Introduction: Standing in a Place, Imagining a Space
The adjective “abnormal” is often used to describe Japan in the context of world politics. Some may see this as a mere self-branding or an out-of-date stereotype. However, it has been widely used not only in scholarly analyses but also in broader geopolitical and geoeconomic discourses until today. At the same time, Japan is more often than not labeled as a “model” to which the non-Western world should aspire. An interesting consequence of this ambivalent identification of Japan is that it has contributed to the construction of fault lines in world politics. This has been the case at least until quite recently when China as another “abnormal great power” (Huang 2015) has come to attract attention.
To illustrate, in a 2003 speech at the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment of Democracy, the then US President George W. Bush claimed, “[s]ome skeptics of democracy assert that the traditions of Islam are inhospitable to the representative government. This “cultural condescension,” as Ronald Reagan termed it, has a long history. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, a so-called Japan expert asserted that democracy in that former empire would ‘never work’” (National Endowment for Democracy 2003; see also Dower 2011: 14). Here, Japan is drawn as the first example to attest the validity of American promotion of democracy. Throughout the American War on Terror, Japan was frequently referred to. Osama Bin Laden compared his attack on the World Trade Center to the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, whereas American media wrote that the same attack invoked
© The Author(s) 2019
A. Watanabe, Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination, Critical Security Studies in the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04399-5_1
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Americans Pearl Harbor, which started the Pacific War in 1941. In the meantime, the renowned historian John Dower criticized the Bush administration daring to equate it to Imperial Japanese government (Dower 2011, 2012). In this way, Japan has acted as a gatekeeper, if not “the front office” (Jackson 2009: 57), of the West and/or modernity. Japan’s exceptionalism is a geopolitical question, which is at a glance fairly extraneous to real geography. Whether Japan is part of the West or not is, at least for Japanese specialists, a recurrent puzzle. Patrick Jackson (2006), calling such a fanciful geopolitical imagination the “West Pole Fallacy,” asserts that “the West is a very decentralized and disorganized actor” and there is “no organization or individual uniquely endowed with the authority to speak and act in its name—and hence no central court of appeals to which potential Western actors can be referred to determine whether or not they are acceptable” (Jackson 2009: 57). Despite the fact that the West has no territoriality like a sovereign state, Jackson claims, “any claimant has an already-existing historical tradition on which to draw when articulating a specific instantiation of the West in their specific local context” (ibid.: 58). Japan, then, is a claimant as well as respondent in spite of the fact that it shares no geographical and historical tradition with any “Western” country. Japan’s true “freakishness” (Hopf 2018) is that it belongs to nowhere but is situated on the fault line of East and West, and perhaps even of South and North, if not an independent civilization as categorized by Samuel Huntington (1996; see also Umesao 1967).
This evolution of kaleidoscopic Japanese identification has happened, perhaps paradoxically, in tandem with the global proliferation of Western “scientific” knowledge since the eighteenth century on the one hand, having the regression of geographical perception that accompanies it on the other. The narrative begins with the arrival of the US black ships in 1853, symbolizing Western technology. As a reaction, Japan, which had adopted an isolationist policy until then, established the first non-Western modern nation-state, assertively assimilating Western political institutions. It was the period when the well-known Japanese enlightenment thinker Yukichi Fukuzawa1 wrote his famous Datsu-A-Ron (de-Asianization thesis), which was first published in 1885, and his seminal An Outline of Theory of Civilization (Fukuzawa 1995, 2009: Watanabe 2018). In 1905, Japan won the Russo-Japanese War. It was said that, having introduced the European military system and financially supported by American capitalists, Japan joined the circle of Great Powers. This victory, however, brought Japan a mighty depression.
