narratives. Moreover, whereas existing work has emphasized the effects of structural f actors on collective and official memories, and the role of agents who contest and challenge official memories, this book highlights interactions between structures and agents in shaping states’ narratives. Memory scholars have predominantly focused on the politics and content of societies’ collective memories, and on sites and forms of memory such as

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memorials, textbooks, museums, and apologies.35 Official memory as a w hole has been less well studied. In the field of international relations, scholars have investigated the effects of memory on political outcomes, investigating, for example, the effects of memory on foreign policy, threat perception, reconciliation, and conflict.36 While this work has demonstrated the importance of official memories and narratives for various outcomes, we do not have as good of a grasp of the politics that shape such memories in the first place. This project thus addresses the prior question of what accounts for patterns of change and continuity in official memories.37 Transitional justice scholarship has also tended to overlook this question, instead exploring normative and empirical questions related to the pursuit of truth and justice in transitions from authoritarianism and conflict.38 In particul ar, transitional justice scholarship differs in three key ways from this book’s approach. First, transitional justice typically refers to the period of a country’s transition to democracy or emergence from civil conflict.39 In contrast, this book employs a broader time frame, analyzing Turkey’s and Japan’s narratives far beyond their initial formulation in periods of transition. Second, transitional justice institutions and processes can contribute to the initial establishment of narratives of authoritarian and violent pasts.40 In contrast, this analysis traces patterns of change and continuity in official narratives following their initial formulation, thereby capturing the politics that affect narratives’ trajectories over time. Third, as Leebaw argues, transitional justice scholars and advocates have emphasized the “depoliticized” nature of transitional justice institutions and practices.41 In contrast, I focus explicitly on the politics by which states’ narratives are s haped and contested. Notwithstanding these differences, these literatures offer insights into factors that influence states’ narratives. In particular, existing arguments attend to impor tant aspects of structure and agency in the politics of memory, but they do not pay sufficient attention to the contingent and interactive processes by which states’ narratives are produced, contested, and defended. Transitional justice and memory scholars emphasize structural determinants of collective and official remembrance, while norms scholars explore the structural effects of norms on states’ practices. Importantly, structural factors can help maintain continuities in an official narrative by creating and reinforcing power asymmetries and by designating certain perspectives and issues as out of bounds or taboo. Conversely, structural and institutional changes—such as the emergence of new states, changes in the relative balance of power, regime change, or the coming to power of a new party or leader—can lead to shifts in a state’s narrative. However, whether change occurs in a state’s narrative and what form it takes cannot be predicted from structural factors alone.

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10 INTRODUCTION

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Transitional justice scholars emphasize that understandings of past wrongs can shift via formal processes of truth-and justice-seeking that are adopted in the wake of regime change. However, regime change provides an indeterminate answer to the questions of when and why states change narratives of dark pasts. Trials, truth commissions, and other mechanisms of truth-and justice-seeking can have ambivalent effects, including “promoting denial and forgetting,” as Loyle and Davenport argue.42 Moreover, countries can adopt diverse policies in the name of truth and justice, for example, lustration or individual criminal trials, which typically have distinct effects. In addition, trials, truth commissions, and other steps are likely to constitute only the beginning of processes of reckoning with the past.43 Another structural argument is that generational change can lead to shifts in understandings of past wrongs.44 However, even if the passage of time does lead to change in a state’s narrative, it does not answer the questions of when change might occur, what prompts change, or how a narrative changes. Moreover, contrary to conventional wisdom, time does not “heal” all wounds or take the bitterness out of past wrongs. This is illustrated with the “irruption” of memories of civil war and dictatorship in Spain, more than three decades after the “Pact of Forgetting” (Pacto del Olvido).45 Scholarship on international norms also emphasizes the importance of structure. Defined as “collective expectations for the proper behavior of actors with a given identity,” norms are a fundamental part of the structure of power, ideas, and interests that states face in the international system.46 As “collective expectations” and “standards of appropriateness,” international norms help constitute identities and influence the practices of state and nonstate actors.47 Over the course of the post-WWII period, the growing attention to memory politics has heightened scrutiny of states’ narratives of past atrocities and increased the perceived values of “recognition,” “truth,” and “reconciliation.”48 While this trend has impacted the practices of an increasing number of states, it has not had a consistent or direct impact on all states. Turning from structure to agency, both memory scholars and norms scholars have investigated agency in relation to the politics of memory. Memory scholars have shown how domestic public debate, bottom-up social mobilization, and “memory activism” can lead to changes in public and official understandings of historical wrongs.49 Somewhat in contrast, this book focuses on official agents of memory and on interactions between official and societal, and domestic and international actors. Like memory scholars, norms scholars have long emphasized the agency of nonstate actors, such as norm entrepreneurs and activists, particularly in pro cesses of norm emergence and diffusion.50 By contrast, “norm takers”—typically,

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Coming to Terms with Dark Pasts?

states—have been treated as relatively passive subjects who commit to and comply with norms or are punished for violating norms. However, work on norm localization, translation, and resistance has begun to catalog alternative forms of agency. For instance, “norm takers” can alter a norm’s content to make it better fit a local context and can employ a variety of strategies to avoid or lessen the costs of noncompliance and violation.51 This book joins this vein of scholarship, exploring the ways in which norms structure expectations and actions related to the politics of memory, as well as the varied ways in which official and societal actors draw on and respond to normative expectations. More generally, I look beyond the limits of a structural or agential perspective to analyze interactions between structures and agents. Tracing changes and continuities in the content of each narrative over time, I identify the actors that produce and contest each narrative, the processes through which change occurs, and the mechanisms that reinforce continuities in each narrative.52 In so doing, I highlight the agency of state actors in relation to international pressures and structures of meaning, the agency of societal actors in relation to official discourse, and the limits of both forms of agency.53 I also unpack the range and complexities of responses to international norms, tracing the diverse ways actors have used and responded to collective expectations related to genocide, human rights, legal accountability, and truth-seeking.54 Finally, by focusing on interactions between domestic and international politics, I reveal how domestic politics functions as a filter that shapes the ways in which states’ narratives change—or do not change—over time.55 Finally, the analysis yields several insights into the nature of change in states’ narratives. First, states’ narratives are prone t oward continuity and inertia. When change does occur, it is typically incremental and often involves layering, whereby new themes are added onto existing ones. This stems from the fact that, as official and societal actors become committed to a narrative, and as actors and institutions become involved in its production, support for the narrative becomes more entrenched.56 As a result, it becomes more difficult—and riskier—to make a change that fundamentally breaks with the existing narrative. Second, change is often multifaceted and sometimes ambivalent. For example, increasing international recognition of the Armenian Genocide was the main catalyst for changes in the content of Turkey’s official narrative in 2001. Yet, while the narrative shifted to acknowledge some basic facts about the genocide, Turkish officials simultaneously took steps to more effectively defend core elements of the state’s narrative. Consequently, movement in the direction of acknowledgment was accompanied by the continued—and arguably strengthened—rejection of the label “genocide.”

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12 INTRODUCTION

Plan of the Book

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The argument outlined above is developed and substantiated over the course of the following chapters. To construct the trajectories of the Turkish and Japanese narratives over the past sixty years, I analyzed a range of primary and secondary sources and conducted more than eight months of fieldwork, including over seventy-five semistructured elite interviews, in Turkey and Japan.57 Triangulating a variety of evidence drawn from interviews, government documents, news accounts, and other primary and secondary sources, I trace the motivations and processes through which change occurs and continuities are reinforced. Chapter 1 presents the conceptual framework developed to assess the content of and changes in each narrative, explains the logic of case selection, and lays out the argument in greater detail. The conceptual framework consists of eight steps, ranging from silencing to commemorating, each of which captures a possible ele ment of an official narrative. In the chapters that follow, this framework is used to identify periods of continuity and points of change in the two narratives’ trajectories. The remainder of the chapter discusses the logic underlying the comparison of Turkey’s and Japan’s narratives, and explains the international pressures and domestic considerations that shape patterns of change and continuity in these narratives. Chapters 2 through 7 analyze the trajectories of Turkey’s and Japan’s narratives. The first three chapters cover the Turkish case, and the latter three cover the Japanese case. Each set of chapters is similarly structured. The first of the three case chapters introduces the case, reviewing the history of the event and discussing the f actors that s haped the initial formulation of the state’s narrative. The chapter then outlines the trajectory of the official narrative over time, and discusses how the book’s argument accounts for the pattern of change and continuity therein. The latter two chapters in each set analyze the trajectory of the state’s narrative over the course of nearly sixty years. Changes in the two narratives are analyzed in relation to the basic historical understanding outlined in the first empirical chapter, as well as in relation to the content of the narrative at earlier points in time. The chapters are organized chronologically to illuminate relationships between actors and developments over time. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on Turkey’s narrative. Following Chapter 2’s introduction of the case, Chapter 3 analyzes the content of, and changes and continuities in, Turkey’s narrative over the period from 1950 to the early 1990s. In this period, the state’s narrative shifted from silencing and denying the genocide to an actively defended position that relativized the violence and presented an alternative account of what had happened. This shift, which began in 1981, also

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involved substantial continuity, particularly in the denial of official responsibility for the deaths of Armenians. This chapter documents the international pressures that prompted these changes and the domestic considerations that shaped their timing and content. Chapter 4 analyzes Turkey’s narrative over the period from 1994 to 2008. Beginning in the mid-1990s, subtle changes emerged in the tone and substance of the narrative. Overall, however, despite major structural changes at the international level—including the establishment of an Armenian state—and the beginnings of domestic challenges to the official narrative, the content of the narrative was remarkably stable, highlighting the persistence of significant domestic constraints. Beginning in 2001, the narrative shifted more substantially, coming to include a limited acknowledgment of Armenians’ deaths and suffering, while rationalizing these facts and continuing to reject the label “genocide.” These changes were made primarily in response to increased international recognition of the genocide, and also reflected the broadening of domestic challenges to and questioning of the official narrative. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 focus on Japan’s narrative. Following Chapter 5’s introduction of the case, Chapter 6 analyzes Japan’s narrative over the period from 1952 to 1989. In this period, the state’s narrative shifted from a broad silence and lack of acknowledgment, to an acknowledgment of the event and the harm suffered, to a vague expression of regret and admissions of responsibility that were accompanied by undercurrents of relativizing and mythmaking. These changes arose from the normalization of relations between Japan and China, pressures from China and other former victim states, and progressive domestic activism. Continuities in the narrative were driven by domestic and international structural factors, attempts by Japanese leaders to move out of the shadow of the past, and conservative activism. Chapter 7 analyzes Japan’s narrative between 1990 and 2008. In this period, the state’s narrative shifted to include admissions of responsibility and apologies, and then backtracked to resume mythmaking and rela hese shifts w ere made in response to tivizing (while continuing to apologize). T pressures from China and South Korea, and amid major changes in the international and domestic structures that supported the state’s narrative. That said, domestic political considerations frequently shaped both the content and extent of changes in the state’s narrative. The concluding chapter reviews the book’s argument and discusses how it accounts for the different degrees of change over time in Turkey’s and Japan’s narratives. Having separately analyzed the two narratives in the preceding chapters, the first part of the chapter focuses on a comparison of the overall trajectories of the two narratives. The latter half of the chapter highlights key findings regarding the effects of and responses to international norms, and closes with a discussion of the broader implications of this research.

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Politics under the Influence Vodka and Public Policy in Putin’s Russia

Anna L. Bailey

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bailey, Anna L., author. Title: Politics under the influence : vodka and public policy in Putin’s Russia / Anna L. Bailey. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017048070 (print) | LCCN 2017052221 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501724381 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501724398 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501724374 | ISBN 9781501724374 (cloth; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501724404 (pbk.; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Alcoholism—Government policy—Russia (Federation) | Drinking of alcoholic beverages—Political aspects—Russia (Federation) | Alcoholic beverage industry—Government policy—Russia (Federation) | Vodka industry—Government policy—Russia (Federation) | Russia (Federation)—Social conditions—21st century. | Russia (Federation)— Politics and government—21st century. Classification: LCC HV5513 (ebook) | LCC HV5513 .B35 2018 (print) | DDC 362.292/5610947— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048070

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: The Contradictions of Alcohol Policy

1. Feeding the State: Vodka from Tsarism to Communism

2. Soviet Policy Doublethink

3. The Parasites Feed: State Capture under Yeltsin

4. Regaining State Control u nder Putin

5. The Judo Gang: Informal Networks and Perceptions of Power

6. An All-Powerful Regulator

7. Beer: The New Pretender on the Russian Alcohol Market

8. The Brewers’ Nemesis in the Duma

v i Contents

9. “Vodka Is Our Enemy, but Who Said W e’re Afraid of Enemies?” 100 10. From Illegality to Demography: Alcohol Policy Paradigms

116

11. The New Antialcohol Network

131

12. Medvedev and the Antialcohol Initiative

147

13. Alcohol Policy as Battleground: The 2011 Alcohol Law

158

14. The Campaign Is Over, but the Battle Continues

173

Conclusion: What Alcohol Tells Us about Russian Politics

179

Appendix 1: Methodology and Research Methods

187

Appendix 2: List of Respondents and Statements in the Public Domain 191 Appendix 3: List of Interview Questions

199

Notes 205 Bibliography 233 Index 243

Introduction The Contradictions of Alcohol Policy

“You know just how serious a problem alcoholism has become for our country. Frankly speaking, it has taken on the proportions of a national disaster.”1 So declared Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in 2009, prior to launching a new government initiative to lower alcohol consumption. The media quickly labeled the new policy direction an “antialcohol campaign,” drawing parallels with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s notorious dry law in the final years of the USSR. Alcoholic beverage producers braced themselves for new restrictions on one of the world’s most lucrative alcohol markets. It seemed natural that Russia should have an antialcohol campaign. The old superpower was experiencing a demographic crisis: a falling population and male life expectancy at just sixty-three years. One of the country’s leading narcologists estimated that 26 percent of all deaths (30 percent of male and 17 percent of female deaths) w ere associated with alcohol.2 Case studies by Western academics had produced similarly horrifying figures. Forty- three p ercent of deaths in men aged twenty-five to fifty-four years in the typical Russian city of Izhevsk were found to be due to “hazardous drinking.”3

2 Introduction

Another highly publicized study found that, over the period 1990–2001, 59 percent of all male deaths and 33 percent of all female deaths in the age group fifteen to fifty-four years were attributable to alcohol.4 It was logical that the Russian authorities would wish to take action to preserve the population and reduce excessive alcohol consumption. Or was it? At this point, history presents us with a problem. If the new antialcohol policy direction was a direct response to excessive consumption, why did it begin only in 2009 rather than ten or fifteen years earlier, when consumption was even higher? Digging a little deeper, we can begin to question some of the assumptions underlying this naive view of policy formation, according to which governments act to remedy self-evident problems in society. Why should we assume that a government has a vested interest in halting population decline or, indeed, that governments always act in the best interests of their people? Who decides which states of affairs constitute prob lems and how best to tackle them? What if the various actors within government are themselves divided on which policy direction to take? Political science provides the tools to analyze these complex factors shaping the realities of policy formation. This book combines insights from policy studies, comparative politics, and sociology to provide a more nuanced account of the directions that alcohol policy has taken in post-Soviet Russia. In doing so, it reveals the complex web of interests, attitudes, and influence shaping policy formation u nder the Putin regime.

