7 Race and racism Rotem Kowner This chapter examines the question of race in modern Japan and traces the development of indigenous strains of racism. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Western scholarship had devised a comprehensive system of racial classification of mankind.1 The Japanese were classified in this system as belonging to the East Asian branch of humankind, first as members of the ‘Homo Asiaticus variety’ and then as the ‘Mongoloid race’. This classification contained an explicit value judgment and assumed the existence of a hierarchy of ‘human races’. In this context, many Western scientists regarded the Japanese, just as any other Asian peoples, as inferior to Westerners. Before the opening of Japan in 1854, knowledge about the Japanese had been largely based on sixteenth-century Jesuit reports and observations of physicians serving in the Dutch factory in Nagasaki. The second half of the nineteenth century, especially the three decades after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, saw a boom in the racial discourse on Japan both in the West and in Japan itself. Japan was the first non-Western country where native scholars participated actively in, and eventually dominated, the discourse and research on their own people, their origin and relationships to other ethnic and language groups in the region. The question of race, however, was not the exclusive domain of scholars. Politicians and officials, too, implemented race-based, and often also racist, policies, both domestically and in the colonial possessions of their countries. Japanese victories in wars with China (1895), Russia (1905) and Germany (1914)2 affected Western racial attitudes toward Japanese, giving rise to ‘yellow peril’ scares and fanning racism. This racism was a factor in the estrangement between Japan and the Anglo-Saxon powers in the early twentieth century. With the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, race became a decisive marker of difference between the two main rivals – the United States and Japan – and a predominant theme in their wartime propaganda. Following Japan’s surrender, the centrality of race diminished but did not altogether vanish, remaining a factor to this very day in domestic politics and foreign relations. As before 1945, the question of race is inseparable from the conflicting impact of Japan’s encounter with the West: the quest for modernity on the one hand and the urge to maintain a distinct identity on the other. 92 Race and racism The Japanese encounter with race, 1868–1905 The modern concept of race is a product of Western European scholarship. Its emergence can be pinpointed to the period between 1735 and 1775, even if its roots can be traced back to the ‘Age of Exploration’ (i.e. the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries). Rudimentary and sketchy ethnological reports of the early modern age gradually developed into a system of knowledge and classification. This system divided humankind into several groups, which were portrayed as separate species or sub-species, each characterized by a different – and qualitatively unequal – set of physical and spiritual attributes. By the mid-nineteenth century, race had become a ubiquitous, influential and purportedly scientific concept in the West, as well as a source of disparaging and generalizing value judgments about non-Western peoples and domestic minorities, that is, of racism (Demel 2013; 2015; Demel and Kowner 2013; Kowner 2004; 2014; Kowner and Skott 2015). The hierarchical concept of race was the product of the keen sense of military, technological and cultural superiority Westerners had felt in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Western imperialism was at its zenith. Beginning with the first Opium War of 1839–42,Western superiority was seemingly validated in a series of military victories and territorial acquisitions throughout East Asia. In this context, the concept of race served as a justification for exploitation and discrimination against non-White peoples (see Brantlinger 2003). Western views of Japan, however, were more complex. Japan seemed attractive, its inhabitants exotic; very few Western visitors ever talked explicitly of subjugating the country (Jones 1974: 305–27; Jones 1980: 145; Muramatsu 1995: 21–8). Nonetheless, Western writers provided typologies of the Japanese ‘race’ within the existing racial system. Despite the claims of ‘scientific objectivity’, these attempts often were shaped by contemporary political and moral attitudes toward the country and the non-Western world (see Fält 2015; Kowner 2000). Apart from Japan’s place in the international and racial hierarchy, the origins of the Japanese and their racial composition were considered the most important scholarly questions at the time. Western scholars, mostly German physicians who taught medicine in Japanese schools and engaged in part-time anthropological pursuits, argued that the first settlers of the archipelago were not necessarily the ancestors of the modern-day Japanese. They asserted that the Japanese were not a pure race but a mixture of peoples who had come to Japan in several waves of invasions (Kowner 2000; 2013; 2016). As we shall see later, these theories soon found an echo in Japan’s growing scientific community that led to diverse indigenous theories about the ethnogenesis