INTRODUCTION:
During the Taisho period (1912–1926), Japan domestically pursued democracy. It was said of the period that prewar Japan was in a sense the most democratic and Westernized. Following Taichiro Mitani (1974: 8), this was when Japanese people tried to re-define what “the state” meant. In the mid-1930s when Japan launched the Asia-Pacific War, however, many intellectuals began to assert that Japan must return to Asia, the East (Toyo)—or part of To-a (East Asia). This debate insisted on overcoming the West, modernity, and science. The irony was that it was the fruit of Western science that made Japan decide to accept an unconditional surrender in 1945: the atomic bombs. Throughout the subsequent US occupation and (re)democratization, Japan was reabsorbed into the West. One of the decisive intellectual events that oriented the discourse of exception is evidenced in 1949, when the Historical Science Society (Rekishigaku Kenkyukai) had its general conference theme of the year “the general law of history.” Regretting the wartime discourse in which many scholars asserted that Asian states including Japan were historically different from European states, the conference claimed that from that time onward, Asia should be analyzed as “exception” of European law (Toyama 1966). Another irony for Japan was that it was during this period that the world saw the rise of nationalism in non-Western countries. Nonetheless, in the discipline of International Relations (IR), this revisionist move caused no conflict until quite recently, and possibly, even now. As the debate circles around Japan’s postwar security arrangement, with which the state entrusts at least nominally its whole defense to the United States, and that cannot be neatly explained with the framework of territorial sovereignty, its focus has been on whether Japan’s behavior is abnormal. To be sure, there have been different perspectives; constructivists tend to argue that the standard of abnormality is an (inter-subjective) social construction (see Hook et al. 2005; Hagström 2015) in contrast to a realist perspective which is likely to lead to a black-or-white judgment. Despite the difference in perspectives, Japan is still treated as an exception. Thus, in a sense, it is Western science that has brought this permeable geopolitical identification as part of the West to Japan. At the same time, however, the occasional revisionist moves, including the recent “conservative” turn under the Abe administration, might give rise to the suspect that Japan has not at all abandoned its geography.
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Place, SPace, and PoliticS: the GeoPolitical Unity of diSUnity
Space and political theory have moved into focus more than ever for students of international politics. However, it is not yet the case as far as Japan is concerned. A question which has recently come to the fore in the discipline of IR is whether there is non-Western theory or not (Inoguchi 2007; Shimizu et al. 2008; Acharya and Buzan 2007, 2017; Acharya 2014; Buzan 2016). This puzzle is in tandem with the concern about whether IR can ensure plurality in world politics (Buzan and Little 2001; see also a special issue of European Journal of International Relations 2013). In East Asia, while the debate on the Chinese School is lively (Zhao 2006; Callahan 2008; Lynch 2009; Qin 2016), that on Japanese School is mostly absent (Shimizu et al. 2008; Shimizu 2015; Watanabe and Rösch 2018), or rather it has interestingly narrowed down intra-regionally to the philosophy of the Kyoto School (Jones 2002; Ong 2004; Shimizu 2015). Accordingly, talking about the state as the subject of theory is avoided. One reason is probably that as Takashi Shogimen (2016: 337) aptly points out, “Euro-American intellectual framework (in translation) is now an alter (yet clearly dominant) ego for Japanese political thinking.” Another but clearly related reason is that, as evidenced in the aforementioned 1949 conference, talking about the space of the state from a theoretical perspective for Japanese scholars has become something to be sidestepped.
At least in Anglophone IR, however, the problem the Euro-American framework has started to draw renewed attention. Recently, Pinar Bilgin (2016) suggested that what is needed is “excavating…multiple layers of already existing stories with an eye on power/knowledge dynamics” (Bilgin 2016: 138). This orientation leads scholars to the fundamental question of what IR theory looks like when space is taken into consideration. Many scholars started to acknowledge that the common sense of social sciences in which theory and history is sharply distinguished is unhelpful to make IR a more globally inclusive scholarship (Acharya and Buzan 2017). This is because theory necessarily represents someone’s history. It is even argued that history is “what you could remember” (Ashworth 2014: 2). As Japanese literal critic Hideo Kobayashi has claimed, it is the past “that does not enable us to recall the excess,”2 and not because we “romanticize” the past we forget (Kobayashi 1961: 76). Then this overlooked issue requires deliberate unearthing.