The Complexities of Policy Formation The idea that tougher policies on alcohol were a straightforward result of the Russian authorities’ desire to tackle a population-level health crisis rests on a rather naive view of policy formation. In reality, policymaking is much more complex, combative, and haphazard than such a simplistic model would allow for. Public policy is formed through the competitive interaction of all those with an interest in that policy. A useful way to model this process is provided by the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) of policy formation. The ACF represents the competitive interaction of policy actors as forming a “policy sub-system.”5 Actors that share similar beliefs and policy preferences form “advocacy coalitions,” which compete within the policy subsystem to try to get their preferred policy enacted.6

Introduction 3

Rather than consensus on policy within the state, we should actually expect disagreement. This is because the state is not a single, unified actor but made up of individual departmental bureaucracies that, by definition, have narrow sectoral interests (for example, finance, law and order, health). Dif ferent departments and agencies compete with one another to pursue policies that promote their own interests and departmental ideologies7 and to protect their policy territory or turf from encroachment by other bureaucratic departments.8 Governments and bureaucrats are thus neither neutral arbiters of other actors’ policy preferences nor benevolent guardians seeking to promote an agreed-upon national interest, but are actively pursuing interests and preferences of their own.9 Numerous examples of this phenomenon are presented throughout the book. For example, the antialcohol campaign of the Gorbachev era was undermined by departmental interests within the state. The current federal alcohol regulator, Rosalkogolregulirovaniye, is a law unto itself, and has been accused of acting to skew the market in favor of certain business interests. A major 2011 law on alcohol was subject to such interdepartmental wrangling that it took nearly two years to enact, as individual ministries fought bitterly to ensure their preferred policy stances w ere the ones adopted. The competitive wrangling of advocacy coalitions—including bureaucratic departments—is just one reason why high alcohol consumption does not automatically lead to a policy response. Another factor is how exactly that consumption is problematized. Social problems are not objective phenomena but rather are ways of thinking about and understanding certain real-world conditions.10 The same state of affairs can be viewed and interpreted in many different ways. Even the ways in which Western academic and medical communities have problematized alcohol have changed over time, from a focus on alcoholism as a disease in the immediate postwar de cades to a public health concern with average per capita consumption that emerged from the 1970s onward.11 Thus, viewing high alcohol consumption as a demographic threat is only one of many possible interpretations of that phenomenon. Indeed, public health is still a relatively new and developing field in Russia compared with Western countries—a legacy of its neglect by the Soviet regime.12 As chapters 1 and 2 show, alcohol consumption was problematized in various ways throughout the Soviet period, including as a challenge to state power, a public order problem, and a threat to economic productivity—but public health concerns w ere notably absent. Unsurprisingly, this legacy continued to shape alcohol policy in the post-Soviet era.

4 Introduction

Policy responses to perceived problems are also shaped by the fact that policy space is limited. That is to say, a potentially infinite number of circumstances could be characterized as problems in need of state action, but decision makers have the time and resources to consider only a small proportion of them.13 Thus, as a very minimum precondition for state action on alcohol consumption, that consumption would need to be interpreted as a priority problem area by an influential policy actor. As chapter 10 shows, this was not the case in post-Soviet Russia u ntil at least the mid-2000s, partly because the transition from communism was bedeviled by a succession of acute political and economic crises.

The Ambivalence of Alcohol So far we have considered the policymaking process in general. But alcohol as a product has one fundamental attribute that affects the development of policy regulating it: the ambivalence of its effects. That is to say, alcohol consumption has both positive and negative consequences, and this results in mixed attitudes t oward it among both the general public and policymakers. This uncertainty is reflected in indecisive, uncohesive, and sometimes contradictory state policies. The ambivalence of alcohol starts at the level of the individual. It is well documented that alcohol consumption can contribute to a range of health conditions, including cancers, cardiovascular conditions, liver cirrhosis, and diabetes.14 But the balance of scientific evidence suggests that total abstention results in worse health outcomes than moderate consumption. There is a “well-established finding in the medical literature” that moderate drinking reduces the risk of coronary heart disease, and from middle age extends overall life expectancy.15 Alcohol can act not only as a relaxant but also as a depressant and has been implicated in suicides.16 At a societal level, drinking is linked with numerous aspects of communal well-being, including sociability, in-group identification, social rituals, celebration, relaxation, and the enjoyment of food.17 However, it is also associated with violence, crime, and other forms of antisocial behavior.18 This ambivalence of alcohol is reflected in public opinion toward drinking: the Russian opinion polls analyzed in chapter 9 reveal hugely contradictory attitudes toward it. Drinking is seen as a problem, yet robust measures to

Introduction 5

tackle it are unpopular. It would seem that p eople can neither live with alcohol nor live without it. That alcohol consumption reaches into many areas of life means that issues related to alcohol are handled by a range of departments and levels of government, even when they are not explicitly recognized as alcohol issues.19 The state’s interests in alcohol can be categorized into four broad areas: fiscal (revenues raised for the exchequer from excise duty and other taxes); economic (production, trade, and inward investment); social policy (including health and demographics); and public order (crime and the maintenance of law and order).20 The wide-ranging nature of the state’s interests in alcohol means that alcohol policies tend to be highly differentiated across government structures. In 2009, regulation of alcohol in the Russian Federation was the responsibility of no fewer than seven separate ministries and departments.21 There is nothing exceptional about this figure: one study of British alcohol policy identified sixteen national government departments as having some responsibility for alcohol issues.22 Thus, state alcohol policies tend to be highly ambivalent in their aims and effects. It is often doubtful whether a single alcohol policy can be said to exist, as different sections of the state bureaucracy have different priorities, interests, and departmental ideologies and so often act in unilateral and contradictory ways.23 In particular, the exchequer tends to have an interest in high consumption due to the revenues generated, while law and order and health departments have an interest in reducing consumption due to the externalities it creates. This problem is not confined to modern states. The vodka historian David Christian noted that the conflict within the state between reducing consumption and increasing government revenues had resulted in “contradictory and ambivalent” alcohol policy in Russia since the seventeenth century.24 Christian was writing in 1990, just before the fall of the Soviet Union, but as w ill be shown throughout this book, these inherent tensions in state alcohol policy have remained present during the post-Soviet era. This brings us back to the task of explaining the initiative to reduce consumption launched by the Russian government in 2009. It turns out that this single policy development cannot be understood in isolation. Rather, it needs to be analyzed in the context of an ongoing history of Russian state policy toward alcohol, and Russian political economy more generally. The analysis contained in this book reveals the many ambivalences in Russian alcohol policy: the conflicting interests within the state, the effect of informal power

6 Introduction

networks in shifting policy away from official goals, and the need to respect the Russian population’s own contradictory attitudes t oward drinking.

Overview of the Book For better or worse, the legacy of Soviet alcohol policy has continued to influence Russian thinking on alcohol policy throughout the post-Soviet period. One cannot fully comprehend these attitudes without understanding their historical roots. Throughout Russian history, alcohol revenues consistently provided a major share of the state’s income. How, then, can we explain the various points in history (1914, 1958, 1972, 1985) where the state (to a greater or lesser degree) chose to cut off a key revenue source by dramatically cutting the supply of alcohol? And why, having been passed, did these dry periods tend to be so short-lived? These issues are addressed in chapters 1 and 2. The newly independent Russian state’s surrender of control over the alcohol market in the early 1990s can hardly be considered a dry period. Indeed, it is widely regarded as the opposite—the lifting of controls and the dismantling of the state monopoly on alcohol flooded Russia with cheap vodka. But this development shared one important similarity with the fleeting Soviet dry periods: it again represented the voluntary sacrifice by the state of its alcohol revenues. Chapter 3 shows how, from 1993 onward, the dominant theme in Russian alcohol policy was the state’s attempt to regain control over the alcohol market that it so hastily surrendered in 1991–92, and thereby restore those revenues. But these efforts w ere severely undermined by a phenomenon of 1990s Russia that political economists have labeled “state capture”: private individuals, firms, and groups (including the mafiya) extracting enormous privileges, or “rents,”25 from the state due to its institutional weakness. Chapter 4 describes how a significant change in the Russian political economy took place around 2000, coinciding with Vladimir Putin’s election as president. State capture gave way to increased state control in the economy, as Putin’s government moved against noncompliant oligarchs and seized control of strategically important industries. The state holding com pany Rosspirtprom was formed to recover federal control over alcohol assets, a move that can be seen as part of President Putin’s reestablishment of the

Introduction 7

“power vertical” (centralized federal control) in view of the high value of alcohol revenues to regional authorities. Yet formal state ownership of alcohol production assets was far from the only way in which economic interests and alcohol policymaking collided under Putin. Chapter 5 provides a case study of the complex kleptocracy in the Russian political economy. The interests in vodka production of some of Putin’s most high-profile cronies—and their perceived influence on state policy—are analyzed in the context of sistema, the informal network-based system of governance in Russia through which allies of Putin are rewarded with business rents.26 Understanding the interaction between the formal and informal aspects of the alcohol political economy in Russia is crucial to explaining the actions of the federal alcohol regulator Rosalkogolregulirovaniye (RAR) (chapter 6). Despite the enduring popularity of vodka in Russia, a new beverage has enjoyed a dramatic growth in popularity in the twenty-first century: beer. This development has had a huge impact on alcohol policy formation, with the struggle between the vodka and beer industries for market share in Rus sia giving rise to lobbying and counter-lobbying (chapter 7). A further twist in this tale is provided by United Russia Duma deputy Viktor Zvagelskiy, who represents a fascinating case study of an alleged “vodka lobbyist” operating at the highest levels of lawmaking (chapter 8). How much do Russians actually drink, and why are antialcohol policy measures popular in theory but not in practice? The difficulties in satisfactorily answering t hese questions are the subject of chapter 9. Chapter 10 looks at how alcohol has been constructed as a social problem in Russia, and why the large consumption peaks in 1994–95 and 2002–3 failed to provoke alarm among the ruling elite at the time, in spite of efforts by public health activists to problematize the issue. In the mid-2000s, a new small but influential antialcohol movement emerged: an alliance of key members of a civil society elite including the Russian Orthodox Church, Public Chamber, and public health professionals. Chapter 11 shows how this new elite was able to seize cultural authority over the definition of the alcohol problem and thus set the antialcohol agenda where previous attempts by public health lobbyists had failed. It is vital to the survival of the political superelite that they are seen to act in the national interest. Once the “alcohol as demographic problem” was in the public eye, this included taking action against drinking. This led to the launch in 2009

8 Introduction

of a new antialcohol initiative overseen by President Medvedev, which is analyzed in chapter 12. Brewing executives working for companies that have major stakes in the Russian market, such as Carlsberg and Heineken, may legitimately wonder why rafts of increasingly restrictive legislation on the production and sale of beer have been passed by the Russian parliament. The commonplace explanation is that the government ordered such legislation as part of the so-called antialcohol campaign of 2009. However, this would be to fundamentally misunderstand the mechanisms of policy formation in Russia. The development and passage of the major 2011 law on alcohol regulation provides a pertinent illustration of this. The law did indeed implement many of the policies instructed by President Medvedev as part of the drive to reduce alcohol consumption. But crucially, the finer details w ere a perpetual battleground between the numerous policy stakeholders, and the final version impacted the beer industry much more harshly than originally anticipated. The stages of the bill’s passage provide a case study of how the alcohol regulator RAR seemingly worked in tandem with Zvagelskiy to push its preferred policies, and how antialcohol rhetoric was used to provide moral cover (chapter 13). Chapter 14 shows how, even after the passage of the 2011 law and the fading away of the alcohol problem from public discourse, the same fiercely contested policy b attles between advocacy coalitions have continued to shape alcohol regulation in Russia. I conclude by assessing how the case of Russian alcohol policy can improve our understanding of policy processes, and what it can tell us about Russian governance more generally. On the evidence provided in this book, merely studying formal institutions and policy channels is insufficient for a full understanding of public policy in contemporary Russia. Rather, the kleptocratic nature of the Putin regime means that analysis of vested interests and informal sources of power—and how they interact with formal institutions to produce real-life policy outcomes—is essential.

