I was asked to post this as a curiosity from 2006. It is one of the worst book reviews I have ever read about an academic book and continues the prize fight between David Williams and Harry Harootunian. Williams is a former teacher of mine and I do remain sympathetic to his views (in addition to being pretty ace in the classroom, he opened my eyes to the politics of studying Japan, and he's an entertaining character at the very least), but he streches his arguments so far (too far) as to render them almost meaningless, and thus open them to easy attack by those who fundamentally disagree with his standpoint.Stylewise, he reads like an American prosaist: A talented user of language, no doubt, but at times about as subtle as a bullfight, and on the wordy side including digressions. To some extent he thus exposes his personality to attacks by being more of a journalistic writer than a strictly academic one. Less would really be more, but I still resent Harootunian's complete failure to see anything good in it, and he actually uses inverted commas when describing Williams' work, calling it a 'book' rather than book. There's not much love lost between these two writers, but that's just plain mean.REVIEW ARTICLE
Returning to Japan: part two
HARRY HAROOTUNIAN
David Williams, Defending Japan’s PacificWar: The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power. RoutledgeCurzon, London, 2004. xxvi + 238pp.
One of the problems facing practitioners of the art of historical revision is the inability
to recognize that historical writing is always a revision and a rewriting. What
this means is that the effort to set out deliberately to produce an historical revision
invariably risks falling into the same trap historians inevitably trip into, which is
the unbridgeable contradiction between the facts that presumably constitute the
rawmaterial of any historical account, since they do not write themselves a history,
and the linguistic descriptions, interpretations that are employed to mediate the
facticity into a coherent account. In this sense, all historical writing is inevitably a
rewriting that always marks a rift between the events and facts constitutive of any
history and whatever is subsequently said about them when this history is formed.
It is this rift that is thematicized in countless ways by historians and explains why
history can be rewritten and ultimately why writing history is invariably a rewriting,
regardless of intentionality. But when the act explicitly announces its desire
to be a revision, the chances are high that it will exceed its quest and become
nothing more than a parody of a parody. The rift is never surmounted and the
contradiction between word and deed never overcome. But the effect of this failed
mission is to call attention to a space of contention which the revision has tried
to close by appealing to a superior knowledge promising to rid ‘reconstruction’ of
subjective will, political partiality and personal bias. Revisionism is always about
failed repetition and the repetition of failure. A fool’s errand, if there ever was
one, the route to revision is possible only if the logic is inverted to enable a concentration
on the form of history itself rather than on its content, and that might
be called the revision of history in order to distinguish it from the mere garden
variety of historical revision. Yet it is precisely the refusal to make this move that
persuades historical revisionists to depend on techniques like hermeneutics and its
claim to secure authentic identification with both enunciator and the enounced,
in the effort to occupy the sensibilities of others in different times and places.
The category of revision thus functions to ratify the claims of a superior historical
knowledge (already based on a prior representation) as ‘objective’ and
free from the mediations of subjective will and the rumor of political partiality.
If it is difficult to exaggerate the role played by this desire to expunge political
bias and partisanship from the act of a putative ‘reconstruction’ in the name of
greater clarity and truth, it is even harder to separate theological zeal from purposeful
historical revision, which takes the form of a self-righteous promise to
embark upon a crusading mission dedicated to setting the record straight before
it is too late. However, setting the record straight is often indistinguishable from
settling scores. At the same time that revision is busied with the task of screening
unwanted political motivations, it must be deployed accusatively to underscore
the correct reading of a text and/or an interpretation in the name of the higher
truth, employing whatever devices are at hand to do the job. This practice invariably
involves appeals to greater empirical authority, the imbecilities of relying on
the ‘transparency’ of translation to substitute for the absence of having anything
worthwhile to say to reinforce the worst of empirical certainties that the facts and
texts speak for themselves and, finally, citational strategies that rival Senator Joe
McCarthy’s rampage to ferret out commies and queers (usually the same in his
thinking). But this operation never fails to betray its own politically driven agenda.
Above all else, willful historical revision rarely possesses the capacity to constrain
its own impulse ‘merely’ to correct, and thus risks exceeding itself to become an
undisciplined and errant mission devoted to destroying the enemy. Its tactic resembles
more the excesses of slash and burn and Agent Orange than the ‘demands
of scholarship’.