INTRODUCTION: STANDING IN A PLACE, IMAGINING A SPACE
In IR, this issue of theory, space, and history, and what has been overlooked, forgotten, or neglected evidently has the most profound implications among social sciences because its field of investigation is the world, too wide a space. The fundamental premise in analyzing this vast field is that it can be divided into analogous pieces. As the political geographer John Agnew (2016: 50) has claimed, these pieces are territorial states “as not simply the primary but as the singular actor of modern world politics.” For him, this methodological nationalism leads IR scholars “three interlocking geographical assumptions reinforce one another in conventional theories: sovereignty as territorial, the domestic-foreign opposition, and the state-society match.” The fact is that those are “more often than not fictive claim that cannot be backed up empirically.” Another issue he has not mentioned here is that all those assumptions reflect histories of a very limited space, which is Europe. By contrast, the aim of this book is to analyze the pieces as places that have each different geographical assumption. To this end, it draws on the literature of critical geopolitics. Critical geopolitics, which began in the 1990s, is an earlier intervention in IR by geographers, the discipline of space and politics. Striving to investigate how politics writes global spaces, it reexamined geopolitics that thrived in the early twentieth century, but was forgotten for decades as an origin of IR. Gearóid Ó Tuathail in his 1996 book Critical Geopolitics argued,
Geopolitics is a mode of theorizing that positions itself outside of the realm of both necessity and freedom. It scripts itself as a “view from nowhere.” But this view from “nowhere” is produced by and dependent upon its situatedness within Western thought. (p. 52)
Geopolitics in this context signifies an academic discipline that originates in the work of the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904).3 The late nineteenth century was the period when Europeans came to realize that all the space on the globe was fully occupied by humans and that there was no terra nullius. Classical geopolitics was said to have prospered during the Nazi period.4 Similar theories were developed both in the United Kingdom and the United States (Ó Tuathail 1996; Dodds et al. 2013), and then exported to several imperialist states including Japan, making geopolitics worldwide phenomenon. However, geopolitics almost disappeared after World War II because geographers regretted their contributions to
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the war discourse, or because the term evoked intellectual closeness to Nazism. According to Ó Tuathail (1996), in the Anglo-American world, Henry Kissinger in the 1970s evoked the term as “a synonym for balanceof-power politics.” Under the Reagan administration, it came to partake a more ideological meaning, and its usage increased not only among intellectuals but also in the mass media (Ó Tuathail 1996: 58).5
Claiming that geopolitics “requires the systematic forgetting of the struggle over geography in order to make sense,” Ó Tuathail problematized the “geopolitical gaze” that has degeographicalized and depoliticized the study of international politics. For him, this view is still very much alive in IR, which was established as an academic discipline in the United States by German émigré scholars such as Hans Morgenthau. Thus, geopolitics,
spatializes the world within a system of ethnocentric sameness. By gathering, codifying, and disciplining the heterogeneity of the world’s geography into the categories of Western thought, a decidable, measured, and homogeneous world of geographical objects, attributes, and patterns is made visible, produced. The geopolitical gaze triangulates the world political map from a Western imperial vantage point, measures it using Western conceptual systems of identity/difference, and records it in order to bring it within the scope of Western imaginations. (ibid.: 53)
This insistence certainly illuminated a problematic dimension of IR, in which geography is treated as immutable but the premise itself is seldom questioned. Thus, critical geopolitics, together with critical IR that had arisen during the same period, was widely touted as a vigorous critique of the Western centricity of IR. However, to date, it is rather its geographical limitation that has been brought up, as its applications has been largely but paradoxically limited within the United States and Europe (Atkinson and Dodds 2000; Dodds 2001; Hepple 2001; Ó Tuathail 2010; Dodds et al. 2013) and this is despite the fact that critical geopolitics on the other hand claims plural geopolitical traditions (Dodds and Sidaway 1994; Ó Tuathail 1996; Atkinson and Dodds 2000). Consequently, an “inability of critical geopolitics” to expand its scope of investigations to outside of the West has been acknowledged (Dittmer 2015; cf. Thrift 2000; Hepple 2001; Kelly 2006). Some notable attempts have been made to remediate this concern (e.g. Slater 1993, 1994; Sidaway 1997; Megoran 2006; Sharp 2011; Ó Tuathail 2010; Ó Tuathail and Dahlman 2011), but the effort
INTRODUCTION: STANDING IN A PLACE, IMAGINING A SPACE
has been far from enough. Interestingly, in this debate, Japanese geopolitics, that is geographically obviously non-Western, has rarely been investigated except almost only one exception (Takeuchi 2000), forming what David Williams calls “Japan-shaped hole” (Williams 1996: xv; see also Ong 2004).
What hampers scholars from analyzing Japan to fill this hole? Though the answer must be multiple, and the most practical issue is obviously linguistic, another major factor must be the kaleidoscopic identification of Japan as an abnormal state discussed above. In the literature of critical geopolitics, Japanese geopolitics is treated as a follower of the West, as Ó Tuathail (1996) alluded. However, as discussed, even a brief observation is enough to doubt this assumption. This book therefore demonstrates that one way to fill the hole is reconceiving of how scientific knowledge unites the world. In his book The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey, relying on Marshal Berman, suggests that modernity is “a unity of disunity.” It unites all mankind, but in this contradictive way. Accordingly, only uncertainty has come to be certain in modern experience. Then Harvey discusses Jürgen Habermas’ claim of the project of modernity, which pursued “human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life.” This was supported by “scientific domination of nature,” which was attained by accumulation of knowledge engendered by individuals (Habermas 1983 in Harvey 1990: 12). However, Harvey goes on to argue, the last century “shattered this optimism” with “its death camps and death squads, its militarism and two world wars, its threat of nuclear annihilation and its experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” (Harvey 1990: 13).