The Migrant Passage Survival Plays and Clandestine Journeys from Central America Noelle K. Brigden Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright ÂŠ 2018 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2018 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data <CIP to come> Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Contents Act 1: Exposition 1. The Opening Scene: A Journey Begins 2. The Plot: Migration Stories Take Shape 3. The Cast of Characters: Actors and their Relationships En Route Act 2: Rising Action 4. The Performance: Migrant Scripts and Roles 5. The Stage: Mobile Images and Props Act 3: Climax 6. A Tragedy: Conclusions and Implications Acknowledgments References Index

1 The Opening Scene: A Journey Begins Karla worked in a tourist cafĂŠ owned by gringos, preparing gourmet coffees for the international backpackers and surfers who flock to the coast of El Salvador. 1 She made friends with some of them on Facebook, catching glimpses of their relatively glamorous lives and travel abroad. She had long imagined that someday she would join these friends and her older siblings in the United States. At 20 years old, life in rural El Salvador made her restless. She longed to leave her small town behind. One brother had been in the United States for a long time, and a second brother had recently left, followed by a sister the month before I met Karla in 2009. Her brothers had warned her that the journey was very difficult; but the second brother had a better coyote [human smuggler] than the first one, and they thought it was now safe enough for their sisters to follow. By March 2010, Karla had already begun to plan her journey, and she talked to me about it. When I asked her to imagine the route that would she would take north and draw me a map, she agreed without much hesitation: <Insert figure 1.1 here> Nevertheless, imagining the journey proved to be a daunting task, and Karla delivered the map nearly a month later with an explanation that she had changed her mind. It was too dangerous to travel clandestinely. In her map, dangerous animals line the trail, symbolizing the risks. A mountain looms ominously in the distance, obscuring the path forward. The journey is uncertain because the adventure cannot be foretold. Despite (or because of) her worldliness and the experiences of her family, Karla knew it would be preposterous to predict the route she would need to travel. Thus, the mountains in her map symbolize her uncertainty about the path she would take. Yet within a year of drawing the map, frightened Karla braved the journey anyway, suddenly leaving for reasons that she never explained to me. Perhaps the lure of adventure overcame the monotony of a rural womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life. Perhaps one of her siblings offered her a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel with an expensive coyote, and she seized the moment. Since such smuggling services could, at the time, cost $7,500 for a regular passage, it is easy to imagine that sponsorship for such pricey travel opportunities might be difficult to refuse.2 I did not have the opportunity to ask Karla about the motives for her sudden flight. Instead, through images posted on Facebook, I have followed her at a distance for years, watching her create a new home in the United States and raise her daughter, born after her arrival and a U.S. citizen. With a bit of luck, Karla will avoid deportation and will not have to travel the migrant passage through Mexico again. The survival plays necessitated by the migrant passage can make heroes, victims and villains out of Central Americans, like Karla, who must brave it. These survival

plays are the performances that structure encounters between strangers under violent conditions, and they become a source of cultural and territorial mobility within the migration corridor. Nevertheless, the State sets the stage, imposing borders and generating risk and uncertainty for migrants crossing Mexico. These everyday scenes of migration unfold within a larger political theater, in which the intensification of migration policing and migrant suffering plays to a U.S. audience.3 Taken together, survival plays and policing scenes depict a tragedy rather than an epic, often closing with senseless sacrifice instead of happy endings. For this reason, I hope that Karlaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s part in the spectacle is over. To return to the image for a moment, the mountain motif in Karlaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s map is not just background setting, serving an aesthetic purpose. The image is critical for understanding the plot structure of a clandestine journey from Central America.4 In her map, the mountains obscure the way forward, because each journey is unique. She cannot know what may lurk beyond. The past offers little guide to the future. While Karla trusted her siblings, she doubted her ability to learn from their experiences in the borderlands. The route north through Mexico changes dramatically from one journey to the next, limiting the capacity to predict whether migrants arrive successfully in the United States or not. Using a theatrical metaphor, this book tells the story of how people, like Karla, navigate in shadow, coping with a double-edged micro-politics of information; it is this double-edged informational politics that animates the plot, creating unexpected twists and moving people in new trajectories as they grapple with unknowns. Karla is rational, but to imagine a journey to the United States, she must navigate an almost impossibly difficult problem of uncertainty. While risk is the probability of a danger and its potential harm, uncertainty characterizes a dangerous situation without a known probability. 5 A dynamic strategic setting and the clandestinity that accompanies it, a necessity during the journey due to policing and criminal predation, exacerbate uncertainty. In this setting, information is both a resource and a curse; migrants must learn past practices and protocols for negotiating the journey, but the very availability of this information renders it suspect. The diffusion of information about how and where to go may lead migrants north, but it may also lead police and criminal predators to migrants. As police and criminals attempt to interdict them, migrants cannot rely upon information about past practices without reservation, even if reliable sources like trusted loved ones conveyed that information to them. In fact, with the intensification of Mexican policing and criminal violence since the mid-2000s, even experienced migrants and guides express bewilderment about recent changes along the route through Mexico. Thus, in the shadow of Karlaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mountains, contemplating their meaning, I studied two interrelated questions about migrant journeys: 1) If the most

experienced migrants and guides feel daunted by this uncertainty and violence, how do people attempt to move along the route with the barest of social or financial resources at their disposal? and 2) How do these wanderers, many of whom never arrive in their intended destinations, interact with people and places along the way, and with what consequences for the societies through which they transit? In answer, I argue that people improvise encounters with strangers and with the terrain to survive a dangerous and uncertain passage. Migration studies, focused primarily on the role of social capital as a mobility resource, have missed the importance of encounters among strangers as a survival resource.6 These studies have also generally overlooked the physical encounter with terrain as a source of migration information. Much of this scholarship treats the journey from the homeland to a destination country as a black box. 7 Scholars emphasize the preparations, resources, adaptations, politics and the socio-economic impact of migration before migrants leave home or after their arrival. Academic work that does unpack the journey tends to focus myopically on the border, rather than the long-distance corridors that most migrants must traverse.8 Nevertheless, during the journey, improvised performances of social scripts and improvised material practices become a resource for mobility. As we will see, migrants’ loose reenactments of these scripts and practices also potentially reinforce or destabilize the markers of identity and place. These reenactments generate social ambiguity. As a result, migrants’ encounters with people and places along the way restructure the route for the people that follow in their footsteps. Importantly, this process unfolds whether migrants reach their intended destinations or not. Scholarship focused primarily on migrant destinations generally misses the story of the people who never arrive there. A U.S.-only view of the migration process obscures the stories of people who never leave home, people who make failed journeys, and people who die or disappear en route. A view from the transit corridor, however, reveals the long reaching shadow of the border for people who may never step foot in the United States. Therefore, I analyze the journey and migrants’ improvised interaction with the transit corridor through which they pass. In this context, improvisation refers to an irreverent resourcefulness, a leveraging of conventions and codes for unanticipated purposes. 9 As such, it is cultural mobility in action, and a theatrical metaphor spotlights this dimension of mobility.10 By tracing these improvisations along the transit corridor from Central America through Mexico and into the United States, I show how fluid migration practices reshape the social landscape. Thus, I argue that migrants’ responses to their uncertain passage transform the possibilities of the nation-state and the world around us, albeit with yet undetermined outcome for borders and humanity. This book, and Karla’s map contained within it, is a portrait of underground globalization in action.

<A>An Ethnographic Journey Drawing on the accounts of people like Karla, I take the reader on an ethnographic journey, introducing the people, places and practices that compose the borderlands within nation-states. You meet the priests and hustlers, cops and criminals, smugglers and good Samaritans, adventurers and refugees who inhabit the transnational space that connects Central America, Mexico and the United States. You meet migrants who never arrive at their destinations, some of them wandering indefinitely and others disappearing, presumably into hidden graves. You meet people who leave home, and you meet the people they leave behind. Following in their footsteps, we will discover how people survive a human security crisis with imagination and improvisation, not only planning. These everyday improvisations generate an emergent transnational space where material and social practices become unmoored. Until now, however, much of the literature exploring the immigrant experience has largely ignored improvised journeys in favor of migration-specific resources and social ties accumulated in migrant home communities and destinations. A focus on established social networks misses the resources that emerge from anonymous, fleeting encounters with strangers and terrain. As a result, this focus also misses a dynamic process of engagement between migrants and the transit corridor through which they pass. Indeed, migration theories rooted in ideas of social capital and networks have a difficult time explaining how migrants cope with uncertainty, not just risk.11 As explained by Cetta Mainwaring, â&#x20AC;&#x153;network theories often present migration systems as fully formed without investigating the agency required to initiate, transform, or weaken such systems.â&#x20AC;?12 In other words, it misses the way migrants shape societies through which they pass and the reordering of geopolitics that occurs within and around these transnational spaces. These migrants reorder global politics simply by attempting to transgress borders and survive to tell the story. Their passage is reshaping the Americas, Eurasia, and the Mediterranean basin. By exploring migration through the lens of the journey, this book responds to a recent call for international relations (IR) scholars to examine how ordinary people, sometimes unwittingly, impede the projects of nation-states and thus shape the world political economy.13 Even if they never reach their destination, people embark on journeys that catalyze personal, social, economic and political transformations along the route they traverse. Scholars of international politics have overlooked the flesh and blood travails of migrants who enact dangerous long-distance odysseys. Much of this scholarship therefore supplies an incomplete view of globalization, one that focuses almost exclusively on top-down and collective challenges to the nation-state. However, ethnographic methods, a lens that focuses on the level of practice, reveal a more complex transnational social

process. Through an anthropological lens we can see how the paths blazed by migrants complicate the cultural markers that the state requires to distinguish between migrants and citizens. We also see how they reshape the physical and socio-economic terrain of the nation-state, leveraging aboveground economies and social relations for underground activities. While the State may impede individual journeys and enforce a territorial boundary, neither collective action nor novel technologies are necessary to complicate borders. To be clear, I do not argue that territorial borders or the state are disappearing. I argue that the interplay between migrants and the State creates unintended consequences that we can best understand at the analytical and methodological borders of international relations (IR) and anthropology. Viewing globalization ‘from below’ allows us to trace how migrants and citizens adapt existing roles, protocols, and rituals for the purpose of their survival. They also improvise upon the material resources at their disposal. A more humble, speculative position emerges from analytical engagement with everyday people, like Karla. On the one hand, IR scholarship benefits from this humility, because we explore politics that matter to the survival of marginalized actors on the world stage. On the other hand, ethnographic accounts of everyday practice benefit from the grand theories of world politics that allow us to transgress the particulars of local experience. This broad historical and global vantage point provides a countervailing narrative to heroic stories that underemphasize the larger political structures shaping individual action. By bringing together both perspectives, we arrive at a richer understanding of the uncertain future of the nation-state. <A>Through the Borderlands Within To provide some context for the argument that migrants’ improvisations reshape the possibilities of the global political order, it is important to remember that states regard their frontiers, and the people who come to embody those frontiers, with suspicion. Borders are contact zones where material and social boundaries must be continually renegotiated, often under conditions of threat, whether perceived or real. Mark Salter conceptualizes borders as a space where citizens, foreigners and migration agents perform citizenship, thereby giving meaning to sovereignty.14 Such state performances produce artificial boundaries between both territories and peoples, and these boundaries unwittingly generate the borderlands: social spaces inhabited by novel forms of cultural hybridity and contestation.15 States, however, have ‘thickened’ and ‘transnationalized’ their borders by outsourcing immigration policing to neighboring transit countries and further emphasizing immigrant apprehensions within their territory, such as at worksites. 16 The policing of transnational flows in the interior of states extends and deepens

the clandestine contestation that normally occurs at these frontiers. Policing extends contestation by moving clandestine activity into the heartland of the state, no longer localized it at its geographic periphery. It also deepens the contestation by incorporating more citizens into a clandestine social field. Thus, the routes become embedded in the nation-states through which they pass, incorporating both mobile and immobile people alike into their flows. In this manner, nationstates of both transit and destination develop borderlands within their borders. The dynamic between state and people internalizes the borderlands, within territories and the bodies that live within them. Gilberto Rosas argues that these contemporary borderlands are uneasily situated along the rough edges of sovereignty, between war and peace, militarization and policing.17 Such hybrid control tactics both function through and re-generate racialized illegalities:18 Nightmares of insecurity are effects of necessarily incomplete exercises of sovereignty at the new frontier. They underwrite the low-intensity warfare at the new frontier. Indeed, this kind of warfare is designed far more to regulate bodies than to conquer populations. Media spectacles of undocumented border crossings and processes of illegality more generally have been widely equated with the U.S. nation-stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s loss of control at its borders. Nightmares of drug traffickers, terrorists, and illegal immigrants weigh down on the new frontier; these dark fantasies legitimate the continuing and ongoing amplification of militarized regimes of social control and a perverse birthing of criminal types in its necessary fissures.19 Indeed, these internal contact zones often become places of greater danger and deception when the State attempts to control them; such interventions increase insecurity for citizens and migrants, both directly through state violence and indirectly, by calling forth a variety of delinquent refusals of the state order.20 For this reason, the map drawn by Karla emphasized her fears of the long trek across nation-states, not only the danger they associate with crossing the borders between them. In fact, Karla and other Central Americans have good reason to be afraid of the journey to the United States. A consensus of scholars, journalists and migrants suggests that the migration corridor from Central America through Mexico to the United States has become much more dangerous in the last two decades.21 Both risk and uncertainty are on the rise along the route. Bandits, corrupt officials and unscrupulous smugglers have robbed and raped migrants ever since people began to transit through Mexican territory en route to the United States.22 But in the last decade, even additional dangers, such as organized mass kidnappings in which the victims are systematically tortured to extort money from the U.S.-based relatives,

emerged.23 At the time of my fieldwork, the National Human Rights Commission of Mexico estimated that more than twenty thousand migrants are kidnapped each year.24 <insert figure 1.2 here> Compounding growing fear, Central American media began reporting crimes along the Mexican routes with greater frequency following the end of the civil war period in the 1990s. And the increasing systematic organization and severity of this violence came to international attention with the shocking discovery of seventytwo corpses of Central and South American migrants in a mass grave in Tamaulipas, Mexico in August 2010.25 Mass murder is a tragic byproduct of increased territorial competition between drug gangs as they attempt to control passage and charge tribute from human smugglers, as well as exploiting the opportunities for kidnapping and extortion. Ask nearly any migrant and they will tell you that the journey is far more dangerous today than ever before. Even though it might be tempting to describe this anarchy as a Hobbesian state of nature, it is, in fact, a byproduct of the State. Borderlands are not a primordial place that predates the State.26 The Mexican and United States’ governments have partnered to increase the risks to migrants travelling unauthorized routes, thereby deterring would-be border crossers.27 To do so, under a policy described as “prevention through deterrence”, U.S. migration authorities have deliberately channeled the migrant stream toward the most dangerous places on the U.SMexico border, such as desolate and therefore deadly desert zones.28 Since 2001, Mexican migration policing has also funneled migrants to the most dangerous places within Mexico, such as the drug-running corridors where kidnappers and corrupt authorities prey upon migrants with impunity.29 At that time, under the first iteration of Plan Sur, Mexico established a series of internal control belts to interdict Central American migrants far north of the Guatemalan border, and in 2008 began to receive substantial support for these security measures from the U.S. through the auspices of the Mérida Initiative.30 Most recently, in the aftermath of a wave of Central American children arriving at the US border in 2014, the Mexican government implemented a reinvigorated the program of policing in its southern corridor, principally targeting the train routes that the poorest and most vulnerable migrants ride north like international hobos, and largely shutting down that method of transportation. The Mexican government announced the newest program, also known as Plan Sur, as an attempt to protect migrants from the deadly train route. However, a consensus among human rights activists indicates that Plan Sur has increased migrants’ exposure to crime by necessitating long unprotected walks through the wilderness. States exacerbate the risks of the journey.31