The irony of this uncontrolled effect dramatizes the importance of personal
motivation lurking in the shadowed recesses of revisionism and, worse, a desire
never satisfied at the heart of such an impulse, which manage to tell readers more
than they need or want to know about the author. Hence, it is possible to say that
the gesture behind revisionism, powered by a potent but ambiguously dangerous
mix of desire (psychological resentment) and political certitude masquerading
as objective truth (political resentment), overdetermines a result which will call
attention not to the pragmatic conception of the task of historiographical practice,
which is to ‘reconstruct’ the past and correct it, but rather to tediously dreary
personal aspirations that have nothing to do with the ‘demands of scholarship’.
In its worst forms, we can observe the toxic effects of excessive revisionism in the
call to rewrite textbooks in contemporary Japan and Holocaust denial promoted
by ‘historians’ like Robert Faurisson.
David Williams’
Defending Japan’s Pacific War: The Kyoto School of Philosophers
and Post-White Power is a reminder of the crucial and not always acknowledged
boundary separating historical revision and the revision of history and how easily
practitioners of the former end up exceeding the revisionist project itself to skid
off the runway, so to speak. Williams, it should be stated, is an apparent admirer of
Ernst Nolte and recalls his theory of ‘deep revisionism’, which has already alerted
us to the reappearance of the ‘Yellow Peril’ (in the shape of Soviet Communism)
as the reason prompting Germany’s decision to go to war in 1939. Nolte, it needs
be remembered, introduced the ‘Asiatic deed’ Hitler carried out (extermination)
from fear of being victimized by the ‘Asiaticism’ threatened by the Soviet determination
to eliminate the bourgeoisie. At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking that
Williams’ ‘book’ recalled for me the movie, White Men Can’t Jump, but was not
nearly as funny or instructive. The declared purpose of this ‘book’ is to rectify the
reputation of Kyoto philosophy, to ‘take Kyoto philosophy seriously’, and rescue
Williams’ ‘heroes’ from intellectual ignominy, namely the figure of Tanabe Hajime
from ‘Western bias’ by ‘prob[ing]’ ‘factual’ and ‘interpretational foundations’ that
have led to the desecration. In brief, Williams wishes to restate and resituate in
the foreground the defense Kyoto philosophy provided to Japan’s decision to go to
war in the Pacific. Along the way the reader is rewarded with details of Williams’
‘autobiography’, the record of his struggle to find the truth effaced by a delusional
America in the grips of hooded ‘White power’ and his Pauline conversion to the
revelations of Kyoto philosophy. But he has clearly overstated the case and the
necessity to ‘save’ Kyoto philosophy from its alleged disrepute and produced not
a serious account but a silly one.
Williams has accepted the responsibility of assuming the ‘painful business’ of
deep revisionism because very simply somebody has to do it. And he has assigned
himself no less a project than the defense of Japan’s involvement in the Pacific
War, much like Ernst Nolte, who had already reassured us that the epoch of fascism
was now passed to subsequently recite for us the great sacrifice Germany
had made in defending the West against a new ‘Yellow Peril’. In Nolte’s historicist
view, the singularity of the Third Reich will simply appear in the long
duration as a moment in the history of mankind. (As with the Armenian massacres
Hitler believed were already forgotten, Nolte looks to the day when nobody
will remember Germany’s genocidal war.) In Japan the defense of the war was
already made in Kyoto philosophy with its powerful critique of epistemological
and philosophical imperialism and the colonization of the mind many Japanese
were convinced they were living during the 1930s. Here, there is no disagreement
over the prescience of this particular critique and its smartness in light of
more recent intellectual sensitivities. But, in spite of the acuity of Kyoto philosophic
perception, there is still the lingering problem of the war against Asia and
Asians and Japan’s colonization of much of the region and the way philosophers
like Koyama Iwao, Kosaka Masaaki and Nishitani Keiji sought to give meaning
to the eventfulness of their present. Any reader of the discussions that took
place in Kyoto in 1942 will recognize that, while the cultural critique against
Western historicist and philosophic claims was on the mark, the response to the
war, imperialism and colonization, occasioning the moment to consider Japan’s
world historical mission, masked a genuine indifference and superiority toward
those Asians Japan was supposedly liberating from white man’s domination. It
was precisely this superiority and indifference that sanctioned the violence and
destruction directed against Asians which Kyoto philosophy at the time successfully
managed to displace in abstraction and on which it remained obdurately
silent. I am not referring to the alleged claims that Kyoto philosophers were really
at odds with the war aims of the army (a claim Williams has heavily invested in and
uses to redirect attention away from the war in Asia) but rather the spectacle of a
continuing war of imperialism and colonialism on the Asian continent Japan had
been waging well before 1941. The attempt to show that Kyoto philosophers were
opposed to the war rings with the same kind of intellectual dishonesty that has
prompted historians like Nolte to suggest that Germany was defending Europe
and the West (bourgeois society) against the new Yellow Peril. What this tactic
seeks to accomplish is a finessing of genocidal and colonial violence, either as the
price that must be paid for pursuing such lofty civilizational goals or simply as a
reflection of indifference toward people who have no subjectivity. The effort to
make philosophers like Tanabe into precursors vocalizing some sort of utopian
fantasy of multi-ethnicity deliberately overlooks the context of an imperial and
colonial present that supplied empirical and existential reality to such theorization.