of the Japanese. The contemporary Western racial worldview in general and Western impressions of the Japanese in particular were tinged with explicit racism. Although impressed by the rapid modernization of Japan and by certain qualities of the Japanese character, Western observers also tended to portray the Japanese as belonging to a race inferior to themselves (viz., members of the ‘Caucasian’ or ‘White’ race), and as members of a group that could imitate others successfully but was incapable of spearheading human progress by originating a culture, making scientific discoveries. Many observers also described the local population, and notably Japanese adult males, as having an unattractive physical appearance marked by a weak body, low stature and yellow skin. Some even dismissed Japanese as effeminate, childlike people who resembled apes and monkeys (Keevak 2011; Kowner 2004; Townsend 2015). Western attitudes apart, Meiji Japan (1868–1912) had its own indigenous racism. Early modern Japanese society exhibited strong prejudices and xenophobia, based at times on crude biological assumptions (Iesaka 1986: 1–25; Kowner 2014: 178;Wagatsuma and Yoneyama 1967: 51–65).These 93 Rotem Kowner attitudes did not necessarily mean the presence of an elaborate concept of race. It is true that in the second half of the Edo era (1603–1868), Japanese scholars, who developed basic taxonomies of plants and other objects, showed awareness of human diversity, formed ethnological generalizations about a number of foreign nationalities and pondered the origin of some ethnic groups in the neighbouring regions (Keene 1969; Marcon 2015; McCormack 2013a). Nevertheless, these scholars did not seek to construe an explicit notion of race, even on a rudimentary level. In the same manner, prior to the 1868 Meiji Restoration, very few Japanese, if any, were aware of the Western racial worldview or bothered to debunk foreign images and perceptions of Japan. Indeed, the opening of Japan did not bring about an instant influx of ideas on race and, apart from the limited adoption of a few items of contemporary Western fashion, foreign concepts of race remained largely unknown in Japan until the late 1860s. Thereafter, the change was gradual as the diaries of members of the Iwakura Mission demonstrate. Sent in 1871–73 to observe the West firsthand and learn from its progress, they accepted the basic concept of race and the idea of innate differences among the various races, but rejected the notion that the Japanese or any of the peoples living in the region (the ‘Yellow race’) were inferior to Europeans (the ‘White race’) (Kume 1975, vol. V: 146–60, 271–5). During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Japanese intelligentsia adopted various modes of the concept of race (jinshu or minzoku) and used them to demarcate boundaries between themselves and the foreign – and domestic – Other (Kawai 2015). By doing so, it also internalized broader aspects of the racial worldview that was prevalent at the time. This worldview was not adopted independently but was part of a larger parcel of science and culture that Meiji Japan imported from the West. Inevitably, members of the Japanese intelligentsia found it distressing to have to accept Western racial views that contained strong racist connotations and disparagement of the Other, including themselves. Some reacted by expressing their desire to ‘leave Asia’ and be accepted instead by those considered superior (i.e. Europe).These racial views were often caused by personal feelings of inferiority and spiritual torment exacerbated during visits overseas and in interactions with Westerners (see Konoe 1981: 138; Natsume 1993–99, XII: 11–14, 68–9; see also Duus 1971; Saaler 2007c). This self-consciousness, however, did not prevent a growing conviction that racial characteristics could be altered, and eventually ameliorated, and that the Japanese, if not other Asians, could reach parity with the West (Kitahara 2007; Majima 2014). In diplomatic relations, the Japanese government since the start of modernizing reforms insisted that its nation and people would be treated as equal, legally and in practice, and developed special sensitivity to any infringement of this expectation (Auslin 2004). The feeling of inferiority and helplessness, at least on the national level, faded away quite rapidly.The rapid and successful modernization in many fields, such as the founding of modern armed forces based on conscription (see Chapter 13 in this volume), the introduction of compulsory education and the promulgation of the Constitution in 1889, could not be dismissed as mere parroting of the West. Self-confidence in the Japanese academia was also on the rise. As early as 1883, Japanese instructors for the first time exceeded the number of German lecturers in the Faculty of Medicine at Tokyo Imperial University (Kim 2014: 41). A year later, a small group of young anthropologists established Japan’s first anthropological association under the name ‘Jinruigaku no tomo’ (The Friends of Anthropology). By 1888, the new association had boasted some 217 members who represented the first generation of noteworthy Japanese scholars educated in Japan or in the West (Sakano 2005). Soon these scholars began to express their views on Japanese origins and racial composition and eventually assumed the leading role in the discourse