Mexico and the United States have not only exacerbated the risks of the journey. Under the banner of the drug war, the Mexican and United States’ governments have also allied to increase uncertainty by intentionally dislocating the routines and relationships that underpin the political economy of transit. To do so, police “decapitated” the drug cartels. They hunted down local terrain bosses in order to generate violent competition within and between gangs with the intention of disrupting illicit trafficking in drugs and people.32 In doing so, states make illicit business, like the smuggling enterprises upon which migrants are dependent, less predictable (as well as more dangerous). For this reason, the Mexican government attempted to claim that the high death toll of criminal violence is a measure of success in the drug war.33 In response to the August 2010 mass murder of migrants in Tamaulipas, Alejandro Poiré, a Mexican security official, offered the following analysis: “This act confirms that criminal organizations are looking to kidnapping and extortion because they are going through a difficult time obtaining resources and recruiting people willingly.”34 This massacre may be viewed as a ‘success’ in a second way; as migration policing pushes migrants into the path of drug cartels, criminal violence against migrants strengthens state enforcement of its borders. In this sense, the heightened danger of criminality to migrants indirectly serves state purposes by deterring some Central American migration. In so far as state policymakers are aware of their role in exacerbating this danger, they are complicit accessories in crime against migrants. Put another way, migration and drug control efforts induced the growth of what Guillermo O’Donnell calls a brown area where informal and formal rules must be continuously renegotiated, and as a consequence, uncertainty is endemic. 35 In Mexico, few migrants avail themselves of official protection, because they are vulnerable to violence committed by authorities and fear deportation. Thus, formal law only intermittently protects migrants. Since the intensification of the drug war, the informal rules of the illicit economy have been subject to continuous renegotiation by criminal actors. Uncertainty along the route has risen because the routines and social networks that underlie clandestine migration have undergone profound change since in the wake of both intensified migration policing, and since 2006, the Mexican drug war. As a result, past practice offers very imperfect guidance for migrants as they move through Mexico. In sum, brown zones and borderlands, such as the migration route, are not beyond the reach of sovereign authority. They are constituted by governance and resistance to that governance. Incomplete sovereignty at borders calls forth a spectacle of violence to project state power and, through militarized policing practice, reproduced the racialized illegality of migrants.36 The combined effect of migration policing and the drug war is largely responsible for the dramatic increase

in both risk and uncertainty. Indeed, Wendy Vogt (2012) traces both the contemporary migration policing and the drug war offensive to a neoliberal agenda pursued by the United States in the region, and she argues that this militarized, free-market agenda constitutes a continuation of processes of colonial and Cold War social fragmentation in Latin America. In other words, the violent and unstable conditions that plague the migration route are state creations; they are not intrinsic to human movement, but an outcome of policy decisions. 37 The internalization of border policing introduced uncertainty and anarchy of a kind normally associated with the international realm into the domestic affairs of the Mexican state. The resultant humanitarian catastrophe, which spans from home through transit communities and destinations, and then back again, is common knowledge across Central America. <A>Following Uncertain Trajectories, Improvising Survival Ironically, however, a wealth of common knowledge concerning the dangers of the route does not provide the migrants much useful information about how they might cope with the challenges that face them once the decision to leave has been made. Thus, hundreds of thousands Central Americans leave home each year and confront an ominous unknown. 38 Given the dramatic uncertainty they confront en route, migrants traveling the entire length of Mexico, over 1,800 miles from southern Mexico to the Texas border following the shortest line, must presume that each journey will be unique. Migrants face information constraints, but they are not naïve. They know that they do not know what the future holds. Strategic interaction between migrants, police and criminals renders the iteration of successful tactics dangerous, because predators rapidly identify and respond to migrant practices.39 For that reason, a ploy that had previously abetted safe passage may enhance risk a second time around. Criminals, ranging from drug cartels that control territory and collect passage fees from illegal traffic to local opportunists who commit rapes and robberies, stalk the migrant trail. Faith in a previously competent coyote could be misplaced in a world where even reputable smugglers sometimes make mistakes and die alongside their clients. Smugglers have been killed crossing territory that has suddenly changed hands among competing criminal organizations, turning cooperative gangs into implacable enemies. Migrants insist that, “every trip is different”, because the shifting strategic context of the route ensures that no two journeys are ever alike, and specific information from a previous trip quickly becomes obsolete. Fully aware of this fact, migrants adopt uncertainty as their worldview. Traveling the route changes people, and the continual presence of transient people changes society. It is perhaps cliché to remind readers that every journey across the globe has its parallel journey into the self.40 Just as new experiences

transform people, so does violence. However, this is not only a personal process. Violence and migration reconstitute not only personal motives, but also social roles and norms.41 Thus, violence and migration produce a fundamental ambiguity and uncertainty along the route. At various places, the roles of the ‘migrant’, ‘smuggler’, ‘gang member’, ‘state official’ and ‘kidnapper’ overlap or become fluid.42 Migrants or smugglers may be forced to collaborate with kidnappers or police to survive, and police may be forced to collaborate with smugglers or kidnappers. Many social markers that might normally signal trustworthiness or solidarity, such as nationality, religion, gender or class, come to betray those who would rely upon them. Among people forced to make decisions in violent situations, treachery is rampant as loyalties shift under the strain.43 The illegality of human smuggling and migration further exacerbates this uncertainty by reinforcing the need for secrecy and deception. Of course, if such practices were perfectly concealed, smugglers would soon run out of clients. So, there are also incentives for publicity. Unauthorized migrants share their travel stories, and they even make claims on the state for protection and services during their journey. As they do so, the location and protocols of unauthorized routes become common knowledge in the communities through which they pass. Nonetheless, illegal activities are undocumented in the sense that there is no objective general record through which we can study migrant vulnerability on the route. For this reason, Susan Bibler Coutin defines clandestine terrain as territory that is simultaneously “hidden yet known.”44 While the veil of secrecy is far from opaque, diffusion renders information dangerous for migrants. By the time a rumor of a safe path or an effective ploy reach migrants, they may also have attracted the attention of migration police or criminal predators. Karla clearly understood the limits of information under conditions of uncertainty; she knew that the ever-changing strategic conditions of the route meant that the well-trod path of her brothers and sister could not be trusted. To follow an established trail through the wilderness is tempting, because it can lead you north. When migrants follow in the footsteps of previous generations of migrants, they learn to rely upon the material artifacts their compatriots leave behind, to observe and mimic tactics of travel companions, to receive humanitarian support from Catholic shelters, and to access a political economy of transit when they hire smugglers and purchase supplies. In this way, the route provides a physical and social infrastructure for the acquisition of information. However, to uncritically follow an established trail is dangerous, because it may have also been identified by patrols or bandits. Consequently, institutionalized practice becomes both a source of vulnerability and a resource for survival. In this context, the accumulation of social capital and lessons learned over time cannot

resolve the information dilemma confronted by migrants. 45 Migrants have no reassurance that past experience will provide a reliable guide for future journeys. Confronted by this informational paradox, how do people make their way? Rather than solely rely on the past for reliable information, people must largely depend on imagination and improvisation. In other words, migrants and smugglers leverage established routines, roles and resources to their advantage. When they do that, migrants reshape a transnational place, known colloquially as ‘el Camino’ (translated to English as ‘the migrant trail’, or directly as ‘the way’ or ‘the road’). By promoting these improvisations, uncertainty destabilizes social and material practice along the route. Central American migrants must make decisions amidst great danger and dynamic uncertainty. Despite their ingenuity, they often find themselves at the mercy of criminal gangs and police, who continually manipulate the rules of the game. The interplay of violence and evasion structures the migratory route by making improvisatory demands on migrants. Thus, without intending to, migrants and their smugglers transform the migration corridor into a space that no state securely controls. Faced with violent and uncertain journeys, everyday people like Karla complicate, but do not eviscerate, the social and territorial boundaries of the nation-state. While migrants and smugglers are the vanguard, they are not alone. Migrants intermingle with a wide variety of people who live along the route. The relationships and roles of these people are also transformed by the passage of migrants. Both citizens and migrants creatively interact and thus complicate the governance of the unauthorized routes which have become a ubiquitous feature of globalization. Ultimately, this ongoing process blurs boundaries between foreigners and citizens, migrants and settlers.46 <A>Globalization and the Nation-State at Disciplinary Borders Since the 1970s, scholars have heralded the impending reordering of the nationstate under conditions of complex interdependence and overlapping sovereignties.47 The inexorable forces of cultural and economic globalization shake, but do not dislodge, both the territorial and ideational moorings of the state.48 Transnational media complicates the relationship between territory and cultural identity.49 State efforts to impede unauthorized flows of people and contraband generate perverse results.50 When IR theorists attempt to account for these complications, they often look to social networks and novel communication technologies as vectors for the diffusion and increasing resilience of transnational practice.51 Indeed, a variety of organized actors, including diaspora activists, leverage these resources to challenge state sovereignty. 52 And while political scientists also use the lens of migration and trafficking to explore the discursive construction of national identity and sovereignty53, they make fewer attempts to

understand the embodied deconstruction of the nation-state at the level of everyday practice.54 By emphasizing lived experience, anthropology points to how everyday material practice shapes place, identity, and common sense understandings of the world around us. The experience of the journey is clandestine transnationalism, called into existence by the very effort of the State to stop it. As the anthropology of criminalization reveals, clandestine activities are never autonomous from the state, but instead constituted by their illegality.55 Migrants often make multiple journeys not despite the State but because of it, as they return from deportations or failed border crossings. Both state and non-state violence structure these practices, rendering trust and community ephemeral along the route. Thus, it should be no surprise that clandestine transnationalism is an incidental, not purposive, challenge to state sovereignty. Of course, we must not forget the human tragedy that necessitates migrant survival strategies, and we should refrain from celebrating these improvisations as intentional resistance to the State. Migrants also become unwilling props in the political theater of borders.56 Here, anthropology can learn from the discipline of international relations, and its broader understanding of the political and institutional structures that shape the global stage, thereby limiting the agency of actors. While migration practice troubles the links between nationality and territory, border policing painfully impacts the lives of migrants and citizens alike. The unending transience that emerges in the wake of mass deportation and border policing erodes the coherence of social and territorial boundaries, but it does not establish a transcendent regime for the protection of human life and dignity. An ethnographic focus on undirected mass movement, coupled with an awareness of ways in which the global border regime potentially perverts this movement, brings this reality into stark relief. Such an interdisciplinary approach adds nuance to triumphant accounts of transnationalism and globalization.57 <A>The Path Forward Like a tragedy with a three-act structure, this book is divided into three parts. The first is the exposition. It sketches concepts and describes the routes as uncertain and violent terrain. This part of the book discusses the transformative process unfolding along the route, and it justifies my methodological approach. In chapter two, I describe my fieldwork methods and the concept of improvisation in greater depth. In chapter three, I introduce the players who inhabit the route and how their relationships have changed over time. These fluid relationships generate social ambiguity and acute uncertainty for migrants. The second part of the book is what playwrights might call a rising action with a character arc, which develops the situations in which migrants find themselves. It

demonstrates how migrants’ responses to those situations transform social roles. To do so, I describe migration practice, fleshing out the concepts and methodology introduced in the first part andexploring the social and material dimensions of the journey in turn. Each chapter makes both an empirical point and further develops the argument in favor of ethnographic methods for understanding globalization and borders. In chapter four, I examine how narratives and actions become survival plays. This chapter traces the performances of social roles and identity that become tactics in transit, and how they become a source of cultural and territorial mobility. By exploring these encounters, I demonstrate the importance of performing ethnography. In other words, I show that reading interview narratives themselves as survival plays can reveal otherwise overlooked dimensions of the journey. In chapter five, I analyze how migrants come to understand and employ material resources in unexpected ways during the journey, shaping the stage for future survival plays. To do so, I merge a critical cartography with ethnography in a series of mapmaking workshops that probe the origins of a transnational imaginary of the route. Maps orient us to how the narrative, characters and stage setting interact, guiding us through the lived experiences of survival plays. This merging of mapping with ethnography follows Tom Conley’s observation that the narrative structure of cinematic performances is also a map, in so far that, “…like topographic projections, can be understood as an image that locates and patterns the imaginations of spectators.”58 Survival plays re-articulate the space of the transit corridor, and when asked to participate in a cartography of the route, migrants deployed maps within their performances of the interview about that corridor. Taken together, this second part of the book documents cultural mobility, as migrants improvise upon imperfect information. This second part of the book also more fully develops a fluid methodology that mirrors migration practice, leveraging social encounters between strangers and the terrain itself to understand that mobility. The final part, or climax, concludes by speculating about the implications of this analysis for the State and globalization, and it briefly explores these dynamics in other regions around the globe. Clandestine migration transforms territorial and symbolic sovereignty of the State, but with indeterminate consequences for human dignity. The State cannot prevent the emergence of a transnational space, but it does have the power to pervert this social reality, thereby inflicting tremendous suffering on both citizens and migrants alike. I conclude with a melancholy reflection on the transnational homelessness that accompanies contemporary migration policing in the Americas. For migrants, destinations have become as ephemeral as the social interactions in which they engage en route; journeys along el Camino have increasingly become experiences with indefinite beginnings and ends.59 The only definite end to the journey is death, and even then, the

disappearance of corpses into unmarked graves renders that certainty ambiguous for loved ones left behind.60 The bodies of deceased migrants become unwilling props in an ongoing political theater of borders.61 Whether they eventually arrive in the United States or disappear into the desert, migrants in transit participate in a contested, collective imagining of el Camino. In the conclusion, I point to an analogous process unfolding across the Atlantic in the wake of the recent refugee crisis. At the periphery of Europe, sea and land routes persist in the face of escalating risk and uncertainty for migrants. Whether their lives are lost to watery graves in the Mediterranean or to the open graves left by Mexican narco-traffickers, whether they step foot in their intended destinations in Europe or the United States, migrants reorder these corridors around the world. Everyday people like Karla change the possibilities of the State, complicating borders. Sometimes they pay a tragic price for playing this pivotal role in the politics of place. Ultimately, it remains unclear where these transnational corridors lead us, as individuals or as a global society. All names are pseudonyms. Special travel packages for pregnant women, infants, disabled people or other vulnerable people can run much higher in price. 3 Andreas 2000. 4 This motif recurs in the map of another would-be migrant, who I will call Noemi. 5 On the difference between risk and uncertainty, see Blyth 2006; Giddens 1999; Keynes 1948; and Knight 1921. 6 For sophisticated work on how migration practice and smuggling is socially embedded in migrant sending communities see, for example, Gaytan et al. 2007; Kyle 1999; Kyle and Scarcelli 1999; Singer and Massey 1998; Spener 2001; 2004; 2009. 7 See Mainwaring and Brigden 2016 for a critique of this oversight. Important early exceptions include a growing literature on transit migration, primarily examining from the European context. See for example: Collyer 2010; Collyer, Duvell and de Haas 2012; Duvell 2012; BenEzer and Zetter 2015; Khosravi 2011. Outside academia, readers can find ample journalism exploring migrant journeys on both sides of the Atlantic. See for example, Kenyon 2009; MartĂnez 2014; Moorehead 2005; Nazario 2007. 8 Ibid. For an excellent unpacking of the journey that interviews migrants en route but focuses primarily at the US-Mexico divide, see De LeĂłn 2015. 9 Greenblatt 2005[1980], 165. 10 Ibid. 11 Brigden 2014. 12 Mainwaring 2016, p.3. 13 See,for example, Hobson and Seabrooke 2007; Hopf 2013. 14 Salter 2008. 15 Anzaldua 2007: 25. 16 Andreas 2003, Rosas 2012, Salter 2004, Sassen 1998. On both sides of the Atlantic, border control is no longer isolated at the geographic periphery of destination countries, but instead executed through international cooperation and surveillance, and a shifting of control and asylum responsibilities to neighboring countries, rather than traditional destinations 1 2