In this regard, the proposals of shu no ronri are as hollow as are those nostalgic
celebrations today which now look upon the older Ottoman, Hapsburg and even
British Empires as paradigmatic prefigurations of multi-cultural and multi-ethnic
political spaces.
Despite Tanabe’s personal fate during the early Occupation, where he went
on to write important essays on the figure of the emperor he opposed and the
status of emperorship which he saw as an expression of mu mediating political
contradictions, Koyama and Kosaka became principal theorists of the Monbusho
(Williams should read the stirring Kitai sareru ningenzo¯ for a post-war updating of
Kyoto philosophy and as an example of the successful survival of his heroes) and
Nishitani re-surfaced as a ‘beloved’ and respected religious ecumenicist known
throughout the world. In this regard, I met Kosaka years ago in Kyoto and was
shocked by the awe accorded him by really well-placed scholars and politicians
who were treating him as if he had been elevated to the status of daimyo¯jin. Not
bad rehabilitation for a bunch of fascists. So what is the purpose of rehabilitating
reputations that needed none? Williams wants to show that Kyoto philosophers,
far from colluding with Japan’s war aims and imperial ambitions, had produced
a perceptive critique of White power ‘before the letter’, and thus persuasively
demonstrated the necessity of now staging a confrontation with it before all of
Asia was incorporated into its devouring machine. Armed with the powers and
responsibility of ‘deep revisionism’, Williams sets out to convince readers of the
rightness of his mission and how ‘unbiased’ he is by resuscitating the ruined
reputation of Tanabe Hajime, especially, and the prefigurative powers of his vision
to overcome ‘whiteness’.
But the problem is that Williams has linked Tanabe’s fate to that of Kyoto philosophers who came out of the war smelling like roses. As far as I know, nobody ever labeled Tanabe as a fascist, not even Tosaka Jun, who wrote endlessly about fascism in the 1930s and who had been one of Tanabe’s principal critics in those years. It is not at all clear from Williams’ account that
Tanabe himself believed he needed resuscitation.
But Williams has larger ambitions. One of these is to call for a ‘paradigmatic
revolution of Japan studies’ by appropriating the insights uncovered by Kyoto philosophy.
(Now there’s a project with world historical significance!) When he is not
wandering over the landscape of twentieth-century philosophy (Lukacs, Heidegger,
Marcuse, Sartre, etc.) in pointless encounters based primarily on secondary
accounts – we really do not need to revisit the Heidegger controversy through
summaries of works that have been long available – what space remains is committed
to denouncing both theWestern bias he has now uncovered and overcome
and obsessive condemnations against charges of fascist complicity among some of
the members of the Kyoto school. (Like Nolte, he wants to banish fascism from
the historical and everyday lexicon.) It occurred to me that, since Williams somewhere
identifies himself with ‘we philosophers’ (just as he also portrays himself
as Marx to somebody’s Engels), his interventions aspire to philosophic authority
and are made to remind us of his membership in the fraternity of philosophers
and thinkers, even though they never rise above the level of unwanted and selfindulgent
digressions.