on this issue (Askew 2004). Due to the initial interest of Westerners in the Ainu, their origins and ethnic relation to the Japanese 94 Race and racism became the subject of a major debate. In 1887, Tsuboi Shǀgorǀ (1863–1913), one of the pioneers of Japanese anthropology, reiterated the earlier speculations of a Western scholar, that the pit dwellers who in antiquity inhabited Hokkaido were pigmoids (Tsuboi 1887; see also Kudǀ 1977; Shimizu 1999). Tsuboi was soon challenged by German-educated Koganei Yoshikiyo (1858–1913), a professor of anatomy at Tokyo Imperial University. Koganei argued that the Ainu were similar to the prehistoric population of the Japanese mainland, whose direct descendants they were. Critically, he concluded that the Ainu once inhabited the entire Japanese archipelago, but were largely displaced by the population that gave rise to the modern Japanese (Koganei 1893; 1894). The true bone of contention, however, was whether modern Japanese were ‘pureblooded’ or a hybrid nation. For some, the discussion of Japanese origins reinforced the sentiment of Pan-Asianism (Saaler and Szpilman 2011) and, indeed, Japanese theories suggesting common ancestry with the Chinese and Koreans were soon postulated (Oguma 1995; 1998). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, some Japanese scholars began to cast doubt openly (and even in foreign journals) on the presumed racial superiority of Westerners (Sakano 2005: 59–61). For instance, in 1903 the anatomist Adachi Buntarǀ (1865–1945) found the odour of Europeans to be stronger and more pungent than that of Japanese, due, he argued, to their larger sweat glands (Adachi 1903). Two years later, by which time the last German anthropologist employed by the Japanese government had left for home, Japanese scholars formed a majority of participants in the international racial discourse on Japan and within a period of little more than thirty years, the Japanese came to dominate (or even monopolize) the production of new knowledge in this field. By dominating the local discourse on race, Japan became the first non-European nation that effectively took over a European intellectual domain. Outside the intellectual realm, the first decade of the twentieth century witnessed another transformation. After Japan’s victory in the war with Russia in 1904–05, an increasing number of Japanese were no longer willing to accommodate foreign manifestations of arrogance, let alone tolerate racial slurs. By then, some Japanese had begun to wonder whether the Western world order was acceptable to them and whether Japan could create a world order of its own. It was at that time that the path to a future racial conflict, though by no means inevitable, became clearly visible (Saaler 2007b). Paradoxically, the growing opposition in fin-de-siècle Japan to the Western racial paradigm and even more so to its stereotypical view of the Japanese, did little to prevent the Japanese state and many of its officials from employing the same paradigm and using similar stereotypes. Starting in the late Meiji era, members of the ruling elite and the intelligentsia formed a national identity that was based on racial lines (Weiner 1997; Yoshino 1992; 1997). Likewise, they accepted the social Darwinist notion that great powers are entitled to subjugate other culturally, technologically or physically inferior nations and peoples; and they also systematically measured, classified and arranged hierarchically their own population and the peoples under their rule (Kim 2013; Kuo 2015; Russell 1996, 24; Tamanoi 2013). By the same token, they established a legal system that discriminated on the basis of race against colonial subjects (Zachmann 2013), against non-Japanese in the neighbouring areas and non-wajin (ethnically non-Japanese) peoples and other minorities in Japan (Sato 1997; Siddle 1997;Young 1997). Immigration and anti-Japanese racism in international relations, 1905–1931 The condescending attitude that characterized Western observations of Japan during the latter half of the nineteenth century turned in the early twentieth century into a mixture of admiration, fear and racial animosity, notably in nations that competed with Japan in Asia or absorbed 95 Rotem Kowner Japanese immigrants (Daniels 1962). By then, Japan’s international position had improved dramatically: it established an impressive diplomatic network including an alliance with Great Britain (see Chapter 2 in this volume); its unequal treaties were revised (see Chapter 4 in this volume); and its military power gained international recognition after its victories over China and Russia. Still, this progress had a downside, exemplified in its extremity in disputes over immigration. Starting as early as 1868, Japanese individuals, mostly peasants from the poorer regions of Japan, immigrated to the west coast of North America, among other destinations (see Chapter 8 in this volume). Their number initially was trifling, especially when compared with the concurrent wave of immigrants from Europe, or even from China, but economic competition, racial hostility and fears of Japanese immigrants serving as a fifth column in the absorbing countries made this human movement a source of increasing embarrassment and bitterness for Japan (Iikura 2006; Masuda 2009). Japan’s victories over Qing China in 1894–95 and then over tsarist Russia in 