(Brigden and Mainwaring 2016). Borders themselves have become “mobile,” internally and externally (Mountz 2010). 17 Rosas 2012. 18 Ibid. 19Rosas 2012: 101. 20 Galemba 2017; Mountz 2010; Rosas 2012. 21 For extensive journalistic accounts of the dangerous journey from Central America to Mexico see Martínez 2010; 2014 and Nazario 2007. 22 See, for example, Frelick 1991. 23 Amnesty International 2010; CIDH 2010; Vogt 2013. 24 CNDH 2009; 2011. 25 More corpses were later discovered at this same site 26 Rosas 2012. 27 Bonello 2016; de León 2015; Kristof 2016. 28 Cornelius 2001; de León 2015; Eschbach et al. 1999. 29 Casillas 2007; Isacson, Meyer and Morales 2014; Martinez 2011; Rosas 2012. 30 Casillas 2007; Chávez-Suárez 2013; Galemba 2017. 31 Boenllo 2016; ICG 2016; Isacson, Meyer and Morales 2014 . 32 Wilkinson 2010. 33 Wilkinson 2010 34 quoted in Archibold 2010. 35 O’Donnell 2004: 41. 36 Galemba 2017; Rosas 2012: 106. 37 The historical process of making sedentary state subjects was (and is) coercive. For this reason, James Scott (2009) understands ungovernable borderlands of early states as zones of relative freedom, necessary for the maintenance of nascent state orders. However, unlike the borderlands described by Scott, the contemporary borderlands are not a utopian stateless space. 38 Archibald 2013; Miroff 2013. 39 While migrants engage in illegal entry, I use the term ‘criminal’ as shorthand for violent or exploitive criminals, rather than those people engaged in a class of ‘victimless’ crimes. 40 In her study of migrant disillusionment in receiving communities on Long Island, Sarah Mahler (1995: 75-81) described the often-painful personal transformation that the journey entails. 41 Primo Levi (1988: 36-49) understood this transformative space as a ‘gray zone’ where victims and bystanders unintentionally or intentionally commit violence while attempting to survive, blurring the boundary between master and slave, perpetrator and victim. Survival often requires subtle forms of collaboration with victimizers. 42 Likewise, genocidal violence is a dynamic process with the power to transform identities and complicate categories of “perpetrator”, “victim”, “bystander” and “rescuer” as people occupy multiple positions or change their positions in response to a shifting context over time (Fuji 2009: 8-11). 43 Some accounts of “globalization from below” offer reason for optimism concerning the potential of solidarity of peoples in communities that transcend the nation-state (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Soysal 1994). The experience of violence and injustice can encourage solidarity, political participation and collective resistance to oppression (Wood 2003). A shared migrant identity, for example, can facilitate collective resistance to violence among Central Americans in transit through Mexico. (Frank-Vitale 2011). The journey can also 19

create allies of strangers in a time of need and generate a sense of community along en route. However, escalating violence has recently unleashed a seemingly contradictory tendency toward both social fragmentation and displays of solidarity (Vogt 2012; 17). In fact, the potential for complex responses that transcend the dichotomy between disloyalty and solidarity increase the unpredictability of individual reactions to violence. 44 Coutin 2005. 45 For a paired comparison of two Salvadoran migrant communities that arrives at this point, see Brigden (2014). 46 Kamal Sadiq (2009) also draws our attention to ‘blurred citizenship’ and the limited capacity of the state to distinguish between citizens and migrants, thereby complicating governance. In subsequent chapters, I will explore how his approach to identity differs dramatically from my own, with consequences for our understanding of policy. 47 See, for example, Keohane and Nye 1977; Ruggie 1993. 48 Castells 1996; Sassen 2006. 49 Appadurai 1996. 50 Andreas 2000. 51 See, for example, Kahler 2009; Keohane and Nye 1998. 52 Adamson and Demetriou 2007; Itzigsohn 2000. 53 See, for example, Doty 2006; Berman 2003. 54 Müller 2008. 55 Heyman 1999; Schneider and Schneider 2008. 56 Andreas 2000; Magañas 2013. 57 Mahler 1998: 72. 58 Conley 2007: 1-2. 59 Mainwaring and Brigden 2016. 60 See also De Leon 2015. 61 Andreas 2000; De Leon 2015; Maganas 2011.

Nation-Empire: Ideology, Emotions, and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies Sayaka Chatani Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

udies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

Contents Notes on Transliteration and Translation List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: The So-Called Inner Territories Chapter 1: National Trends Chapter 2: From Mobilization to the Social Mobility Complex Chapter 3: Totalitarian Japanization Interlude: Okinawaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Place in the Nation-Empire Part II: The So-Called Outer Territories Chapter 4: Colonial Intellectuals Chapter 5: Finding Rural Youth in Taiwan Chapter 6: Emotional Basis for Japanization Chapter 7: Model Rural Youth in Korean Village Chapter 8: Opportunities and Loopholes Part III: Consequences Chapter 9: As Young Pillars of the Nation-Empire Chapter 10: Epilogue: Back in Villages On the Archives and Sources Notes Index

Introduction On October 7, 1943, a 21-year-old man living in the countryside of colonial Taiwan wrote in his notebook, “I am turning into a passive person working at the institute. I have to become a volunteer soldier next year!”1 His name is Xu Chongfa in Mandarin Chinese pronunciation, and he was a son of a Fujian-Chinese descendent family. Working as an instructor at the Xinzhu province youth training institute, he used that notebook mainly to log busy daily activities and impressions of wartime youth training in Japanese. In the middle of work-related details, these two sentences abruptly appear. This little—almost accidental—introspective note gives historians a slight opening to Xu’s worldview. And it puzzles us. What did he see in the idea of volunteering for the Japanese army? Xu’s expressed sense of frustration makes sense considering how extremely difficult it was to become a volunteer soldier. The Japanese Empire launched the volunteering program in Taiwan in 1942, a year before Xu’s diary entry. In the first year, 425,961 young people applied for 1,000 open spots. That number rose to 601,147 in the second year, and to 759,276 for 2,000 available spots in the third year. Considering that in 1940 the total male population in the main age group targeted for this program (17-30) was 633,325, these were extremely large numbers. The majority of applicants, particularly in its initial phase, came from farming families, who constituted 42% of Taiwan’s total population, despite the fact that volunteer soldiers were paid far less than porters hired by the military.2 The competitiveness produced the phenomenon of “volunteer fever” across the island, even creating a “blood-application culture,” so named because many signed applications in their own blood to express their “pure loyalty.” 3 Although to a lesser degree, the “volunteer fever” in rural areas had been also happening in colonial Korea. The same program began in Korea a little earlier, in 1938. In the first year, 2,946 Korean men applied for 400 open spots, and both the numbers of applicants and slots grew year by year to 254,273 and 4,000 in 1942, and 303,394 and 6,300 respectively in 1943.4 As one can easily imagine, these figures in official statistics included many cases of deception and coercion hidden underneath the word “volunteer.” But there are also a large number of testimonies that verify common desires to become volunteer soldiers. An eager response like Xu’s was not uncommon, although he might have been more passionate than average because he considered himself an exemplary Japanized youth. He was in charge of training hundreds of other Taiwanese youth to also become qualified as volunteer soldiers. His students also expressed firm support for the Japanese war effort and belief in the Japanese moral virtues in their personal and public writings. These youth struggled to prove their heartfelt loyalty to the Japanese emperor. Today, academics have been making efforts to record and analyze

experiences of colonial soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army.5 But when it comes to the volunteer soldier, it was not those who passed the exam, but those who applied but failed made up the majority of society. Very few of such former applicants, however, have a reason to actively tell postwar generations about their motivations and actions of the time. We can raise a variety of questions about the phenomenon of the volunteer fever and postcolonial memories about it. But the questions central to this book are the most basic of all. How did young men in the colonies become passionate about their colonizer’s nationalism? Why did they feel compelled to apply to the volunteer soldier program? In fact, why on earth did anyone, whether in the metropole or in the colonies, express an embrace of the presumably imposed ideology and willingness to fight for the cause so irrelevant to their immediate interests? Half of the story is easily traced. State bureaucrats, politicians, and activists devoted a great amount of time and energy to guide young generations to that direction. In the Japanese Empire, the seinendan (village youth associations) became the main vehicle of top-down youth mobilization. The seinendan began as hamlet social organizations widely seen in rural Japan that governed peasants’ lives for centuries. With the pre-existing spread of these groups, the Meiji government (18681912) not only found a way to organize and educate young people (roughly between 12 and 20 of age), but also gained access to even the most remote rural communities. In colonial Taiwan and Korea, Japanese imperialists found no equivalent of traditional youth associations instantly. Yet they copied the seinendan format of youth organization, trying to make it as rooted in rural communities as possible. By the 1930s, across the empire, seinendan groups were expected to serve state and social leaders’ goals to transform the young rural masses into ideal Japanese imperial subjects—hardworking, healthy, and rationally-living modern farmers loyal to the state and the emperor. During its military expansion on the Asian continent and the Asia-Pacific War from 1937 to 1945, the imperial state relied on these “youthful pillars of the empire,” Japanese and non-Japanese, to supply military and industrial manpower. Its obsessive effort to organize native youth was extended to the newly occupied territories in Southeast Asia during the war.6 To state officials, agrarian youth symbolized the grassroots forces that would resolve the rural and national predicament, bind Asia together, and shoulder heavy burdens of the empire. What Japanese officials hoped to achieve in youth mobilization is not the primary focus of this book, however. My foremost goal is to shed light on a less clear dimension of the story, namely, local social dynamics that determined value and meanings of youth programs from the viewpoints of participants. The operations of the seinendan were conditioned heavily by rural social contexts, making a unique dynamic separate from that of the urban-based Boy Scouts or competitive middle schools. The seinendan carried the idealized image of “rural youth” [nōson seinen] which

embodied masculinity, modernity, and moral superiority over urban culture. Such image of rural youth had a great appeal to many average-class young villagers. But under the vast imperial network of the seinendan, young people lived in diverse social and cultural contexts that gave different meanings to the rural youth discourse and their membership in the seinendan. What value did they find in imperial youth programs? How did youth training affect their social relationships? How did it lead to the colonial volunteer fever? Ultimately, what did the adoption of Japanese nationalism mean to youth in the Japanese and colonial countryside? The large part of this book thus examines histories of young men and their changing social surroundings in villages of northern Japan, Okinawa, northern Taiwan, and southern Korea between the late nineteenth century and the midtwentieth century. I hope a comparison of local narratives bridges some chasms bizarrely existent in the studies of Japan and its empire. The most obvious one is a geographical divide. Despite the classic calls to consider the deep link between the metropole and colonial societies, studies that cut across the Japanese Empire remain rare.7 The imperial spread of the seinendan not only offers a useful anchor that brings together different parts of the empire. It also underscores the importance of transcending today’s national boundaries to flesh out the larger dynamic of empirebuilding. Another chasm is a twin of the geographical divide. Modern nationbuilding, empire-building, and totalitarian wartime mobilization have been compartmentalized as different themes. In the Japanese Empire in particular, they were inseparable from one another. The processes and experiences of youth mobilization show the close overlap of these dimensions. The result of bridging these divides is a major remixing of historiographies and the emergence of previously ignored links. The rise of youthful rebelliousness in 1920s Japan has never been juxtaposed to the spread of anti-colonial youth groups during cultural rule in Taiwan and Korea. One might never have imagined how exconscripts in Japanese villages wrote their resumes in the late 1920s had anything to do with how hundreds of thousands of young men in the colonies applied to the volunteer soldier program later. Even stark differences among these societies, such as that in the schooling and literacy rates, are accorded new meanings by comparing their consequences. The new linkage should give some suggestive implications to studies of other colonial empires. But it is especially important to acknowledge it in the case of Japanese imperialism. This is because close linkage was the characteristic of the Japanese Empire, which had an exceptionally strong drive to homogenize diverse populations into a category of “Japanese.” <A> Japan’s Nation-Empire One implication offered by this trans-local study of youth mobilization is a new look at Japan’s assimilationism. A number of scholars have already analyzed the intellectual genealogy of assimilationist principles envisioned by Japanese politicians

and theorists, as well as policies full of dilemmas, contradictions, and fluctuations.8 Here, instead of unpacking debates about Japanese assimilationism, situating Japan in the global context will sufficiently show why Japanese leaders and colonialists from the top to the bottom, despite their diverse positions and disagreements, widely shared a drive to homogenize imperial subjects and aspired to form a nation across imperial domains—or what I call a “nation-empire.” For policymakers in Meiji Japan, building a nation and building an empire meant essentially the same thing. They commonly believed that the empire was a powerful version of the nation-state. In his lecture on Japanese colonial policies in 1914, Gotō Shinpei elaborated on the relationship between nationalism and imperialism. Educated in Germany, Gotō had established the colonial administration in Taiwan in 1898 and become the first president of the South Manchuria Railway Company in 1906. He was one of the most qualified experts to discuss Japanese colonial policies of the time. Gotō viewed imperialism as something that grows out of nationalism and argued that Japan finally joined the trend of European “national imperialism”9: Nationalism, having arisen in the nineteenth century, became truly a major political force. This force provides the strong with a supreme weapon, but it is clear that, for the weak, it is rather a suicidal weapon. The result of competition for survival among European powers is that weak states were forcefully assimilated as nationalism arose. The extreme cases include Ireland, Finland, Poland, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.10 Arguing that population pressures turned strong nations into colonial empires, he continued, “Japan was unaware of the trend of the nineteenth century in which the transition from the rise of nationalism to national imperialism generated the need for colonial policies,” and, without preparation, Japan entered the world of empires.11 Gotō was not alone in his view that a modern empire developed from a nation. We see a similar assumption in the Social Darwinist perspective, which spread across the world in the nineteenth century. In Japan, Katō Hiroyuki delivered a theory of survival of the fittest as the basic character of world politics and influenced many leaders in Japan and Asia by the 1880s.12 A Chinese reform activist Liang Qichao, for example, used the similar concept of national imperialism and the Social Darwinist view to explain China’s situation under European imperial powers.13 Both Gotō’s understanding of national imperialism and the Social Darwinist worldview reflected two dominant political trends of the late nineteenth century: aggressive imperialism and racial theories. When Meiji Japan was established in 1868, the dismemberment of Africa and the Pacific was rapidly accelerating. Jennifer Pitts has argued that European imperialists in the nineteenth century, compared to their predecessors, shared a widespread sense of “cultural or civilizational confidence.”14 They had long developed ideological legitimacy for overseas expansion using the language of liberalism and universalistic morality—bringing civilization to non-