But what if the two atomic bombs were a wake-up call for the Japanese to their negligence of science? That is, what if it was the same bombs that made Japanese people acknowledge certainty of scientific knowledge, rather than its uncertainty? The evidence of this postwar Japanese scientific optimism is in fact abundant. The late Emperor Hirohito wrote in a letter in 1945 to his son the Emperor Akihito, “I have a word to say to you. Our subjects too much believed in the imperial nation and downgraded AngloAmericans. Our military officials, putting too much emphasis on spirit, forgot science” (in Kano 2013: 23). Equally, even a high school girl wrote in her diary, “The use of the cruelest arm in human history, the atomic bombs, finally saw the end of the war. We were completely defeated in a science war. Yes, in the science war, it is only power of science that can resuscitate Japan” (Kano 2013: 24). This national stigma of lack of science, as Dower (1999) points out, considerably contributed to Japan’s postwar national identity as a “world leader in science and technology” (kagakugijyutsu rikkoku), which have allowed the assertive use of nuclear power in postwar Japan.
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Another effect of this experience on the Japanese was that they thought the atom bombs, which violently ushered the world in the era of “deterritorialized threats” for the West (Ó Tuathail 1998), had accidentally but ultimately attained the one world that they had dreamed of. As this book shows, in the first half of the last century, many Japanese intellectuals believed that rebuilding a borderless world by replacing the European conflictual world order of nation-states was their geo-historical mission. It was geo-historical because they thought that the history among nations in Asia, particularly in Japan, was much more peaceful than the conflictual one in Europe. Iwao Koyama, a Kyoto School philosopher, for example, insisted in 1954: “the world has become one as civilization” under “science technology.” The same year, a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon no. 5, was exposed to radiation emitted by Operation Castle at Bikini Atoll, causing the death of one of the crew members. Koyama stated that the emergence of the hydrogen bomb “functions to deter war.” Presenting a nuclear deterrence theory, he asserted that the hostility between capitalism and communism would become “almost only a belief.” Now, because of the emergence of nuclear arms, “the modern nation-state is losing its raison d’état” (Koyama 1954). Ikutaro Shimizu, an intellectual who led the protests against the renewal of the US-Japan Treaty in 1960 (Rokujyunen Ampo), in 1980 wrote, “it is strange that the deeper we considered about the issue of atomic bombs, the less we feel pain of the defeat.” He felt at ease because Japan, “the state that is not a state,” has finally but unintentionally came to be “the pioneer, the model, among the new states.”
This “the state that is not a state” was exactly the “de-territorialized” state by the destructive power of atom bombs. This state therefore belonged neither to the West nor Asia. As I will explain, what Japanese geopolitics supported was nothing but the elimination of the European state system, which would encompass the dissolution of their own modern state into a region and possibly into one globe. The notoriety of German geopolitics is often said to be expressed in the idea of Lebensraum (living space), whereby imperial expansion is justified. By contrast, Japanese geopolitics highlighted Lebensform (form of living), a forgotten term of geopolitics. This idea was most saliently envisioned in the notorious regional order, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (GEACPS), wartime Japan pursued. As the historian Peter Duus (1996: 70) has noted, at a glance, it looks like an “opportunism disguised as national mission.” However, the idea, so quickly diffusing among intellectuals, ultimately
INTRODUCTION: STANDING
offered a new and inspiring definition of Japan’s national identity, one that not only placed Japan on a plane equivalent to the Western powers but also suggested that Japan stood in the forefront of a movement to end their centuries-long hegemony over the world outside the West. The vision of the GEACPS placed Japan in the vanguard of human/historical progress much as the victorious allies, wrapped in the banner of ‘national self-determination’, had placed themselves in 1918. (ibid.: 71)
The story does not end here. Notwithstanding the discourse of deterritorialization, this overcoming geography of Japan, or the “imperialism without colonies” (Duus 1996) perfectly resonates with geographical ignorance of American people, of the exact state that invented the atomic bombs. This American ignorance, Neil Smith states, has lead in a contradictive way to the “methodical construction of an American Empire” (Smith 2000: 4), in which geography paradoxically played a crucial role. To this construction, the Japanese thesis of beyond geography has evidently contributed a lot. As I demonstrate below, this Japanese ignorance of geography has certainly been buttressed by geography, but what geography meant for them was radically different. Here, the questions for this book then are: in what way are we united and diverged? What kind of accumulation of knowledge enables us to state an inconsistent identification of Japan as part of the West, rendering Japan a kaleidoscopic rhetorical commonplace (Jackson 2006) which different parties rely on for a variety of reasons? It should be acknowledged that knowledge accumulates differently in each place. At the same time, despite the difference, it is through knowledge the places are connected to a space. Therefore, following Edward Casey (2001: 683), space in this book must be understood rather as place “to be the immediate environment of my lived body—an arena of action that is at once physical and historical, social and cultural” that is distinguished from space “to be the encompassing volumetric void in which things are positioned.”