1904–05 had a tremendous effect on the discourse on race both domestically and overseas. At a time when the ‘survival of the fittest’, or rather ‘survival of the strongest’ as Herbert Spencer’s original phrase was commonly interpreted, was accepted as gospel, no success could be greater than a triumph in war. After Russia’s defeat, and even more so five years later, with the commission of the battleship Satsuma – the most complex weapon system of that time and the first warship of this kind to be designed and built domestically – it was difficult to deny that the Japanese proved themselves capable of mastering the latest technologies. This mastery was the key factor for Japan’s becoming the hegemonic power on land in Northeast Asia and a threat to Anglo-American naval supremacy in the Pacific. Never before was this country so strong but at the same time its people so unwelcome (Saaler 2007a). In continental Europe, signs of alarm and antipathy appeared first following Japan’s victory over Qing China, with Germany leading the bandwagon. If one figure could be singled out among those anxious about the rise of Japan, it was Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941). His antiJapanese outburst took place when he heard about the Treaty of Shimonoseki that concluded the Sino-Japanese war. Under the terms of the treaty victorious Japan obtained Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula on the Chinese mainland. In less than a week, Germany joined Russia and France in the Triple Intervention to demand that Japan give up its acquisitions in mainland China. Japan had no choice but to accept this ultimatum. The kaiser, motivated in part by a realpolitik desire to acquire a colonial foothold in East Asia, added a personal tinge to the conflict by sketching a picture of the danger looming from the East entitled ‘Against the Yellow Peril’ (Gegen die gelbe Gefahr). To produce a sharper visual representation, he soon commissioned the painter Hermann Knackfuss (1848–1915), who drew a group of warrior goddesses, representing major European nations, led by the Archangel Michael. The only symbol of the Orient was a Buddha looming in the distance over conflagration and carnage but the message was unmistakable. When the drawing was distributed among the monarchs of Europe, the fear of Chinese hordes led by Japanese began to spread (Röhl 2004: 754–5; Gollwitzer 1962; Lyman 2000; Saaler 2017). In the United States, too, racial animosity toward Japan increased after its victory over Russia. Although President Theodore Roosevelt loathed the tsarist regime and admired Japanese military performance in Manchuria, he and his successor,William Howard Taft, were not free of racism in their attitudes toward Japanese and other Asian immigrants. This led to attempts to limit Asian immigration to the United States (Esthus 1967; Sinkler 1971, 395–400; Henning 2007: 162–4). Much of this was not new, but the Russo-Japanese War accentuated earlier prejudices and concerns, which subsequently spread also to Great Britain, Japan’s principal ally (Best 2015; Towle 2013), although there was no Japanese immigration to Britain at the time. But, Japan’s 96 Race and racism proven military might, coupled with growing population pressures internally and its unmistakable course of external expansion, seemed threatening to the United States’ interests. In 1906–07 these heightened fears, especially on the West Coast, led to the implementation of domestic measures against East Asian immigrants (Iriye 1972; Bean 1952). Faced with the discrimination against its nationals, the Japanese government insisted that its country and its subjects overseas be treated as ‘honorary Whites’, but to no avail. Thereafter diplomatic and economic relations between the two nations became more and more strained and they began to regard each other as major rivals (Tovy and Halevi 2007; Saaler 2014a). During World War I, Japan fought on the side of the Allied Powers and cooperated with the United States in Siberia. Neither this military involvement nor the fact that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was still in effect prevented Western writers, scholars and politicians, mostly Americans, from musing at the time on the possibility of an all-out racial war in which Japan would be the archenemy (Lea 1909; Pitkin 1921). During this period, Japan, too, had its share of fantasies over a racial war (Satǀ 1920; 1921). Partly as a response to Western demonization and anxiety of international isolation, and closely related to growing Pan-Asian sentiments, these fantasies evolved into an explicit discourse on race (jinshuron), in which an alliance with China in a race war against the West was occasionally mentioned (Hackett 1971). With the end of World War I, Japan gained at last wide recognition as a great power (ittǀkoku; lit. first-rate nation) and in due course played a substantial role in the establishment of the League of Nations. As the only non-White great power and under the reverberations of the discourse of race at home, Japan began to act as the champion of the ‘coloured’ races and submitted a proposal for racial equality at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Although the aim of the proposal was seemingly defensive and self-serving rather than altruistic, it was rejected, due to opposition by the British Empire and the United States (Shimazu 1998). Another disappointment followed two years later at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22. Some in Japan suspected that Great Britain, its long-standing European ally, was moving closer to the United States whose main objective was to impede Japan’s military rise and imperial ambitions. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 turned race into an even more important international issue (Lee 2007; Hirobe 2001). Although not directed exclusively at Japan, the Act attempted to preserve White supremacy in the United States by establishing quotas for undesirable immigrants, among them Japanese. This caused outrage in Japan (Stalker 2006). Around the same time, in 1925, Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which would make its sinister contribution to racial discourse in Europe. It included a number of references to Japan. Hitler divided humankind into three groups: culture founders, culture bearers and culture destroyers and placed the Japanese in the second category. If Europe and America were to perish, Hitler mused, the Japanese development would dry out in a few years and the culture would ‘stiffen and fall back into the sleep out of which it was startled seven decades ago by an Aryan wave of culture’ (Hitler 1939: 398; Maltarich 2005: 175–212). As part of the growing Japanese view of the world as increasingly violent and racially polarized, Japan witnessed the rise of a domestic form of eugenics. The idea was conceived in Britain in the late nineteenth century, the word itself being coined in 1883 by Francis Galton (Galton 1883), but the first associations to promote the improvement of the population’s genetic traits through selective reproduction were established in Japan in 1924. The most prominent organization was the Japanese Association of Racial Hygiene (Nihon minzoku eisei kyǀkai), which soon urged forced sterilization of ‘inferior people’, the encouragement of reproduction among the fittest, alongside the prohibition of birth control based on women’s discretion. Although the implementation of these policies never came close to the scale witnessed in Nazi Germany, during the 1930s the influence of the eugenic view in general and the association in particular grew stronger and its legacy continued even after the war (Frühstück 2003; Suzuki 1983). 97 Rotem Kowner Overall, during the first decades of the twentieth century, Japan still maintained its Western orientation while becoming ever more sensitive to the way it was viewed in the West and aware of actions taken against its subjects. And yet, the five-year period between 1919 and 1924 marks a watershed when many politicians, military men and intellectuals lost any hope of Japan’s ever gaining acceptance as an equal by the West, and by the Anglo-Saxon powers in particular (MacMillan 2003: 321). Thereafter, influential visionaries such as the army officer Ishiwara Kanji and Pan-Asian ideologue ƿkawa Shnjmei (see Peattie 1975; Szpilman 1998a) increasingly turned their energies to the construction of a self-sufficient Asian empire under Japan’s leadership. In this future autarkic sphere, they mused, there would be no place for members of the ‘White race’ whereas Asian peoples would co-exist in harmony under Japanese rule (cf. Brown 2007; Miwa 1973: 389–90). The rise of the idea of a race-based empire and racial war against the West Although Japanese imperialism did not emerge necessarily in response to Western racism, during the first three decades of the twentieth century the two interacted with and stimulated each other. By 1932, however, Japan ventured onto a new course: giving up on the liberal West and building instead a self-sufficient Asian-Pacific empire. The occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo a year later provided an opportunity to experiment with this form of a race-based empire (Mimura 2011; Hotta 2007). Until then, the territorial expansion of the Japanese modern state had been of a different character.The peoples inhabiting the islands in the immediate vicinity of Japan, which were annexed in the 1870s, became Japanese subjects, and even the relatively large populations of Taiwan and Korea, taken over in 1895 and 1910 respectively, became Japanese subjects and were gradually Japanized. However, in Manchukuo, and even more so in Southeast Asia, which the Japanese occupied in 1941–42, the populations, which were too large and ethnically and culturally too different from the Japanese were treated differently. In the racial hierarchy established during the war, the Japanese constituted the ‘master race’ and the peoples of Southeast Asia remained in a subordinate position. Japanese efforts in the region mainly concentrated on the extraction of urgently needed raw materials, and to that end, Southeast Asians were harshly exploited as workforce (Kratoska 2005). A large number of labourers (rǀmusha), often forcedly conscripted, died as a result of the treatment they received in territories such as the Netherlands East Indies (presentday Indonesia), Indochina and Malaya. Thus, while maintaining the rhetoric of Pan-Asianism and Confucian harmony, Japan exploited the territories it occupied not less intensively than the Western powers had done before. In some instances, however, it was also willing to delegate a certain degree of autonomy: both Burma and the