CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198205890
- eISBN:
- 9780191676840
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198205890.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History, Political History
This chapter provides a discussion on Taisho politics and society. It starts by presenting the second phase of Taisho democracy. It also describes the Rice Riots. The riots were not a ‘failed ...
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This chapter provides a discussion on Taisho politics and society. It starts by presenting the second phase of Taisho democracy. It also describes the Rice Riots. The riots were not a ‘failed revolution’ as some historians have suggested, but ‘a Jacquerie of enormous scale’ on the part of people of the lower order in urban areas where narikin (nouveau-riche) and the poor lived side by side. One major result of the Rice Riots was the creation of permanent government control for distributing rice, developed in response to numerous petitions demanding self-sufficiency in food supply and the government regulation of rice prices. The chapter examines the Siberian intervention during 1918–22, the assassination of a prime minister, and universal male suffrage (adopted in 1925). Next, it explores Taisho liberalism in literature, Osugi Sakae and the White Terror of 1923, strikers, co-operators, levellers, the Public Order Preservation Act of 1925, and Kawakami Hajime and Japanese Marxism.Less
This chapter provides a discussion on Taisho politics and society. It starts by presenting the second phase of Taisho democracy. It also describes the Rice Riots. The riots were not a ‘failed revolution’ as some historians have suggested, but ‘a Jacquerie of enormous scale’ on the part of people of the lower order in urban areas where narikin (nouveau-riche) and the poor lived side by side. One major result of the Rice Riots was the creation of permanent government control for distributing rice, developed in response to numerous petitions demanding self-sufficiency in food supply and the government regulation of rice prices. The chapter examines the Siberian intervention during 1918–22, the assassination of a prime minister, and universal male suffrage (adopted in 1925). Next, it explores Taisho liberalism in literature, Osugi Sakae and the White Terror of 1923, strikers, co-operators, levellers, the Public Order Preservation Act of 1925, and Kawakami Hajime and Japanese Marxism.
Annmaria M. Shimabuku
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823282661
- eISBN:
- 9780823285938
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823282661.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
Alegal reveals modern Okinawa to be suspended in a perpetual state of exception: it is neither an official colony of Japan or the U.S., nor an equal part of the Japanese state. Today it is the site ...
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Alegal reveals modern Okinawa to be suspended in a perpetual state of exception: it is neither an official colony of Japan or the U.S., nor an equal part of the Japanese state. Today it is the site of one of the densest concentrations of U.S. military bases globally—a truly exceptional condition stemming from Japan’s abhorrence toward sexual contact around bases in its mainland that factored into securing Okinawa as a U.S. military fortress. This book merges Foucauldian biopolitics with Japanese Marxist theorizations of capitalism to trace the formation of a Japanese middle class that disciplined and secured the population from perceived threats, including the threat of miscegenation. Through close readings of poetry, reportage, film, and autobiography, it reveals how this threat came to symbolize the infringement of Japanese sovereignty figured in terms of a patriarchal monoethnic state. This symbolism, however, was met with great ambivalence in Okinawa. As a borderland of the Pacific, racial politics internal to the U.S. collided with colonial politics internal to the Asia Pacific in base towns centered on facilitating encounters between G.I.s and Okinawan women. By examining the history, debates, and cultural representations of these actors from 1945 to 2015, this book shows how they continually failed to “become Japanese.” Instead, they epitomized Okinawa’s volatility that danced on the razor’s edge between anarchistic insurgency and fascistic collaboration. What was at stake in their securitization was the attempt to contain Okinawa’s alegality itself—that is, a life force irreducible to the law.Less
Alegal reveals modern Okinawa to be suspended in a perpetual state of exception: it is neither an official colony of Japan or the U.S., nor an equal part of the Japanese state. Today it is the site of one of the densest concentrations of U.S. military bases globally—a truly exceptional condition stemming from Japan’s abhorrence toward sexual contact around bases in its mainland that factored into securing Okinawa as a U.S. military fortress. This book merges Foucauldian biopolitics with Japanese Marxist theorizations of capitalism to trace the formation of a Japanese middle class that disciplined and secured the population from perceived threats, including the threat of miscegenation. Through close readings of poetry, reportage, film, and autobiography, it reveals how this threat came to symbolize the infringement of Japanese sovereignty figured in terms of a patriarchal monoethnic state. This symbolism, however, was met with great ambivalence in Okinawa. As a borderland of the Pacific, racial politics internal to the U.S. collided with colonial politics internal to the Asia Pacific in base towns centered on facilitating encounters between G.I.s and Okinawan women. By examining the history, debates, and cultural representations of these actors from 1945 to 2015, this book shows how they continually failed to “become Japanese.” Instead, they epitomized Okinawa’s volatility that danced on the razor’s edge between anarchistic insurgency and fascistic collaboration. What was at stake in their securitization was the attempt to contain Okinawa’s alegality itself—that is, a life force irreducible to the law.
Aaron Stephen Moore
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804785396
- eISBN:
- 9780804786690
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804785396.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
Through an analysis of a prominent theorist of technology, Aikawa Haruki, this chapter demonstrates how a conception of technology associated with broader values of rationality, efficiency, and ...
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Through an analysis of a prominent theorist of technology, Aikawa Haruki, this chapter demonstrates how a conception of technology associated with broader values of rationality, efficiency, and creativity was embraced and first elaborated upon by leftist intellectuals exploring technology’s role in revolutionary social transformation. Aikawa developed a theory that rooted technology in creative praxis and subjectivity against what he perceived as spiritual alienation and economic exploitation under capitalism. He published detailed studies and proposals on labor management, industrial organization, colonial development, and even film aesthetics that outlined an alternative, non-alienating vision of technology that permeated all aspects of life, and resolved some of the ills of capitalist modernity such as class and social conflict. Thus, in many instances, it was leftist social scientists who shaped some of the most radical notions of mobilizing society through technology, and who reveal how the “technological imaginary” attracted theorists across the political spectrum.Less
Through an analysis of a prominent theorist of technology, Aikawa Haruki, this chapter demonstrates how a conception of technology associated with broader values of rationality, efficiency, and creativity was embraced and first elaborated upon by leftist intellectuals exploring technology’s role in revolutionary social transformation. Aikawa developed a theory that rooted technology in creative praxis and subjectivity against what he perceived as spiritual alienation and economic exploitation under capitalism. He published detailed studies and proposals on labor management, industrial organization, colonial development, and even film aesthetics that outlined an alternative, non-alienating vision of technology that permeated all aspects of life, and resolved some of the ills of capitalist modernity such as class and social conflict. Thus, in many instances, it was leftist social scientists who shaped some of the most radical notions of mobilizing society through technology, and who reveal how the “technological imaginary” attracted theorists across the political spectrum.