Reframing Geopolitics
The immediate puzzles that guide my investigation are as follows: how does geopolitical thought travel a long distance and contribute to processes of political spatialization in the recipient country? How did Japanese people form their geopolitical imagination(s) by importing theories of classical European geopolitics in the first half of the twentieth century? Finally, by
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tracing the mutation of political theory that travels spatially, its aspiration is however not just to explicate mutation of theory, but to understand why and how knowledge is making the world apparently one, despite the difference.
For this purpose, geopolitics has to be reframed. For critical geopolitics, which emerged as a response to the rapid transformation of world politics since the 1980s, geopolitics was a discourse that represented “epistemological principles” of governing white male elites (Ó Tuathail 1994: 319). Critical geopolitics re-conceptualizes geopolitics as “a discursive practice by intellectuals of statecraft spatializ[ing] international politics in such a way to represent a “world” characterized by particular types of places, peoples and dramas” (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992: 192). For critical scholars, geopolitics is “a convenient fiction” of a “set of practices within the civil societies of the Great Powers that sought to explain the meaning of the new global conditions of space, power, technology” (Ó Tuathail 1996: 15). It is an ensemble of heterogeneous efforts that nevertheless shares common traditions of imperialism, Social Darwinism, and “Cartesian perspectivalism,” which has provided them with a geographical gaze that sees the reality of the world as “out there” (ibid.: 22–23). For these traditions, the world is composed of “a viewing subject” and a “viewed object” (ibid.: 29). It is a Eurocentric view that significantly reduces the messy reality of the world.
The ultimate aspiration for this critical geopolitical enterprise is to rectify the “sectoral narrowness” (Buzan and Little 2001) of contemporary studies of international relations, whose origin can be traced back to classical geopolitics (Ó Tuathail 1996; Ashworth 2014; Buzan and Lawson 2015). Sharing this aspiration, however, I counter the claim that geopolitics is exclusively of white male elites. Instead, I reframe it in a much more democratic way to incorporate Japanese geopolitics by claiming as follows: geopolitical knowledge becomes power in a foreign community only when it fits into the vernacular, which defines the relation of geography and politics developed in the community according to its collective experiences. In this respect, it is not the Cartesian way of seeing that matters—geopolitics invokes each own way of seeing in each context (Watanabe and Rösch 2018). Japan in the twentieth century did not follow what Agnew (2003) calls the modern geopolitical imagination disseminated from Europe despite the import of geopolitical thought. Therefore, more importantly, it was not caught in the territorial trap in the sense Agnew warned. Japanese geopolitics envisaged the transformation of the world order differently from the West as they were
in a different geo-historical context. They imagined the state not as a bounded space, but precisely as an unbounded space. Although I partly agree with the critical geopolitical statement that geographical knowledge is power (Ó Tuathail 1996), it does not necessarily mean that the expansion of geopolitical knowledge is the expansion of European power as its original form. Rather, how power is imagined in each place is an open question. In the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the emergence of the globe as a unified space. However, the unification contains actual disunity. Political theory that travels globally is fragmented in each political place (Jahn 2016). Nonetheless, the fragmented theory still makes the globe a unified space through the places. The geopolitics this book will reveal is a part of geopolitics as a science, as a global accumulation of knowledge, which contains fragmented views that nonetheless see the globe as a “unified” space. Therefore, this book is a study of political places.