Philippines were granted formal (though incomplete) ‘independence’ in 1943 (see Chapter 3 in this volume). The outbreak of the war against the Western Allies in December 1941 marked the start of a ‘racial war’. While Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Japanese units invaded Southeast Asia and in the course of the following months occupied Western colonies there. Popular writers in the United States were not far off the mark when they stated that the conflict was ‘a holy war, a racial war of greater significance than any the world has here forth seen’ (Dower 1986: 7). It was also a struggle of extreme ferocity and savagery. Whereas the Japanese were bent upon driving out the ‘White man’ from ‘their’ continent, the Americans were equally determined to destroy their racial ‘Yellow’ enemy and to this end brought to life all kinds of abominable racist images. The Japanese government regarded the sweeping Japanese triumph over the Western colonial powers in 1941–42 as a mere prelude to the formation of a great modern Japanese empire 98 Race and racism in East Asia. To this end, in 1942 it declared its intention to establish the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ (Daitǀa kyoljeiken) and created a separate ministry for that purpose, the Daitǀashǀ (Greater East Asia Ministry). Although the Co-Prosperity Sphere was a euphemistic term for Japan’s colonial rule, the propaganda represented it as an embodiment of freedom and equality, using long-established slogans such as ‘Asia for Asiatics’ and ‘same culture, same race’ (doljbun doljshu) (Hotta 2007; see also Chapter 3 in this volume). As for Japan’s enemies, their propaganda directed against Japan was viciously racist, but it was not, as sometimes claimed, the main cause of the aerial bombings the United States carried out against Japan in the final year of the war. Germany was the target of at least as devastating bombings over several years, without a manifest racial element in the propaganda against it. Similarly, one can only speculate whether the United States would have dropped an atomic bomb on Germany had this weapon been available before the war in Europe ended. Be that as it may, by most accounts, racism was not a crucial factor in the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nevertheless, there was evidently little in the contemporary image of the Japanese to counter this inhuman decision inasmuch as there was no ‘Japanese counterpart to the “good German” in the popular consciousness of the Western allies’ (Dower 1986: 8). This racial difference had been even more obvious on the American home front. By the spring of 1942, the United States incarcerated some 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry (62 per cent of them were American citizens), while leaving its citizens of German or Italian ancestry free (cf. Fujitani 2011: 82–108). The latter were probably too numerous to be interned, but numbers were not the core issue, racism was. ‘A Jap’s a Jap’, is how Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, the commanding officer of Western Defence Command and a vocal supporter of the internment, explained this unprecedented measure, ‘You can’t change him by giving him a piece of paper’. (tenBroek et al. 1954: 35; on the treatment of Japanese in Nazi Germany, see Krebs 2015). Japan, too, applied racist policies to its Western enemies during the war. Although it did not rely on demeaning and vicious propaganda campaigns on the same scale as the Americans, it routinely humiliated Western prisoners of war in public parades in the conquered cities. Similarly telling are the death rates among Western prisoners of war that were much higher than in any previous war fought by modern Japan (cf. Kowner 2009). Notwithstanding tendencies to avoid the demeaning of the enemy, Japanese racial propaganda continued to elevate the self by stressing spiritual rather than physical strength (Dower 1986). The wartime recollections of the novelist ƿoka Shǀhei (1909–88) nicely illustrate this tendency. Captured in the Philippines in early 1945, ƿoka’s impression of the first GI he saw appears to reflect the racial ambivalence his generation felt toward the enemy: The beauty of his face struck me with wonder. From the contrast between his pure white skin and the bright red of his cheeks to the individual features of his face so different from our own, I gazed upon a simple yet undeniable beauty – a beauty whose sudden appearance before me held a particular freshness because the world it represented had been banished from my sight since Pearl Harbor. (ƿoka 1996: 20) Postwar Japan and the re-emergence of ethnic nationalism after 1945 The Allied occupation of Japan (1945–52) is associated today with reconstruction and recovery and marks a turning point that ended a period of imperial expansion and incessant international 99 Rotem Kowner conflicts. Despite the terrible war, the human toll and the devastating urban destruction caused by air raids, the Japanese public embraced the U.S.