Because Williams has already fused Tanabe’s circumstances with Koyama and
Kosaka, who have been accused of fascist tendencies, he is able to dramatize
his case for rectification and re-appropriation. Where this strategy misleads is in
giving the impression that no real differences existed among these thinkers. Yet it is
obvious that Tanabe’s thinking was quite distant from Koyama and Kosaka, not to
forget Nishitani, and there was a significant difference between the ‘cosmopolitan’
program informing shu no ronri and the discussions on Japan’s world historical
mission and its ‘philosophy of total war’. The tactic of throwing them together
actually works against the best interests of poor Tanabe since it binds him to the
most baneful legacy of Kyoto philosophy. What Williams inadvertently unveils is
the absence of any real problem and the labor of a skewed logic busily inventing
what clearly is not there. Perhaps he should also include Joe McCarthy in his
pantheon of heroes.
We know that Williams was able to escape the illusions of his youth (‘Once upon
a time in America’) and free himself finally from the snares of ‘Western bias’ to become
one with Kyoto philosophy. This familiar chant, resonant with hermeneutic
privilege, is accomplished through reading and translation. But this attempt to see
things through the optic of Kyoto philosophers and to close the very distance between
subject and object that had condemned previous interpreters to unrelieved
error and bias never moves beyond the announcement of a declared intention to
‘take it seriously’. It thus rests on the operation of reading/translation, which apparently
needs no further explanation because it instantly presumes transparency
and the realization of authentic understanding through the alchemy of empathy.
The empathetic identification, of course, is already manifested in Williams’ desire
to be one with Kyoto philosophy, and ironically reveals the pathos of the white
boy who can’t jump. The opacity of transparency is immediately flagged, however,
when we see the term so¯ryokusen leap off the page in transmuted (I should say transubstantiated)
form as ‘total resistance’ and when a discussion on why minzoku
should not be translated as ‘race’ ignores its primary association with folk, which
was precisely the way it was employed by thinkers in the 1930s and remained at
the center of Tosaka’s critique of Tanabe’s use of the term as a stand-in for shu
in its mediating capacity. When Williams finally gets around to allowing ‘folk’ to
surface as a possible translation, he warns his reader that the ‘word “Volk” is used
in English-language Allied scholarship in order to browbeat the Germans about
the war’ (p. 160). But this unknowing proclamation explains nothing whatsoever
and makes sense only if it is seen to exemplify Williams’ own proven aptitude
for browbeating, whose utilization is made to substitute for the absence of a convincing
argument, especially when he is able to yoke it to strategic omissions of
widespread usages and practices which will easily undermine his interpretative
house of cards. I need mention only Yanagita Kunio and his followers, who always
used minzoku as ‘folk’ and minzokugaku as ‘folklore’, or fascist sociologists
like Takada Yasuma and Suzuki Eitaro, to name two among many, who grasped
minzokushugi as ‘folkism’ principally because of its powerful association of organic
communalism, not the nation. In the end, the sound and fury of the browbeating
actually exposes the empty political soul of the would-be historical revisionist and
the bankruptcy of his/her claims to set the record straight.
Once Williams has been able to shed the illusions of his youthful socialization
in Amerika and recognize the lies of White power he had been fed, he is ready to
receive the message ofKyoto philosophy, especiallyTanabe’s, and the truth of what
might be called White man’s bluff. The road to self-discovery and self-knowledge,
achieved through a form of ‘working through’, opens the way for Williams to
envisage his grand project of a ‘revolutionary Japan studies’. For Williams the crisis
of the present is already upon us and demands a choice between romanticism and
enlightenment. Somehow this crisis is related to the ‘state of the field’ of Japan
studies today. ‘The high decencies of Enlightenment have triumphed over the
suspect doctrines of the romantic. After Hitler,’ he continues almost mournfully,
‘we are all universalists’ (p. 167). But, since most Japanese have not made this
choice, Japan studies in the West has targeted the ‘Japanese quest for satisfactory
national identity’ (p. 168) with resentment and hostility. The purpose of this
meditation is to remind readers that the goal of Japan studies is not to criticize or
to praise but to understand Japan. But we know that this very advice was already
circulating decades ago as a code for accepting precisely the representations that
the hired hands of Japanese exceptionalism (reincarnated goyo¯gakusha) in and
out of Japan were peddling to dismiss and displace criticism. When he finally
gets to his destination, via a detour through Wounded Knee, Frankfurt, Paris
and Oxford, in a ‘book’ loaded with ceaseless detours of self-contradiction and
incessant posturings,we learn that Japan studies must turn to theKyoto school and
its critique of White power and the ‘White Republic’, and ‘return to Japan’ itself,
like himself, in order to begin the great task of dismantling the regime of White
power and constructing the ‘new post-White order that is the planet’s destiny’
(p. 171). At the heart of this recommendation is the empathetic desire to become
Japanese that signals a repetitious re-enactment in the present of the process of
‘imperialization’ (ko¯minka) Japanese colonial policy deployed to transmute the
identity of subject peoples into imperial subjects. What the Kyoto school provided
was simply the alibi for the installation of Yellow power, which is exactly what
Japanese offered to Asia once they had rid the region of White man’s colonialism.