JaPaneSe GeoPoliticS
Wartime Japanese geopolitics, Daitoa Chiseigaku (Greater East Asia geopolitics), has been an abandoned field of study. Similar to German geopolitics, it is believed to have supported Japan’s imperialistic expansion. Japan was the biggest “hub” of geopolitics at least outside of Europe, and it was as both subject and object of geopolitics. Major classical geopoliticians—Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), and Karl Haushofer (1869–1946)—analyzed Japan by stressing its difference from Europe (cf. Kjellén 1918; Haushofer 1941, 1942a, b; Tanaka 1997; Marklund 2014). Then Japanese scholars began to employ geopolitics into their own analysis. The first introduction of geopolitics by a Japanese scholar was in 1925, but this did not lead to a wider appreciation. In the 1940s, geopolitics saw a revival. During this period, it flourished as notable geographers and political scientists became committed to the field, translations of the works of major European geopoliticians abounded, and there was even a specialized academic journal. However, due to this anathematic past, even in Japan, geopolitics was forgotten until the mid1970s when the late geographer Keiichi Takeuchi wrote a short piece on the topic. Even until today, investigations in Japanese are sparse (e.g. Takeuchi 1974, 1986, 2000; Hatano 1981; Miwa 1981; Fukushima 1997; Sato 2005; Takagi 1998, 2005, 2009; Shibata 2006, 2007, 2016) and in English, there are almost none. A laudable exception besides Takeuchi, is the comparative accounts by Christian Spang (2001, 2006) INTRODUCTION:
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focusing on the relation of Japanese and German geopolitics, and recent works by Yoichi Shibata (2006, 2007, 2016). Since most of the existing studies put too much emphasis on the reflection of Imperial Japan’s wartime mistake and accordingly the political linkage between geopoliticians and the government, what Japanese geopolitics actually was in comparison to European geopolitics has been only scarcely addressed (e.g. Fukushima 1997; Hisatake 1999, 2000; Sato 2005). As these stress Japan’s imperialist aspect, it has been assumed that ideologically Japan followed the steps of European imperialism.
By contrast, the question I want to pursue by largely relying on the method of intellectual history is, as Ó Tuathail (1996: 72) has argued, the “con-textuality” of geopolitics, though mine is spatial, or “spatiohistorical,” rather than just “historical,” as he states. While critical geopolitics denounces the powerful boundary-making practice of the West, it does not question how and why only Japan, amongst other non-Western states, is often posited to have transgressed the discursive threshold. Consequently, it has not addressed the question of why Japan, despite the racial, geographical, and historical difference, has contributed to the making of Eurocentric world. I show that Japan fought against the West not because it followed the European imperialistic model of organizing the world by learning geopolitics, but it did so in its own reading of geopolitics. This counterargument against European geopolitics insisted that any boundaries, including national borders, were a social construction. Japan did not transgress borders —such boundaries simply did not exist and the interpretation of geopolitics was according to their indigenous intellectual tradition. The mutation of geopolitics enabled wartime Japanese scholars to justify a particular way of organizing space that was fundamentally different from the Western way. In the course of this appropriation, the original Western practice that supported the theory was abandoned in the space of interpretation by the interpreting subject. By reframing the theory in accordance with their own epistemic practice, Japanese geopoliticians envisaged that world history as well as the distribution of space on the globe was changing into what they believed to be just. This mutation was largely not noticed from outside because it was more about the way than the contents. Moreover, this mutation was then abruptly forgotten even by the appropriating subject as the context transformed.
INTRODUCTION:
StandPoint, imaGination, aSSemblaGe, and commUnity of exPerience
To excavate this collective negligence, this book considers interpretations from three aspects: standpoint, imagination, and assemblage. By “standpoint” I do not mean “perspective,” but a geographical, historical, and social condition that a particular context provides for a subject (see Mannheim 1985: 79–81; Maruyama 2003 [1978]; Go 2016). In doing so, I want to analyze spaces that are imagined as “a particular, unique point” of the intersection of “all those networks of social relations and movements and communications” (Massey 1993: 66). At this intersection, what is highlighted is the important role of spatial imaginations. At the same time, each standpoint has its own horizon, which limits the view. This focus on imagination opens up a number of new questions, as spatial knowledge can be morphed both tactically and unwittingly when it travels across linguistic and geographical borders, letting the subject of knowing creatively imagine the world. In particular, this study claims the importance of cognitive gap. In this gap, an unknown quality of foreign knowledge is comprehended essentially sensory. It is further morphed through the practical application. Accordingly, the difference of interpretations of same knowledge get sucked between places as it is impossible for us to stand the other’s place. Because of this “less-than-conscious” (Solomon and Steele 2017: 3) process of knowledge production, the space of interpretation has to be envisaged not as a space for intellectuals but places that are however embedded in a wider geographical community. This emphasis on imaginations enables me to highlight the contingency of political theory’s appraisal. As Bialasiewicz et al. (2007: 406, emphasis in original) argue, in the discursive production of imaginative geographies, “performativity rather than construction” is “the better theoretical assumption.” Discourse cannot be constructed intentionally, but only performed. How it performs and if it performs is different in each space. At the same time, however, the respective spaces have to be considered in relation and not in isolation. The question for the present study is how a theory, a product of a particular epistemic tradition, is read in different traditions. What this book wants to analyze is a condition of possibility presented by a particular intersection of theory, space, and time. This condition can be rightly observed only by thoroughly re-constructing the context in which the intersection is situated. Unlike conventional historical study, again, its focus is on intersections. The goal of the analysis is to
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consider how different knowing subjects—both domestically and internationally—in different spaces can project an apparently identical spatial imagination of the globe as a product of action, which however contains unrecognized perceptual gaps.