-led occupation and their culture almost instantly. On the other hand, surrender and occupation brought back old feelings of racial inferiority. Largely as a reaction to the Nazi atrocities, it was exactly in this period that the importance of the concept of race diminished considerably in the West, at least in the official discourse. In Japan, however, this transformation was delayed.The relative benevolence of the new rulers, and the resulting admiration for American soldiers revealed, for example, in postwar novels, did little to repress worn-out concepts of racial difference. The debate on what to do with children born to American soldiers and Japanese women during the first years of occupation is evidence that such racial attitudes remained. Critics insisted that these children would be a stain on the nation as they would never be successfully integrated into Japanese society. As it turned out, the number of these children was far smaller than feared, and thus, although plans to send the majority of them for adoption overseas failed, the issue was gradually forgotten (Dower 1999; Koshiro 1999). With the end of the occupation, the beginning of reconstruction and the first signs of the economic ‘miracle’, Japan’s national confidence began to grow again. Extensive surveys on the ‘Japanese National Character’, conducted every five years since 1953, provide an eloquent testimony to this growing confidence. Among several categories, the surveys examined the image of Japan’s national status vis-à-vis the West by asking whether Japan is superior, inferior, or equal to the ‘West’. In 1953, more Japanese found their country to be inferior rather than superior, but five years later, there was a reversal in responses, and subsequently responses affirming Japan’s superiority increased considerably, reaching a peak in the 1980s (see Figure 17.1 in Kowner and Befu 2015; Yoshino 1992). It should also be pointed out that the focus on Japan vis-à-vis the West in these surveys was not accidental. Postwar Japan, particularly during its first decades, repeated the Meiji era’s ‘escape’ from Asia. In the early 1970s, discourse associated with ethnicity and race resurfaced and has been widely popular ever since. Known as Nihonjinron (literally, ‘theories/discourses on the Japanese [people]’), it has sought to account for the characteristics of Japanese society, culture and national character and so to provide building blocks for a new identity. Nihonjinron has also served as a broadly based ideological support for Japanese nationalism through its emphasis on the nation as the people’s preeminent collective identity. Using books and the media as its main channel, this discourse is based on an ethnocentric, unmistakably racial, and at times even racist, common denominator, which stems from the fact that Nihonjinron treats Japanese culture, national character and individual personality as a unique and unparalleled product of racial, historical and even climatic elements (Befu 2001; Dale 1986; Kowner and Befu 2015). Advocates of Nihonjinron tend to perceive their compatriots as members of a distinct group in both cultural and biological terms and to elaborate the special relations between race and culture in Japan (Oblas 1995). There are some similarities between this approach and Japan’s prewar ideology, but public discourse in postwar Japan has emphasized the homogeneity of its population in a more explicit manner than before (Dale 1986; Minami 1994). For instance, it tended to disapprove tacitly of inter-marriage with other Asians, and with Asian males in particular (Oguma 1995; Koshiro 2013). Still, Nihonjinron is not particularly inward looking. Its ethnocentric character is amplified by its reliance on comparisons between Japanese culture and other cultures, predominantly Western ones.The biological unity of the Japanese people has been another recurrent theme in Nihonjinron writings, which have promoted extensive research on the genetic markers of the Japanese population throughout history and stirring up tremendous interest in ‘Japanese’ bodily and facial appearance. It is not a surprise, then, that a number of Nihonjinron theorists have referred to Japanese ‘blood’ and the question of blood purity 100 Race and racism ( junketsushugi). In using these racially charged terms, they assumed a shared biological heritage and immutable features that allegedly characterize the Japanese as a coherent group (Fish 2009; Yano 2013; Yoshino 1997). As critics have pointed out, the claims of homogeneity and purity, which are based on the alleged lineage of the Japanese inhabiting the archipelago since time immemorial in isolation from other nationalities, are often used to discriminate and exclude various minorities in Japanese society (Arudǀ 2015; Beije 2009; Chapman 2008; Cleveland 2014; Fukuoka and Tsujiyama 2011; Kearney 1998; Tsuda 1998). By the mid-1980s, new economic tensions between the United States and Japan showed that ostensibly forgotten racial images in either country could easily be resurrected. In Japan, Nihonjinron tenets seem to have underlain, at least partly, expressions of Japan’s spiritual superiority. One vocal, if not atypical, advocate of this view was Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro (b. 1918). At a political meeting in 1986, Nakasone praised the achievements of the Japanese education system, but his speech soon turned into a comparison between ‘us’ (Japanese) and ‘them’ (Americans and the West in general). ‘Our average [intelligence] score’, he boasted, ‘is much higher than that of countries like the United States’. Still, Nakasone’s own attribution could not disguise a century of Japanese racism, the legacy of emulation of Western