The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 18 | Issue 17 | Number 1 | Article ID 5461 | Sep 01, 2020

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Early Freeze Warning: The Politics and Literature Debate asCold War Culture

Michael Bourdaghs

Abstract: This essay revisits the 1946-7“Politics and Literature Debate” (Seiji tobungaku ronsō), a pivotal controversy amongleftist Japanese writers and intellectuals that isconventionally cited as the starting point ofpostwar literary history. Situating the debate intandem with three influential texts published atroughly the same time in the West—LionelTrilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1951), RuthBenedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword(1946), and The God That Failed (1950), editedby Richard Crossman—the essay argues thatthe debate should be considered an earlyinstance of the Cold War culture that wouldemerge globally in the decades that followed.

Introduction: The 1946-7 “Politics andLiterature Debate” (Seiji to bungaku ronsō)among leftist Japanese writers and intellectualsis conventionally cited as the starting point forJapan’s postwar literary history. Reflecting onthe disaster of the war and Japan’s imperialistaggression against its neighbors, as well as onthe failure of the prewar proletarian culturemovement to prevent that disaster, participantson both sides of the debate shared a strongcommitment to the idea of Literature as acornerstone to modern culture, as well as tothe democratization of Japan and the rootingout of fascist and “feudal” elements from itspolitical life. The source of their disagreementarose from sharply differing views of thecorrect relationship between those two goals:was literature properly autonomous from the

political, or was it part and parcel of thepolitical?

In some ways, the debate represented aresumption of disputes that had dogged theproletarian literature movement of the 1920sand 30s and that had been forced into silenceby the fascist state’s censorship and repressionof the left. But the debate also reflectedsomething of a generational divide within theJapanese left, as a rising generation of criticssuch as Hirano Ken and Ara Masahito—many ofthem associated with the new cultural journalK i n d a i B u n g a k u ( M o d e r nLiterature)—challenged the authority of more-established writers and critics such as NakanoShigeharu and Kurahara Korehito, many ofthem veterans of the prewar proletarianliterature, who were affiliated with the newlylegalized Japan Communist Party and thejournal Shin Nihon Bungaku (New JapaneseLiterature). As it unfolded across the pages ofmultiple journals and newspapers, the debateeventually involved dozens of writers. Thedebate ultimately died out without everreaching a clear resolution, as other issues tookcenter stage in intellectual life, notably theAmerican Occupation’s Reverse Course and theresumption of intensified censorship againstthe JCP and other leftists under intensified ColdWar conditions. But the after-currents of thedebate would continue to shape Japaneseliterary criticism and intellectual life fordecades to come.

Like much of Japan’s leftist and Marxist literaryhistory, the Politics and Literature Debate waslong ignored or glossed over in English-language studies of Japanese literary history. A

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research project organized in recent years byfaculty and graduate students from PrincetonUniversity, Waseda University, and theUniversity of Chicago aimed to rectify thissituation by providing the first extensiveEnglish-language investigation into the debate.The project resulted in the publication of twovolumes: The Politics and Literature Debate inPostwar Japanese Criticism, 1945-1952 (editedby Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, RichiSakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda; LexingtonBooks, 2017), an anthology of annotatedtranslations of twenty-four key essays thatconstituted the original “Politics and LiteratureDebate,” and Literature among the Ruins,1945-1955: Postwar Japanese LiteraryCriticism (same editors; Lexington Books,2018), a collection of new scholarly essays onthe debate by scholars from across NorthAmerica and Japan. The following essay istaken from the latter volume and reprintedhere (with some revisions) by kind permissionof Lexington Books.

Early Freeze Warning: The Politics andLiterature Debate as Cold War Culture

The Politics and Literature Debate of 1946–47has long been taken as the starting point forpostwar Japanese literary history. My purposehere, however, is to rethink it as an earlyskirmish in Cold War cultural politics. Insteadof positioning the complicated disputesinvolving Hirano Ken, Nakano Shigeharu, andothers in reference to the just-ended war of1931–45, what happens when we map them inrelation to the global Cold War that was justgetting under way?

This is not an entirely new gesture. Inrethinking Japan’s postwar culture through thelens of the Cold War, I follow in the wake ofmany others.1 Taking up the 1946–47 debatesas early Cold War culture helps revealconnections with subsequent developments inhihyō (criticism) in the 1960s, ’70s, and

’80s—that is, during the latter stages of theCold War. More important, this rethinkingproductively shifts the ground from which anAmerican scholar approaches Japan. Whereasthe postwar Japan studies approach has oftenproceeded from the implicit (and sometimesexplicit) assumption of America as thebenefactor that rescued Japan from fascism, aCold War framework situates the United Statesin a less-comfortable position, one in which itsown stance as a perpetrator of geopoliticalviolence has to be raised alongside the study ofJapanese cultural production. I conclude myessay with a consideration of American Japanstudies as yet another instance of Cold Warculture.