It is here the recently growing literature of assemblage thinking is helpful (cf. Collier and Ong 2005; Ong 2007; Marcus and Saka 2006; Anderson et al. 2012; Allen 2011, 2012; Acuto and Curtis 2013; Sassen 2013; Dittmer 2014; Grossburg 2014). Marcus and Saka (2006) define assemblage as “a topological concept that designates the actualizations of the virtual causes or causal processes that are immanent in an open system of intensities that is under the influence of the force that is external to it.”
An assemblage observes “always-emergent conditions” at the intersection of two open systems. I employ this concept because it liberates us from claiming a particular theoretical stance to the utmost extent, since it treats theory and empirics, that is, theory and history, in the same arena. This point is crucial because the present study cuts across plural social structures and problematizes epistemic differences through which an allegedly identical theory is understood differently.
I do not want to consider the term assemblage as what belongs to a particular intellectual tradition, but as a mode of thought seen in some other regions including Japan. In Japan, the localization of knowledge has been a subject of study since the beginning of the twentieth century, due to its history of incessant importation of foreign ideas such as from China back in the seventh century (Yoshino 1927; Tsuda 1938; Maruyama 1992 [1949], 1983 [1952]). Space has been an essential element for this intellectual inquiry (Nishida 1911, 1986 [1926], 2012 [1926]; Watanabe 2017). Among them, Maruyama Masao has developed the concept of basso ostinato driven by these considerations (Maruyama 1992 [1972], 1976, 2003 [1979], 1996 [1984], 1996 [1985], 1988; Rösch and Watanabe 2017). This term denotes a substratum underlying human thought, implying the “thingness” around which assemblages are formed. It is in constant flux as it is socio-historically constructed in a geographical community, but is experienced by people as a relatively stable yet intangible intellectual framework. By developing the concept through Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, Maruyama has tried to identify subtle mutations largely exerted unconsciously on any imported ideas. This study employs this concept as a heuristic device to detect a particular way of converting traveling ideas in a community, and identifies the role of a cognitive gap that facilitates the process of mutation (Nelson 1992). Using
abductive analysis as a pragmatic research strategy (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009), this study follows Barry Buzan and Richard Little (2001: 34) and analyzes “different stories” about geopolitics “in parallel” and not “in opposition to each other” in order to know what is going on globally (see also Maruyama 1992 [1960]).
Assemblage thinking enables us not to label thought traditions with words like “progressive,” “regressive,” “post-,” or “pre-” in accordance with a particular tradition of thought (Vasilaki 2012). Thus, I aim to scrutinize the local and the global, the internal and the external, micro and macro, subject and object, sameness and difference, all in relation rather than in opposition (Collier and Ong 2005; Allen 2012). At the same time, however, following John Allen (2012: 190), my concern is not just multiplicity, relationality, and ephemerality, but “an emergent ‘thingness’ beyond relational effects.” It is this “thingness” in relation to a particular place that this study ultimately hopes to approach.
A Frame of Community
I do not posit the place Japan for this study as the state. Practice, derived from everyday experience, is affective, and site-specific. Through practice, we create space. Thus, “space is in society.” Social space is “opened and occupied with and social reality, with and as people’s interrelated lives” (Schatzki 1991: 653). Practice is an ever-changing condition of possibility available to actors in a given space, and such condition defines agency. In order to analyze the practice, a space called Japan is posited heuristically for investigation here.
To specify this space, this study considers people living in Japan— regardless of their nationalities—as members of a community of experience developed in a social space. Its membership is not defined by nationality but by shared experiences. Doing so means escaping geographical determinism by simultaneously emphasizing its communal character as well as individualistic elements. As this community is envisioned as a social space, it is individually perceived but the cognizance is still vaguely shared among its members. In this community, a specific collective identity can be superficially recognized, but this is merely an aggregate of individual perceptions. People continuously define and re-define themselves by assembling often unconsciously around a specific node and imagining their experiences in a particular environment that is however likewise continuously changing. As they increase the apparently shared experiences
A. WATANABE
over time, the community as an aggregation of individuals develops a tacit collective thought style, which contributes to this incipience. This community is in flux but simultaneously ostensibly stable due to this fundamental less-than-conscious and collective character.