racism alongside indigenous views of differences. Compared with the Japanese ‘monoracial society’, he explained, ‘[t]here are many blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in America. As a result of this, the average score over there is exceedingly low’ (Bowen 1986: 40; Ivy 1989). Thirty years on, despite the ongoing recession, present-day Japanese society enjoys high levels of affluence and political stability and has overcome many of the difficulties and obstacles experienced by earlier generations. Japan is one of the most homogeneous societies in the world, both linguistically and culturally, with ethnic Japanese accounting for 98.5 per cent of the population. However, this homogeneity and apparent social stability mask a lingering legacy of arguably moderate but nonetheless deep-seated discriminatory attitudes, which are based on racial grounds and are directed both against minorities (including the indigenous people of the Ainu, the people of Okinawa and people of Korean descent) and against foreign residents. This social attitude serves as a tool to ensure cohesiveness in the majority, but it haunts those excluded and hinders Japan’s efforts to integrate as a member of the international community as well as its ability to compete in world markets. Conclusion This chapter has argued that race and racism have been powerful factors in the history of modern Japan, even if their impact varied considerably at different times. Japan entered the modern era without a well-defined outlook on the question of race. In the late nineteenth century, however, it was forcibly exposed to this question, and soon began to adopt certain aspects of it. As a concept, race held powerful appeal in Japan because it was associated with the West, modernization and the quest for a greater national status. This appeal was double-edged as the Western race-based Weltanschauung caused considerable frustration, while stimulating endeavours for civilizational attainment and facilitating imperial expansion. Modernization was largely achieved but because the quest for status remained unresolved, the question of race became important in highlighting international differences with regard to territorial expansion and use of resources and manpower overseas. Following World War II and the demise of the Japanese empire, the issue of race lost its earlier importance but its reverberations still linger today. Racism, by contrast, does not require elaborate knowledge and may thrive in the presence of foreigners and domestic minorities without any familiarity with the concept of race. Certain strains of racism that had their origins in pre-modern Japan had remained dormant and 101 Rotem Kowner undeveloped for centuries. After the opening of Japan, they developed rapidly once the concept of race was introduced and crucially when the unified state acquired a colonial empire of its own. During this period, foreign racism toward Japan and Japanese overseas added an emotional element to Japan’s tensions with the major colonial powers and so were a factor in bringing about its ultimate ‘revolt against the West’. Imperial Japan also had its own share of racist attitudes toward other groups, although this does not necessarily mean it developed a unique form of racism (Kowner and Demel 2015). This said, certain observations about the form and manifestations of racism in Japan can be made. First and foremost, the geographical remoteness and political seclusion that characterized pre-modern Japan had an impact on the emulation and usage of racism soon after the country was opened. Remoteness, seclusion and a relatively high degree of (often celebrated) ethnic homogeneity, helped to minimize contacts with foreigners and nourished xenophobic attitudes. Historically unaccustomed to the presence of foreigners or even compatriots from remote regions, the Japanese have displayed a relatively low tolerance for internal non-conformity, let alone for ethnic Others who do not conform to the local ways of life. It is possible to argue that the exposure to Western race theories and racial ideology reinforced this intolerance in Imperial Japan and at times even provided it with an ideological pretext for racial discrimination. Furthermore, high value given to status and ranking within modern Japanese society made foreign notions of Japan’s racial inferiority particularly obnoxious, and so, in the long run, exacerbated even further the conflict whose roots lay in realpolitik. Notes 1 The term ‘West’ is used here to mean ‘Western Europe and North America’. 2 Although the so-called Japanese-German War (Nichidoku sensǀ) ended in November 1914, Japan remained formally at war with Germany until the conclusion of the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Further reading Azuma, Eiichiro (2005) Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dower, John (1986) War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York: Pantheon Books. Fujitani, Takashi (2011) Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kowner, Rotem, and Demel, Walter (2013–2015) (eds) Race and Racism in Modern East Asia, 2 vols, Leiden: Brill. Shimazu, Naoko (1998) Japan, Race and Equality:The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919, London: Routledge. Weiner, Michael (ed.) (2008) Japanese Minorities:The Illusion of Homogeneity, London: Routledge. 102