The rethinking I want to pursue requirestranscending the boundaries of Japan to placethe 1946–47 debates in a more global context.In the wake of the horrors of World War II,intellectuals around the world engaged in livelyd e b a t e s o v e r t h e m e a n i n g s a n dinterrelationships of such concepts as“literature,” “politics,” “subjectivity,” “culture,”“nation,” “Marxism,” and “humanism.” Weneed only to think of such classic works asAuerbach’s Mimesis (1946), Wellek andWarren’s Theory of Literature (1946), Adornoand Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment(1947), or Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1947)to sense this context.2 We might add Orwell’sAnimal Farm (1945) to this list—and note thatOccupation authorities arranged the 1949publication of a Japanese translation of thenovel and sponsored performances of akamishibai storyteller adaptation aimed atfactory workers, government officials, andlabor unions.3 Of course, the Politics andLiterature Debate unfolded within its ownspecific historical situation, yet its participantswere aware that their activities as criticsparalleled similar developments around theworld.

The Politics and Literature Debate began withthe April 1946 publication in the journal

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Ningen (Humanity) of a roundtable discussionon “The War Responsibility of Writers”(Bungakusha no sekimu). Skimming the table ofcontents of that journal from 1946 to 1947, wecome across the following article titles:

Fukuro Ippei, “Saikin no soveto bungaku omegutte” (On recent Soviet literature)(January 1946)

Satō Saku , “Furansu bundan noshinchōryū” (Recent currents in Frenchliterary circles) (May 1946)

Honda Kiyoj i , “Amerikateki shi i”(American-style thought) (June 1946)

Takeda Taijun, “Chūgoku no sakkatachi”(China’s writers) (June 1946)

Ramon Fernandez, “Thought andRevolution” (July 1946)

Thomas Mann, Voyage with Don Quixote(serialized October–December 1946)

André Gide, “André Malraux (The HumanAdventure)” (November 1946)

André Gide, “French-Style Dialogue”(January 1947)

Takahashi Yoshitaka, “Hesse mondai” (TheHesse problem) (February 1947)

André Malraux, Man’s Hope (March 1947)

In February 1946, Ningen also published aspecial issue devoted to “American Thought,”while in 1947 it ran a two-part special issue(July and September) on contemporary Frenchliterary trends. In April 1949 it carriedNakahashi Kazuo’s piece on “The Problem ofLiterature and Politics in Contemporary EnglishLiterature” (Gendai Eibungaku ni okeru

bungaku to seiji no mondai), while in January1952 it published Katō Shūichi’s translation ofSartre’s What Is Literature? Clearly, readers ofthe Politics and Literature Debate as itunfolded across the pages of Ningen andkindred journals in late-1940s Japan had accessto timely information about similar debatesunderway around the globe.

Moreover, intellectuals outside Japan,particularly after the Chinese Revolution (1949)and the outbreak of the Korean War (1950),showed keen interest in how Japaneseintellectuals understood the relationshipbetween politics and literature.4 As I discuss inthe following, the monthly Encounter regularlyincluded translations from modern Japaneseliterature as well as reportage on theintellectual milieu of 1950s Japan. Moreover, ifwe browse such American intellectual journalsas Partisan Review or Commentary from thisperiod, we find a striking resemblance toNingen and its peers in Japan. During the earlyCold War, in both Japan and the West a sharedcanon was emerging—centered on such figuresas Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Mann, and Gide—as theground for ongoing debates over the properrelationship between literature and politics.Rereading the 1946–47 Japanese debate intandem with its counterparts abroad shouldopen up a more global, dialogic understanding,as we come to see both what it shared withsimilar debates elsewhere and what was uniqueto it.

My initial tactic here for tackling this enormousproblem is to reread the Japanese debatealongside three intertexts. These three workswere published in the United States at roughlythe time of the debate and played importantroles in Cold War culture. Each remains inprint today, and each was translated anddebated within Japan. Directly or indirectly, theJapanese critics who engaged in the Politicsand Literature Debate did so in dialogue withthese texts, and through this dialogue conceptsthat would become fixtures of Cold War culture

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began to take shape. As Ann Sherif hasreminded us, “culture during the Cold Warreveals itself as the primary front or battlefield,the desired site of transformation andconviction.”5 Whether or not they were awareof it at the time, Japanese intellectuals in1946–47 debating the proper meanings of“politics” and “literature” stood on the frontlines of a battle for hearts and minds thatwould unfold across the globe in the comingdecades.