In this community, people develop their own geopolitical imaginations. This concept is borrowed from Agnew (2003; see also Agnew and Muscarà 2012), but not without modification. For Agnew, the modern geopolitical imagination denotes the commonsensical knowledge of world politics that “arose from European-American experience but was then projected on to the rest of the world and into the future in the theory and practice of world politics” (Agnew 2003: 2). By contrast, I aim to depict the modern geopolitical imagination as an actual composite of numerous imaginations that can never be synthesized but in which locals connect themselves to the global in their own manners. Modern European geopolitical imagination is superimposed on local imaginations on the surface, nonetheless buttressed by numerous different imaginations. Each imagination reflects its site-specific mode of power, rather than the power supposedly imposed. Following Allen (1999: 212), “power is always already spatial, but it is neither uniform, nor continuous over space. It is actualized in different and combined modes precisely because spatiality makes a difference to the effects that power can have” (cf. Agnew 1999). In the ostensibly hegemonic modern geopolitical imagination, heterogeneous imaginations of multiple subjects are actually imbricated without being amalgamated into one, generating the polymorphous nonetheless vibrant image of “the actual global” (Collier and Ong 2005: 12). Thus, the term has to be reconceptualized as a co-constructed projection at the intersection of knowledges, powers, and subjectivities. This book examines only a small part of those numerous imaginations, in which a different set of questions of space, knowledge, and power in world politics is addressed.
oUtline of the book
Chapters 2 and 3 provide a theoretical mapping of how political theory travels inter-regionally by examining existing research. The aim of this investigation is to clarify how local micro-politics affects the traveling of theory in an unnoticeable way. The first chapter investigates existing approaches of global knowledge dissemination mainly in Western literature. This chapter argues that in addition to the contextualism that has influenced recent literature on international intellectual history, the
literature of the geography of knowledge identifies a tacit but important role of geography in the act of knowing, which then calls for further microanalyses. Chapter 3 examines related research in Japan in order to expand the consideration of this spatial dimension of global knowledge dissemination. Using the example of international law, the chapter studies a curious inquiry that took place in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. By revisiting this discussion, the chapter aims to explicate how Japanese scholars deepened the inquiry on the relation between knowledge and space.
Chapter 4 specifies an analytical framework by addressing three remaining questions. The first question is about the epistemology and power in Japan during this period. The second question is how the local community and territory of knowledge are conceptualized avoiding the pitfall of geographical determinism. The last question is concerned with how to relationally envisage multiple spaces in which exotic knowledge is interpreted. The discussion revolves around the thought of Kitaro Nishida, a Japanese philosopher who developed a theory of place. It demonstrates that epistemology in Japan during the period essentially had a subjectivist character that opposed Cartesian objectivism, the product of a contextdependent tradition stemming from an imported Confucianism. Chapter 5 is a bridging chapter to a case study. The first half of the chapter discusses the literature of critical geopolitics in relation to Japan. In the latter half, the historical development of Japan’s geopolitical imagination is explored.
Finally, Chaps. 6 and 7 are devoted to the analysis of Japanese geopolitics. The appropriation of geopolitical theories is analyzed by establishing two time frames that correspond to the historical events of the periods: from 1925 to the mid-1930s, and from the mid-1930s to 1945. The initial application of classical geopolitics in Japan can be dated back to 1925, when a geographer rebuffed the increasing white supremacism in the Pacific with an empirical study on US immigrants in the region. Chapter 6 revisits the history of the concept of the state as a living organism from Ratzel to German geopolitics during the Weimar Period; this is in order to calibrate the mutation of the concept made by Japanese scholars. Chapter 7 explicates the Daitoa Chiseigaku (Greater East Asia Geopolitics), a Japanese geopolitics that aimed at creating a world order of regions in which the modern state system had to become obsolete in order to make the world literally one, supported by popular imagination.
A. WATANABE
noteS
1. Throughout this volume, Japanese and Chinese names are written in the Western way of first mentioning the given name and then the family name. It is to avoid confusion among readers not familiar with the East Asian name order.
2. All translations from Japanese to English are by the author, unless otherwise stated.
3. The term “geopolitics” was coined by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén.
4. Murphy (1997) however contends that Weimar Germany, more than Nazi Germany, was responsible.
5. In Japan, for example, Aku no Ronri: Chiseigaku toha Nani ka (A Theory of Evil: What Is Geopolitics?) was published in 1980 (Kuramae 1980) and quickly became bestseller.
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