European “barbaric” peoples. But by the late nineteenth century, the “nation” came to be defined increasingly by racial or ethnic coherence, leading to anti-colonial nationalisms and challenging the earlier logic of legitimacy for European imperialism.15 In imperial capitals, theories of racial differences came to dominate colonial policymaking as well. Even the presumably “color-blind” assimilationist empire like in French Algeria increasingly viewed colonial populations in racial terms.16 In this environment, Japan embarked on its modern statehood as a new nation and an empire simultaneously.17 Not only that, the crosscurrent forces of empires and racial and ethnic nations pushed Japan in one particular direction: the nationalization of its colonial empire, or “nation-empire” building.18 Born out of the late-nineteenth-century global context, Japanese assimilationism stood upon its own racial-ethnic assumptions, somewhat separate from those of the French Empire. For many Japanese colonial rulers, racial, ethnic, and cultural assimilation [dōka] was a sui generis logic of legitimacy. 19 In the French mission civilisatrice, the avowed goal of assimilation was the implementation of French republicanism, which the French claimed was universally applicable. In Japanese colonies, racial and ethnic descriptors defined the goal of assimilation, or in other words, the goal was set as to integrate colonial people into the “Yamato race.”20 For this reason, inter-marriages, especially Japanese women marrying Korean and Taiwanese men, were officially encouraged as a way to expand the “Yamato race.” The definitions of “Japanese nation” and “Yamato race,” the envisioned degrees of assimilation, and the advocated means to achieve it lacked consistency. Nevertheless, Japan’s assimilationism presumed the priority to make the colonized similar to the colonizer rather than to make the colonized better in the universal scale of civilization—although the difference between the two disappeared in measuring the “cultural level” of the colonized.21 Most of the Japanese colonial strategists assumed a continuation between the integration of Ezo (Hokkaidō, 1869) and Ryūkyū (Okinawa, 1879), and Karafuto (1905) and the acquisition of “outer territories,” including Taiwan (1895), Korea (1910), and Nanyō (1919). They envisioned Korea as a colony of agricultural settlement similar to Hakkaidō.22 Okinawans often heard the phrase: “Okinawa is the eldest son, Taiwan the second, and Korea the third.”23 In speeches and essays, the same-ness in racial and ethnic origins across these domains was emphasized repeatedly. The first Governor-General of Korea, Terauchi Masatake, defined the assimilation policy in the “Proclamation of Annexation” in 1910: “It is the natural and inevitable course of things that the two peoples [of Korea and Japan] whose countries are in close proximity with each other, whose interests are identical and who are bound together with brotherly feelings, should amalgamate and form one body.”24 The same-ness discourse increased in importance and became the premise for Pan-Asian unity over time. The kōminka policy implemented in Taiwan and Korea between 1937 and 1945, often translated as the “imperialization” or “imperial

subjectification” policy, sought racial and ethnic reprograming or “Japanization.” Aggressive Japanization policies were already familiar to Okinawan people in the Meiji period, to the extent that historians call it Okinawa’s kōminka.25 The kōminka demanded that Okinawans, Taiwanese, Koreans, and many more imperial subjects in other places speak, eat, walk, think, and die like ideal Japanese subjects. The aspiration for nation-empire building was also evident in the thick ruling apparatus resembling that of the nation-state. Among the empires, Japan deployed by far the largest number of colonial bureaucrats per capita. Colonial bureaucrats in Korea numbered 103,225 in 1942 for a population of roughly 20 million and 86,212 in Taiwan for a population of about 6 million in 1940.26 In contrast, slightly more than 1,200 British bureaucrats worked in the elite administrative division of the colonial service in Africa for an estimate population of 43 million. The Indian Civil Service had 1,250 covenanted members for a population of 353 million.27 In French West Africa, the colonial bureaucracy averaged 500 French officials for the population of 15 million in the 1920s. Indochina, with nearly 21.5 million people, had a larger bureaucracy, but it only numbered 5,000.28 In addition to government officials, schoolteachers and semi-governmental organizations facilitated intense rule over colonial people. Moral suasion [kyōka] groups operated simultaneously in Japan and its colonies to teach emperor-centered nationalism and modern living customs. Youth training programs were considered a part of this dense ruling apparatus. The diversion from the European norm of colonialism became clear particularly during the interwar years. All empires became increasingly sensitive to international reputation in the system created under the League of Nations, where they set standards and watched one another’s colonial practice. In this new international arena, indirect (associationist) colonial rule, a policy propagated by Lord Lugard in his 1922 The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, became the norm even for nonBritish empires. Imperial propagandists depicted indirect rule as more humane, more feasible, more far-sighted, and less costly than assimilationism or segregation. 29 Facing the shift in the global norm, however, the Japanese government paradoxically confirmed its assimilationist stance. 30 The “Wilsonian moment” of 1919—the Korean mass demonstrations for independence and the Taiwanese movement for self-rule—propelled Japan to seek more sophisticated means of assimilation rather than turning to indirect rule.31 In response to the independence movement, Prime Minister Hara Takashi argued that “[t]he desire of most Koreans is not for independence, but to be treated as equals of the Japanese. I intend to see to it that the Koreans have such equal opportunities in education, industry, and government position, as well as to undertake reform of local government along the same lines it has proceeded in Japan.” 32 During total mobilization for World War II, “Japanization” became a moral goal that would distinguish Japan from Western imperialism. Governor-General of Korea, Minami Jirō, argued that the initiation of military service in Korea was another step toward completion of a united Japan and

Korea. He declared, “our country’s rule of Korea is fundamentally different from colonial policies of Western powers.”33 The bottom-up analysis of youth mobilization in this book evaluates how this stubborn orientation for assimilationism was experienced by ordinary people at the grassroots level. Seeing beyond the overlay of national discourse, the juxtaposition of village cases shows the continuity and simultaneity, as well as fundamental gaps, between “domestic nationalization” and “colonial assimilation” with great concreteness. The pre-modern roots of the seinendan appealed to Japanese imperial leaders, who emphasized the departure from the Western model of imperialism. But at the same time, it meant an imposition of a Japanese method of social engineering onto the alien environments of colonial villages. How seinendan-style youth groups were received and translated in the local contexts gives us a glimpse of diverse local reactions to Japan’s assimilationist drive. Switching our viewpoint from the empire to mobilized youth also helps us reexamine our assumption about the powerful imperial state. The strong drive for nation-empire building and the signs of successful mobilization tend to create the image of a domineering, controlling, and hegemonic state machine. However, the processes of youth mobilization in villages, even in the metropole, were full of unexpected and convoluted results. We will see how clueless and ineffective officials and activists often were in influencing village societies. The real puzzle of Japanese assimilationist rule is thus not that of why Japanese policymakers pursued it against the global norm. It is rather that of how the Japanese Empire achieved a degree of success in Japanizing young men across the empire despite its fragile status as a mostly foreign colonizer. <A> Assimilation as Ideological Mobilization Japanese assimilationist policies were lopsided in stressing the homogenization of people’s behaviors and the fostering of loyalty among imperial subjects. Education was its primary means. Japanese teachers in the countryside, whether in Japan or its colonies, made every effort to instill “national consciousness,” so to speak, by teaching children the “correct” Japanese language and preaching them the ancient lineage and glory of the emperor. From the viewpoint of students, “Japanese-ness” was mostly measured by their demeanors alone. They were expected to show their blind worship for the emperor, speak accent-free Japanese, and be hardworking, hygienic, thrifty, and obedient. Even for colonial populations, Japanization required an acquisition of prescribed “Japanese” habits so they would become automatic reactions, not results of processed thoughts. Transforming people's behaviors and possibly consciousness was not a politically neutral act, to be sure. Postcolonial scholars of Taiwan and Korea emphasize the enforced subjugation of colonial peoples under policies of assimilation, especially during the Japanization period. Leo T. S. Ching has pointed out that Japanization concealed the inequality between

“natural” Japanese and “naturalized” Japanese in their political and economic rights.34 Korean historians often use the term “ethnic cleansing” to express the oppression of Korean collectivity. 35 Subjugation and differentiation through Japanization was not unique to formal colonies. For ethnic minorities and rural women in Japan, nationalization and assimilation meant a construction of the categories of barbaric selves, such as “primitive Okinawans,” contrasted against the idealized “Japanese.” To them, it also meant turning themselves into cheap and productive laborers useful in Japanese labor markets.36 For young men in villages of marginalized northern Japan, nationalization triggered dual feelings of self-loathe for being backward peasants and self-worth as pillars of Japanese agrarian ideals. At all fronts of assimilation, as Ching argues, the category of “Japanese” was constantly being negotiated. If we view the issue of Japanese nationalization and assimilation as power politics over the transformation of individuals, it opens up a whole new world of comparison to different kinds of polities beyond colonialism. Most of today’s scholars of modern histories view power not in terms of means of violence, but instead, in terms of control over people’s hopes and desires. The role of the modern state in power politics in particular has become the center of scholarly investigation. We have adopted a variety of concepts, such as hegemony, discipline, persuasion, and governmentality to identify invisible control of the modern state over individuals. These concepts have surely produced new avenues to analyze even the most brutal totalitarian regimes in history. Work on fascist and communist regimes has shown how the state exercised a pervasive cultural power in addition to violence and terror—Fascist Italy established what Victoria de Grazia has called a “culture of consent” through Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, the national leisure organization;37 the Nazi’s promised happiness and success to the members of Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people); 38 Stalinism offered a utopian socialist civilization to industrial workers. 39 Historians have also been eagerly locating the agency of individuals in their maneuvers, support, or resistance vis-à-vis the state. This approach has been attractive to historians of Japan’s colonial assimilation as well. Todd A. Henry, who offers an ethnography of public spaces in colonial Seoul, for example, views “Japanese assimilation” as “contested experiments of colonial governmentality” and frames his analysis in the binary of “the structures of Japanese rule” and “the multivocal agency of the subjects who filled its cracks.”40 Takashi Fujitani also considers wartime integration policies in Korea as an extension of governmentality.41 The application of state power theories to Japanese colonial rule, especially Fujitani’s juxtaposition of Koreans in the Japanese Empire and Japanese Americans in the United States, has broken the conventional “imperial-colonial” divide and shown a new possibility of comparisons to various kinds of rule. This book takes a step further. Instead of assuming the dichotomy between the power of the modern state vis-à-vis individuals that maneuver within it, I situate both

the state and people in ever-changing, intertwining layers of social relationships. Here I join the recent revival of scholarship that asserts the importance of social dynamics in studying totalitarian governance. Since Alf Lüdtke’s call for the “everyday history” of ordinary people under Nazi Germany in the 1980s, the field has expanded and shown the vibrant sphere of people’s activities.42 Most recent scholarship not only sharpened the analytical edge, investigating people’s social identity, bonding, grudge, and aspiration, but also expanded the geographical scope, reaching Mao’s China and Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, for example.43 These studies have shown the heterogeneity of the social sphere and led us to sometimes question the “totalitarian” nature of these regimes. This book will not stop at revealing the wide social appeal of the state ideology or diverse social activities hidden beneath seemingly domineering state control over private lives. It will claim that the transformation of individuals extremely useful to the state, even their internalization of a state ideology, was a product of changing social relationships. By the “internalization of a state ideology,” for the lack of better words, I refer to the phenomena in which people felt emotionally attached and committed to a set of beliefs and value system strongly promoted by the state. Other scholars might prefer using different terms, such as “identity conversion,” or even “brainwashing.” But the former presumes the mutually exclusive nature of (ethnic) identities, and the latter neglects the fluidity of people’s attitudes. My own expression could be misleading, too, if it gives an impression that people swallowed static ideas imposed from outside. Instead, they actively shaped the ideology by appropriating the ideas to their personal and social contexts.44 But it is important to note that it was more than obvious for people under mobilization, especially in the colonies, that the large part of the ideology came from the imperial state. Whatever cooptation it ensued, there was an awareness that by using the rhetoric of the imperial state, they increasingly availed themselves to the state mobilization machine. The word “internalization” might also invite epistemological critiques: Can we, and if so how, access people’s inner thought? People’s mindsets could be impossibly fragmented. As Jan Plamper warns about “the mind-boggling diversity of human thought, utterance, and action” to researchers of popular opinions in Stalinism, it is impossible to measure the degree of ideological belief in one individual.45 This is why I look for signs of emotional attachment, instead of people’s “true voice.” Close attention to social relationships is key in teasing out the formation of emotions surrounding Japanese imperial nationalism in specific local contexts. It is my hope that a comparative study like this rescues us from both the sea of supra-historical individualistic particularities and the pre-determined dichotomy of the state and its subjects and allows us to, however partially, uncover the social mechanism of ideological mobilization. <A> The Social Mobility Complex

De-centering the state in our inquiry is not to underemphasize the political nature of nationalization and assimilation. But it shifts the locus of politics down to people’s eye level. Various kinds of social tensions specific to the geographical and economic conditions, gender, and generations emerge as central in this kind of investigation. One social tension critically important to us comes from the perception of urban dominance widely held by rural residents. Like in many other parts of the world, the city-country binary became a dominant trope in Meiji Japan. Louise Young has observed that in contrast to the ideological value of the countryside cherished during the Tokugawa era, Meiji leaders firmly believed in urban supremacy. Cities, particularly Tokyo, became the face of modernity, and the countryside was considered “modernity’s Other.”46 I argue that equally important as visions of urban modernity (and urbanites’ rural nostalgia) were the new senses of being backward and being neglected shared by rural residents. After all, the majority of people lived in rural areas—roughly 70% of Japanese, 80% of Taiwanese and Korean lived in the countryside in the 1930s.47 They viewed urban modernity and urban culture as their “Other.” It is not a coincidence that agrarianism gained currency as the powerful form of nationalism across the globe. Despite its pervasiveness, few historians have given a thought to the psychology of rural residents behind urban centric development as an element that defined the era.48 A mere focus on the rural sphere does not necessarily reconstruct that aspect. Take a classic work by Richard Smethurst, in which he argued the rural seinendan and army reservist groups provided robust support for militarism in prewar Japan. He attributed it to the unchanging, feudalistic nature of village communities, reinforcing the image of the backward and problematic countryside. 49 The tendency to perpetuate urban hegemony is more blatant in writings on colonialism in general. David Prochaska, in his work on settler colonialism in French Algeria, explicitly stated, “[c]ities are more important relative to the countryside, and the European urban dwellers are more important than the European colons of the Algerian bled (countryside),” because “the urban centers of Algeria played a disproportionately important role in the history of the colony. It was here that settler society was first and most fully elaborated, it was here that Algerian nationalism arose and took root. In short, what went on in the cities largely determined what went on in Algeria as a whole. Whoever controlled the urban centers… controlled to a large extent what went on in the colony itself.”50 Although not as explicitly expressed, this mindset seems to prevail among many historians of Japanese imperialism. There is a heavy emphasis on colonial capitals in the English-language historiography, and “colonial modernity” often refers to advanced technologies, urban landscape, intellectual discourses, middle-class lifestyles, and mass media, all of which were distant images to the majority of colonial populations.51