To offset charges of imperialism and colonialism Williams invokes the currently
fashionable argument of modernizers (and dramatized in the Showakan) that
Japanese colonialism brought benefits to the colonized.
But what Williams refuses to address is the question contemporary revisionists
in Japan have enthusiastically evaded: the record of Japan’s imperial and colonial
depredations against Asia. Years ago Takeuchi Yoshimi tried to defend those in
the inter-war period who had mounted a powerful critique of Japan’s imitative
modernity and its colonizing consequences. While he approved of the critique,
he was at a loss to explain its relationship to imperial war in Asia and why Japan
waged a war of destruction against fellow Asians. It was Takeuchi who well after
the war reminded his contemporaries that the ‘roots of Japanese fascism lie in
the very structure of Japanese culture’ and it was the ‘honor student culture’
dedicated to maintaining it and personified by theKyoto school that best expressed
the link between the ‘philosophy of total war’ and Japan’s colonizing aspirations
by providing the “‘subjective” legitimation’ to what plainly was an ‘imperialist
war’. Moreover, the same philosophers who supplied, according to Williams, the
template for a future figure of non-White power and multi-cultural and multiethnic
utopia had no trouble in insisting on Japan’s leadership in the coming
reconstruction of Asia, which invariably meant developing a national community
on the Japanese model. As for the empire of Yellow power that had already taken
shape by 1942 it was fully committed to force and violence and to a studied
indifference toward those subject peoples without subjectivity who were now being
asked to participate in the great ‘cooperative’ enterprise. And who can forget
Nishitani Keiji’s memorable addendum on the great ideals of Kyoto’s multi-ethnic
empire which reflected the niggardly offer of partial subjectivity to only the most
able among the empire’s subject peoples qualified to ‘become half-Japanese’?
It is not at all clear why this book has been published (even as one blurb hails it
as ‘revolutionary’) and what kind of audience is being targeted. It is neither good
philosophic exposition nor competent intellectual history. Williams proudly announces
that this is the third monograph he has published with RoutledgeCurzon
and hopefully it is the last. Yet, the publication of this ‘book’ says as much about
Routledge as it does of Williams (on whom we already know too much).We might reasonable wonder about the standards at Routledge (something Williams worries
lot about) and the apparent absence of editorial leadership. The question begged
by this ‘book’ is whether anybody on the editorial staff actually read it, and if
they did what was going through their mind. Who was watching the store when
the manuscript came through? Who, moreover, could possibly have vetted this
incoherent, rambling, self-serving and self-heroizing manuscript and actually recommended
publication with a straight face? For additional insurance, Williams
drops names in his acknowledgements and throughout the text as rapidly and compulsively
as local party loyalists nervously buying votes. The effect of this lavish
spreading of citations is to have constituted an army of virtual support (recruiting
the ‘imprimatur’ of some prominent names in the ‘field’ who have probably been
co-opted unknowingly in his crusade but maybe not), but the presence of this vast
reserve army of would-be supporters still fails to explain the grounds on which
the recommendation for publication was made. Who will read this ‘book’, now
that it has been unleashed, and how it is to be used, apart from providing a guide
to the fine art of browbeating, are other questions too depressing to contemplate.
Unfortunately, the mystery will remain with Routledge and its absent editors who
seemingly have no need to account for the reasons to sanction issuing a senseless
screed which, at the very least, will be able to stand as a reminder of that
other great idiocy of British higher education – the Research Assessment Exercise
(RAE).
New York University