For sure, colonial capitals were fascinating places. But unless research goes beyond urban centers can we not see even the position of the capital in colonial society, let alone a big picture of colonial dynamism. As a historical fact, Prochaska’s assumption that views cities as a microcosm of the entire colony was not shared by Japanese colonizers of the 1930s. Colonial agents more keenly studied how rural populations lived Japanese rule than today’s historians have been. Villages experienced colonialism differently. On the one hand, as many Marxist scholars have emphasized, the exploitation of peasants was systemic.52 On the other, with fewer interactions with Japanese settlers, the boundary between “us” and “them” evolved less around the colonizer-colonized divide. As we will see, more than their hate of the colonizer, their sense of antagonism toward urban residents and intellectuals occupied many village youth’s minds. In the 1930s, their convoluted feelings of envy, grudge, and rivalry vis-à-vis their urban counterparts became a social glue among seinendan members across the empire. By appropriating the global and imperial discourse of agrarianism, many youth in the countryside attempted to imagine a rural modernity—defined fluidly by the denial, transformation, or imitation of urban modernity. In short, the trope of urban-rural binary created a specific social dynamic and sentiment among young people in the countryside, which enormously impacted how imperial policies of nationalization and assimilation reached them. Another social tension worth an emphasis is that of generations. The elevated status of “youth” [J: seinen, MC: qingnian, K: ch’ŏngnyŏn] since the late nineteenth century and during the most of the twentieth century in the East Asian public discourses coincided with the global emergence of “modern youth” as the main protagonist of modernization and revolutions. Before that global moment, different classes, occupations, locations, and genders had developed their own ways of conceptualizing age progression and organizing age groups. But in most parts of neo-Confucian societies, the idea of “youth,” expressed in various terms, was locked within the spectrum from childhood to seniority and was rarely highlighted as the most important part of a lifespan or the most noteworthy age group. The hierarchy of generations was highly important in regulating people’s everyday lives because it specified statuses and roles of individuals in the familial, social, and sexual relationships.53 “Youth” came to life as an independent category when society faced massive changes in the late nineteenth century. The Japanese term, seinen, to specifically refer to the new category of “modern youth,” is said to have been born out of an 1880 translation of the Young Men Christian Association. Although the term itself appeared in earlier texts, its use for the YMCA dramatically changed the connotation of the word, soon generating a whole genre of seinen magazines and theories about seinen.54 The attention to new youth grew rapidly by absorbing various concerns of the time. Youth was first and foremost viewed as the main driver for modernization

by social commentators like Tokutomi Sohō. These “youth” were encouraged to develop national consciousness and acquire Western knowledge. For state officials, “youth” also became a graspable category that gave legibility to the abstract “masses.” They considered guiding this impressionable group of population as key to mass control. People living under national and imperial formations and rapid industrialization were also experiencing an unfamiliar and unexpected social phenomenon: distinctly divided generations.55 A decade apart in birth years now meant a substantial difference in experiences and mindsets. In short, the mix of hope and anxiety about living under dramatic social changes was reflected in the growing discourse of youth. The modern concept of youth thus had a universalizing effect across classes and locations but created a new social tension between generations. The imagined universality of youth was a driving force for various uniformed youth groups in the twentieth century, be it the imperial and colonial Boy Scouts, Mussolini’s Opera Nazionale Balilla, the Hitler Jugend, or the Soviet Komsomol. Studies on these groups point to the fact that the new generational perceptions were the cause, not the result, of the popularity of these groups, although these groups further widened generational divisions.56 At the same time, as we will see throughout the book, the idea of youth was another entity that was heavily modified according to the social and individual contexts. The seinen discourse certainly awakened many village youth in the Japanese Empire, but how young people digested it and how it changed their lives varied significantly. Young villagers’ engagement in the politics of becoming modern youth was another factor that determined the ways and processes of nationalization and assimilation. Finally, another major source of social tensions, regrettably not examined thoroughly in this book, is gender. Becoming the modern youth, which specifically had a male-gender connotation, presupposed departure from the previous way of reaching “manhood.” Because manhood and manliness had been closely intertwined with the age hierarchy, redefining the statuses of age groups inevitably affected gender formations. In Japanese villages, the premodern hamlet male youth groups already functioned as a site where young men who passed coming-of-age (around 15 sai) experienced and developed masculinity. Engaging in social duties, group entertainment, and control of sexuality of female villagers through the local youth group elevated the masculine quality of individual men and confirmed the overall male domination in village affairs.57 In establishing the modern seinendan, however, many became extremely eager to reform the previous customs of the hamlet youth groups, including how their sexuality and masculinity should develop—premarital sex came to be abhorred in the public discourse, and the introduction of army conscription in 1873 redefined the source of masculinity.58 Nonetheless, both in practice and as a symbol, the masculinity-producing character of the seinendan barely changed since before Meiji. At the same time, the construction of masculinity was

no longer constrained by village boundaries, but influenced by national, imperial, and global elements. Mastering and deploying the rhetoric of Japanese imperial nationalism became a part of gender-defining process. Similarly, the seinendan built in the colonial countryside intervened into the processes of gender construction specific to the locality. The reason that I was not able to expand on an analysis of gender politics surrounding rural youth mobilization is because manliness was defined by too large a number of contradictory factors. Starting from being youthful and disciplined and having experienced military service, being rural against “effeminate urban and intellectual youth,” being hardworking and thrifty in contrast to the “modern girl,” and being knowledgeable, being eloquent, being quiet, and being cosmopolitan, all boosted a young man’s masculine quality. While they had various kinds of “Other” against which they asserted masculinity, young rural women rarely became the opposite pole. Men occasionally gave women a space to participate in the construction of “rural” and “youth” and to express female views, but men usually did not have to negotiate with women about masculinity attached to either “rural” or “youth.” In short, politics of constructing manliness overlapped too much with too many social battles, and at the same time, it engaged too little with the opposite gender. This characteristic of politics of masculinity prevented me from demarcating its contours. I hope future studies with other vantage points will give a more critical analysis of rural politics of both masculinity and femininity.59 The case study chapters of this book (Chapters 2,3, 5-8) focus on how various social tensions, including the ones described above, affected lives and worldviews of young men in the countryside, and how they shaped the processes of nation-empire building at the grassroots level. I use a term, “social mobility complex,” to refer to the mechanism in which many social elements came together to push young men to the embrace of Japanese imperial nationalism. I named it so because the core of the mechanism was the perception of upward social mobility. But this was not about a calculation of material interests. Rather, the emphasis rests on the sense of selftransformation from perpetual peasants to success-seeking modern youth. This was usually triggered by new job positions available to graduates of youth training institutions, or opportunities to continue building up their credential as “model rural youth.” Tangible benefits were important because they changed the psychological state of young farmers. This is why class matters. The main protagonists of the social mobility complex were young men in the “middling class” in each village society. In the Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese countryside, the changes in methods of agricultural production, land reforms, and the decline (or consolidation) of traditional landlords, and many other factors gave birth to the new social class especially around the mid-1920s.60 They cultivated a sufficiently large area of land and secured a relatively stable source of income. Their sons were well-off enough to attend at least six-years of elementary school and often the additional two-year

upper-level program. But they were not affluent enough to be able to pursue higher education in cities. In the coming chapters, I sometimes use the phrase “minimallyeducated” or “little-educated” to describe them in contrast to those who continued on formal education, but the reader should remember that those who graduated from the upper-level program “had quite a high level of knowledge” and “were probably better at writing than those who go on to university nowadays, and the proportion of graduates was also roughly similar” as the historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki argues.61 Sons of the middling-class families equipped with high-level of literacy formed the most ambitious group in each village during the interwar years. Not incidentally, this group of young men provided by far the largest supply of soldiers, exceeding its demographic proportion. 62 Accompanying the perception of social mobility was the collective identity as “rural youth” that spread across the countryside. This was made possible through the expansive communicational sphere in newsletters and publications circulated among seinendan members. The shared identity and confidence as “rural youth” in turn implanted a sense of moral superiority over intellectuals, urban youth, and older generations among participants. In building moral superiority, Japanese agrarian nationalism became the common token. Young men enthusiastically appropriated it in their local contexts and internalized it when they deployed the rhetoric in their writings and speeches. The emergence of this mechanism was perhaps not clearly noticed even in contemporaries’ eyes. Yet it rendered a quiet revolution in many young villagers’ lives. Far from being obedient and feudalistic as often labeled, these supporters of Japanese militarism and agrarian nationalism in the countryside were subversive, career-seeking, and outward-looking modern beings. The writings of those who thrived in the social mobility complex show that the process was filled with emotions, including joy, bonding, grudge, grievance, envy, and jealousy. Their emotional attachment to Japanese nationalism—what I view as synonymous with the internalization of the ideology—transpired in the experience of sharing these emotions using the prose of the state. This might remind historians of emotions of the formation of what Barbara H. Rosenwein calls an “emotional community.” 63 Our inquiry does not concern the boundaries of emotional communities or youth’s peculiar emotional discourse, however. For us, the widespread sharing of emotions proves the centrality of social relationships. In youth training institutions, youth was defined as the target of discipline—an opposite of emotional beings. But their iron discipline was a product of their emotions shared in their local social complexities. In other words, emotions not only indicate the strong embrace of the ideology, but also underscore the grassroots, haphazard, fluid nature of ideological indoctrination. <A> Villages and Individuals

This book offers multiple comparisons. One is that of representation and real people. The discursive construction of “rural youth” among national leaders in Japan and among colonial intellectuals in Taiwan and Korea is analyzed in Chapters 1 and 4 respectively in order to be contrasted to village experiences. How that representation ceased to function in empire-wide programs, including soldiering in the Japanese military, is explored in Chapter 9. Throughout, “rural youth” (with or without parentheses) indicates the discursive entity, and “village youth” and “agrarian youth” mean actual people living in the countryside. The largest portion of the book is a comparison of three villages: Shida village, Shida county in Miyagi prefecture (Chapters 2 and 3), Beipu village, Zhudong country in Xinzhu province (Chapters 5 and 6), and Kwangsŏk village, Nonsan country in South Ch’ungch’ŏng province (Chapters 7 and 8). In villages, representation and reality were more closely negotiated. Implied in the village cases is a comparison of “inner territories” [naichi] as the main islands of Japan including Okinawa, Karafuto, and Hokkaido were called, and “outer territories” [gaichi] or the formal colonies. I was impelled to put “so-called” in front of these terms in the Part titles because the naichi-gaichi divide is not necessarily useful in understanding the lives of village youth. This was particularly the case in Okinawa, which will be explored in Interlude after Chapter 3. Focusing on the rural sphere, I consciously avoid the analytic of colonial modernity—there was no inherently “colonial” kind of modernity for these village youth. One might wonder how representative of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea these villages are and how comparable they are to one another. I did not aim to find a representative village of each country, although I believe these villages share common characteristics with many other villages. Nor did I seek perfect comparability among the three villages beyond the observation that they were equally small and peripheral in national-imperial politics. The primary goal of comparing villages is to suggest a new way to dissect the empire. These villages show the diversity of experience in present-day national boundaries and even within one village. Equally important is that they show patterns across the empire. Unless we recognize micro-level patterns, we will remain puzzled by how the empire could, despite its coercive character, ideologically mobilize such a huge proportion of young populations across its domains. Individuals’ accounts are useful because they reveal subtle changes in their social positions. I introduce one or two men in each case study. In the Shida chapters, I discuss the case of Katō Einojō (1904-1987). Katō was the eldest son of a landlord, not an example of an average farmer. He kept detailed records of his private youth group called the Aratanome 4-H Club, as well as documents on village administration and wartime mobilization. Personal accounts of average farmers of the 1920s and 1930s are hard to obtain, but his group journal and local administrative documents provides some voices of neighborhood farmers.

In Taiwan, I focused on stories of Xu Chongfa (1922-) and Huang Yuanxing (1925-). Huang and Xu belonged to the average class of village youth in Xinzhu. After elementary school, both went to a number of youth training programs in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They insisted that we speak in Japanese during the interviews although I spoke with their families in Mandarin Chinese. In the aftermath of the war, Xu, a then-assistant instructor at Xinzhu province’s youth training institute, brought home a library of personal letters from trainees, instructors’ notes, attendance records, newsletters, and photo albums the night before the Guomindang force came to confiscate the facility. Thanks to his collection, I could examine an unusually rich amount of personal details. In Korea, I was fortunate enough to locate and interview Kim Yŏng-han (1920). 64 Kim grew up as the eldest son of a family in Kwangsŏk village, South Ch’ungch’ŏng. After elementary school, he participated in youth programs and obtained jobs in local administration as a model rural youth. He kept a few photos and records of his youth training and, as a local historian, collected a large number of materials from the colonial period. During our interviews, we constantly switched between Korean and Japanese. On the one hand, he was careful in narrating his involvement in colonial mobilization. He remained in touch with few friends of this period partly because many left the region during and after the Korean War. On the other hand, he emphasized the importance of youth training in formative years of his life. He sang Japanese military songs in public and wrote down the lyrics without my soliciting. He criticized Korean Marxist historians, saying, “they don’t know the real situation of the countryside,” showing confidence in his first-hand knowledge of village affairs. Altogether, stories of these individuals and villages show us how micro-level social tensions and relationships formed the social mobility complex and haphazardly came to support Japan’s goal of nation-empire building. Their cases also give us a stable anchor in analyzing the dramatic shifts in the postwar period, as discussed in Chapter 10. I am fully aware that, besides questionable generalizability, the materials I use, particularly oral histories, have a risk of inaccuracy and require consideration of how their memories were constructed and narrated. My role as an interviewer—a female Japanese researcher studying at an American institution (then)—might have influenced what interviewees said and how they phrased it. I assume that postcolonial situations—their relationships with the new rulers and the growth of Taiwanese and Korean nationalisms—affected their narratives. Despite these issues, the interviewees provided vivid pictures of everyday lives in the countryside we would never gain from archival materials. Being able to see their expressions and hear the tone of their voices helped me discern more than I could with colonial official reports and newspapers—these printed sources, too, have issues in accuracy and reflect the intentions of unidentifiable authors after all. The personal histories

reveal the whole range of emotions formed in their immediate social relationships. That gives us a clue to the puzzles of why these people aspired to become model rural youth and how youth mobilization of the Japanese Empire operated in such intensity and scale.

Xu Chongfa, “Seinendan o megurite,” October 7, 1943 (Xu’s personal archive).

Kondō Masami, Sōryokusen to Taiwan (Tokyo: Tōsui Shobō, 1996), 371-3. In the survey of the first three months of applications, 58.6% were from the agricultural sector. Those in other industries but from rural villages clearly exceeded this number.

Chou Wan-yao (Zhou Wanyao), “Riben zaiTai junshi dongyuan yu Taiwanren de haiwai canzhan jingyan,” Taiwanshi yanjiu 2.1 (June 1995): 97-102.

Naimushō, Taiheiyō Senka no Chōsen oyobi Taiwan (1944), in Miyata Setsuko, Chōsen minshū to “kōminka” seisaku (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1985), 62. On the military recruitment in colonial Korea, see: Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 2011); Brandon Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan's War, 19371945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013).

“Soldiers” include volunteer soldiers, conscripts, and civilian military personnel. Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy; Chou Wan-yao (Zhou Wanyao), ed., Taiji Ribenbing zuotanhui jilu bing xiangguan ziliao (Taipei: Institute of Taiwan History Preparatory office, Academia Sinica, 1997); Hui-yu Caroline Ts’ai (Cai Huiyu), ed., Zouguo liangge shidai de ren: Taiji Riben bing (Taipei: Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, 1997). On the issue of public memory of Taiwanese soldiers in the Japanese army, see: Shi-chi Mike Lan, “(Re-)Writing History of the Second World War: Forgetting and Remembering the Taiwanese-Native Japanese Soldiers in Postwar Taiwan,” Positions: Asia Critique 21, no. 4 (December 10, 2013): 801–51. 6 American intelligence analyzed the Japanese-sponsored groups. “Japanese Attempts at Indoctrination of Youth in Occupied Areas,” (February 5, 1945), FOIA no. 0000709428, available at Central Intelligence Agency website (last accessed December 1, 2017). 5

Fred Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006); Andre Schmid, “Colonialism and the ‘Korea Problem’ in the Historiography of Modern Japan: a Review Article,” The Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 4 (November 1, 2000): 951–76.

Mark E. Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009); Oguma Eiji, “Nihonjin” no kyōkai: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, Chōsen shokuminchi shihai kara fukki undō made (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1998); Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi teikoku Nihon no bunka tōgō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996), for example. For the effects and politics of assimilationism in colonial Seoul, see Todd Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). On the wartime integration, see Fujitani, Race for Empire.

Gotō Shinpei, Nihon shokumin seisaku ippan, Nihon bōchōron (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1944), 49.

Ibid, 48.

Ibid, 50-51.

Yoshida Hiroji, Katō Hiroyuki no kenkyū (Tokyo: Ōhara Shinseisha, 1976), 71-117.

Limin Bai, “Children as the Youthful Hope of An Old Empire: Race, Nationalism, and Elementary Education in China 1895-1915,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 213-214. On the ways in which Korean intellectuals and authors were influenced by Social Darwinism, see Vladimir Tikhonov, Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: The Beginnings (1880s-1910s): “Survival” as an Ideology of Korean Modernity (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010).

Jennifer Pitts, A Turn To Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism In Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 14.

For eighteenth-century liberal thinkers like J.S. Mill, nationhood was “an achievement of civilization,” not applicable to “barbarians.” Pitts, A Turn To Empire, 143-144.

See: Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 19-54.

For discussion on external and internal conditions that drove Japan into imperialism, see Mark Peattie, “Introduction” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, ed. Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1-52; Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

There are a number of scholars who attempt to capture the overlap between nation-state and empire. Yamamuro Shin’ichi uses the term “kokumin teikoku,” which could also be translated as “national empire” or “nation-empire.” What he means by it is the prototype of modern empires that has the nation-state at home and a multi-racial empire abroad. Yamamuro Shin’ichi, “Kokumin teikoku no shatei,” in Teikoku no kenkyū: genri, ruikei, kankei, ed. Yamamoto Yūzō (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2003), 87-128; See also Tomoko Akami, “The Nation-State/Empire as a Unit of Analysis in the History of International Relations: A Case Study in Northeast Asia, 1868-1933,” in The Nation State and Beyond: Governing Globalization Processes in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Isabella Löhr and Roland Wenzlhueme (Verlag: Springer, 2013), 177-208; Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).

See Mark Peattie, “Japanese Attitudes toward Colonialism, 1895-1945” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 80-127.

For more detail on the concepts of race and ethnicity in Japanese imperial rhetoric, see Kevin Doak, "The Concept of Ethnic Nationality and its Role in Pan-Asianism in Imperial Japan," in Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders, ed. Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (New York: Routledge, 2007), 168-82; Oguma Eiji, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen: nihonjin no jigazō no keifu (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1995).

See Michael Kim, “The Colonial Public Sphere and the Discursive Mechanism of Mindo,” in Mass Dictatorship and Modernity, ed. Michael Kim, et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 178-202.

Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 9.

Higa Shunchō, “Nengetsu to tomoni,” Okinawa taimusu, March 11, 1964, quoted in Ōta Masahide, Okinawa no minshū ishiki (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1976), 337.

Government-General of Chosen, Annual Report on Reforms and Progress in Chosen (Korea) 19101911 (Seoul: Government-General of Chosen), 242, trans. Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 116.

Ōta Masahide, Okinawa no minshū ishiki (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1976), 341-344.

Okamoto Makiko, Shokuminchi kanryō no seijishi: Chōsen, Taiwan Sōtokufu to teikoku Nihon (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2008), 51 and 60.

John Cell, “Colonial Rule,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire Volume IV The Twentieth Century, ed. Judith Brown and WM. Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 232.

Martin Thomas, The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 83. Finding out the numbers of colonial civil servants in Algeria, especially after 1870 when military rule transitioned to more assimilative administration, requires elaborate work beyond my means. This is because in the system called rattachements, many administrative services in Algeria were directly controlled by the ministries in Paris, not by the government-general in Algeria.

Susan Pedersen calls it the “Lugardian moment.” See: Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 107-111; Cell, “Colonial Rule.” Alice L. Conklin, A Mission To Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa 1895-1903 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 142-211; Thomas, The French Empire, 54-89, on associationism in the French colonies; Elizabeth Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 141-167.

On the Wilsonian moment, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). On the acceleration of assimilation under cultural policy in the 1920s, see Komagome; Caprio; Uchida; Michael Kim. On policy analysis, See also: Kasuya Ken’ichi, “Chōsen Sōtokufu no bunka seiji,” in Iwanami kōza Kindai Nihon to shokuminchi 2: Teikoku tōchi no kōzō, ed. Ōe Shinobu, et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992), 121-146.

For an example of assimilationist operations in the interwar period, see: Sayaka Chatani, “The Ruralist Paradigm: Social Work Bureaucrats in Colonial Korea and Japan's Assimilationism in the Interwar Period,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no.4 (October 2016): 1004-1031.

Hara Takashi, Hara Takashi nikki, VIII (Tokyo: Kangensha, 1950-1955), 563, trans. and quoted in Peattie, “Japanese Attitudes,” 107.

“Shiganhei kunrenjo no kaishoshiki ni atarite,” Chōsen nippō (editorial), June 15, 1938.

Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, June 2001), 6.

For example, see: Ch’oe Yuri, Ilche malgi singminji chibae chŏngch’aek yŏn’gu (Seoul: Kukhak Ch’aryŏwŏn, 1997).

Tomiyama Ichirō, Kindai Nihon shakai to “Okinawajin”: “Nihonjin” n inaru to yū koto (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 1990), 236; David Howell, Geographies of Identity in NineteenthCentury Japan (Bekeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Mariko Asano Tamanoi, Under the Shadow of Nationalism: Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), 85-114.

Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher, eds., In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence, and Agency in Mussolini's Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

See Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, “Volksgemeinschaft: Writing the Social History of the Nazi Regime” in Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, eds. Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto (Oxford University Press, 2015), 1-26; Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany 1930-1945 (London: Routledge, 2013).

Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

Henry, Assimilating Seoul, 3.

Fujitani, Race for Empire. Other examples that use the Foucauldian approach (sometimes partially) to Japanese colonization of Korea includes, but are not limited to: Theodore Jun Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health 1910-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Hui-yu Caroline Ts'ai, Taiwan in Japan's Empire Building: an Institutional Approach to Colonial Engineering (New York: Routledge, 2009).

See, for example: Alf Lüdtke ed, The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, translated by William Templer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

See Patrick Bernhard, “Renarrating Italian Fascism: New Directions in the Historiography of a European Dictatorship,” Contemporary European History 23, no.1 (2014): 151-163; Paul Corner, ed., Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Alf Lüdtke, ed., Everyday Life in Mass Dictatorship: Collusion and Evasion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson, eds., Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Suzy Kim, Everyday in the North Korean Revolution 1945-1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, trans. Ethan Mark (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

This point is inspired by Jochen Hellbeck’s claim that ideology exists only in the act of individual appropriation, rejecting the view that dichotomizes “self” and “ideology” as preexisting poles. But my goal here is to analyze how social forces conditioned and caused the process of appropriation, not whether particular “selfhood” was constructed through it. Jochen Hellbeck, “Liberation from Autonomy: Mapping Self-Understanding in Stalin’s Time,” in Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes, 49-63.

Jan Plamper, “Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism,” in Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes, 75.

Louise Young, Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern life in Interwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 84.

The precise figures differ depending on how one defines “rural” areas. According to the 1930 census, about 49 million (76%) lived in “gun-bu” (villages and towns under the population size of 20 thousand) and 15.4 million (24%) lived in “shi-bu” in 1930. In the same

year in Korea, 94.4% lived in “gun-bu” and 5.6% in “fu-bu,” and 81% of working population engaged in agriculture. In Taiwan’s 1930 census, nearly 4.4 million (84%) lived in “gun-bu” and 846 thousand (16%) lived in “shi-bu.” 48

The pioneer in this attempt is Ann Waswo, “The Transformation of Rural Society 19001905,” in The Cambridge History Of Japan Volume 6 The Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Duus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 539-605.

Richard Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 11.

Todd A. Henry acknowledges the critique on the heavy emphasis on urban history. Henry, Assimilating Seoul, 11, esp. fn 35. Work that has intervened into the urban-centric historiography includes: Albert L. Park. Building A Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015); Yumi Moon, Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896-1910 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). Two chapters in Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea (Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) do discuss the rural revitalization policy and the peasant discourse, but they both focus on the intellectuals and policymakers: Gi-Wook Shin and Do-Hyun Han, "Colonial Corporatism: The Rural Revitalization Campaign, 1932-1940," 70-96; Clark Sorensen, “National Identity and the Construction of the Category ‘Peasant’ in Colonial Korea,” 288-310.

See, for example: Pank Kie-chung and Michael D. Shin, Landlords, Peasants, and Intellectuals in Modern Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010). For a more systematic analysis, refer to: Gi-wook Shin, Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996).

“Children” and “childhood” had been recognized as a more separate category than “youth” had been in neo-Confucian societies. Kee-hun Lee [Yi Ki-hun], “Ilcheha ch'ŏngnyŏn tamnon yŏn’gu” (PhD diss., Seoul National University, 2005), 15-28; Ping-chen Hsiung, A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Chen Yingfang, “Qingnian” yu Zhongguo de shehui bianqian (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2007), 122.

Tani Teruhiro, Seinen no seiki (Tokyo: Dōseisha, 2003), 29-31.

See Richard Evan Jobs and David M. Pomfret, “The Transnationality of Youth,” in Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, eds. Jobs and Pomfret (London: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2015) 3-4.

A large number of studies have been done on these groups. Some of the relatively recent ones include: Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Timothy H. Parsons, Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004); Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Jobs and Pomfret, eds., Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century; Mark Roseman, eds., Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770-1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Nagano Hiroko, “Collective Maturation: The Construction of Masculinity in Early Modern Villages,” trans. Anne Walthall in Recreating Japanese Men, eds. Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 203-215.

Morris Low, “The Emperor’s Sons Go To War: Competing Masculinities in Modern Japan,” in Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan, eds. Kim Louie and Morris Low (London and New York: Rutledge, 2003), 81-99; Theodore F. Cook, Jr., “Making ‘Soldiers’: The Imperial Army and the Japanese Man in Meiji Society and State,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, eds. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 259-294.

See: Watanabe Yōko, Kindai Nihon joshi shakai kyōiku seiritsushi (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1997). On education on women in colonial Korea, see Kim Puja, Shokuminchiki Chōsen no kyōiku to jendā (Yokohama: Seori Shobō). On the seinendan for young women in colonial Taiwan, see Miyazaki Seiko, “Shokuminchiki Taiwan ni okeru josei no eijenshī ni kansuru ichi kōsatsu,” Jendā kenkyū 6 (March 2003): 85-108; Miyazaki Seiko, “Taiwan ni okeru joshi no seinendan to shokojin no keiken (1939-45-nen),” Gendai Taiwan kenkyū 39 (March 2011): 62-83. For studies of rural women, see also: Tamanoi, Under the Shadow of Nationalism; Simon Partner, Toshié: a Story of Village Life in Twentieth Century Japan (Bekeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). 60 Ann Waswo, “The Transformation of Rural Society 1900-1905,” in The Cambridge History Of Japan Volume 6 The Twentieth Century, ed. by Peter Duus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 451-605. Shin, Peasant Protest, esp. Chapter 4; Ōkado Masakatsu, “Meibōka chitsujo”; Chih-Ming Ka, Japanese Colonialism in Taiwan: Land Tenure, Development, and Dependency, 1895-1945 (Boulder: Westview, 1995), esp. Chapter 4. 61 A quote of Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s interview by Ethan Mark. Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Grassroots Fascism, 15. 62 Watanabe Tsutomu, “Dare ga heishi ni nattanoka (2),” Kansei Gakuin Daigaku Shakaigakubu kiyō 119 (October 2014): 19-36, esp. 19-21. 63 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University press, 2006); See also Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context: Journal of the History and Philosophy of the Emotions 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–32. 59

His extensive interview by the National Institute of Korean History appears in: Kuksa P’yŏnch’an Wiwŏnhoe, Chibang ŭl salda: chibang haengjŏng, 1930 yŏndae esŏ 1950 yŏndae kkaji (Kwach’ang-si: Kuksa P'yŏnch'an Wiwŏnhoe, 2006), 2-220.