I must note, though, that at the time of thePolitics and Literature Debate, the term “ColdWar” was not yet in wide circulation. GeorgeOrwell had used it or its cognates in severalessays published in 1945–47,6 but the term didnot win wide usage in English until around1947; many point to the publication of WalterLippman’s The Cold War that year as a turningpoint. The Japanese counterpart (reisen) seemsto have entered the popular vocabulary around1949. A keyword search through the onlinearchive of the Asahi newspaper, for example,turns up an article of March 27, 1949, on East-West tensions (“Takaku kyōtei ni shippai:Uzumaku ‘tsumetai tatakai’ ” [Failure to reachmultilateral accord: A spiraling “cold war”]) asthe earliest usage of the kindred phrasetsumetai tatakai. Searches of other onlinedatabases of magazine articles also show thephrase reisen beginning to appear in 1949.

In other words, the writers who engaged in the1946–47 debate could not have known at thetime that they were early Cold Warriors.Nonetheless, I argue here that the positionsand concepts they advanced contributed to theformation of what would become a global ColdWar culture.

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The first of the three intertexts is Lionel

Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination. Trilling, aprofessor of English literature and comparativeliterature at Columbia University, was a leadingfigure among the group known popularly as theNew York Intellectuals, centered on the anti-Stalinist Partisan Review. The LiberalImagination first appeared in 1950, but Trillinghad published many of its essays previously inliterary journals, precisely during the period ofthe Japanese Politics and Literature Debate.The book became a best seller and a popularsensation.7 It would have a decisive impact on1950s American literary criticism: one criticdescribed it as being akin to “Holy Writ.”8

Lionel Trilling (Source: Wikipedia)

Trilling’s impact on Japan seems less dramatic.His work was not widely introduced into Japanuntil after the end of the US Occupation(1952)—in other words, well after the Politicsand Literature Debate had reached itsinconclusive conclusion. As part of a campaignby the Congress for Cultural Freedom andother Cold War cultural institutions to present

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his work to readers outside the United States, apartial Japanese translation of LiberalImagination appeared in 1959 under a revisedtitle: Literature and Psychoanalysis.9 Theprevious year saw the publication of atranslation of The Middle of the Journey,Trilling’s 1947 autobiographical novel depictinghis own break with communism (what would betermed in Japanese literary history a tenkōshōsetsu, a conversion novel).10 Prior to this,Trilling’s thought was introduced to Japanesereaders through various journal articles.11 Butas of 1946–47, Trilling does not seem to havemuch of a presence in the minds of Japaneseliterary critics. For example, an article in theOctober 1950 issue of Ningen surveys theongoing reevaluation of Henry James inAmerican literary history without mentioningTrilling, despite the important role he played inthat reevaluation.12

The Liberal Imagination represents a boldrewriting of American literary history (and, to alesser extent, world literary history) from ananti-Communist perspective. As such, itbecame a classic text of 1950s American “ColdWar liberalism.”13 The “liberalism” that Trillinganalyzes remains somewhat amorphous, butthis does not prevent him from vowing in thework’s preface that “in the United States at thistime liberalism is not only the dominant buteven the sole intellectual tradition.”14 AsTrilling openly acknowledges, his literarycriticism is driven by a political agenda: hewants to define the proper relationshipbetween politics and literature. Whereas whatTrilling calls the liberal imagination inAmerican cultural life holds that mankind isperfectible, literature’s duty is to resist thisoptimistic belief. While Trilling does not use thesame language as Ara Masahito employed insuch Politics and Literature Debate essays as“Dai-ni no seishun” (Second youth, 1946), it isclear he has something similar in mind: forTrilling, literature is properly a kind ofnegativity.

Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination(1950)

Trilling in defining his mission presumes whathe calls “the inevitable intimate, if not alwaysobvious, connection between literature andpolitics” (xviii). Echoing Hirano Ken’s assertionthat the defining keyword of Japaneseliterature in the Shōwa era has been “politics,”Trilling writes that “the literature of themodern period, of the last century and a half,has been characteristically political” (xviii),with Trilling defining that last term in “thewide sense of the word” (xvii) to include “thepolitics of culture, the organization of humanlife toward some end or other, toward themodification of sentiments, which is to say the

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quality of human life” (xvii). Literature inparticular served as a source of persistentresistance to liberalism’s rationalizingideologies, as an insistence on the necessity ofimagination and sentiment to any concept ofhuman freedom. In the face of liberalism’stendency to simplify problems in order toorganize solutions to them, literature acquireda force of political resistance by being “thehuman activity that takes the fullest and mostprecise account of variousness, possibility,complexity, and difficulty” (xxi).

Trilling is in particular fascinated by therelationship between literature and power. Asin the Japanese Politics and Literature Debate,for Tril l ing this relationship could beunderstood in part icular through anexamination of the impact of the CommunistParty on American letters. This thematic isdeveloped in a chapter that was originallypublished in 1946 to commemorate the tenthanniversary of the Partisan Review—and one ofthe chapters omitted from the 1959 Japanesetranslation. This little magazine, Trilling notes,was at its inauguration in the early 1930sassociated with the American Communist Partybut quickly moved away from that position tobecome a new intellectual and literary voice forthe non-Communist Party left.

The essay begins with a meditation on thewaning power of literature. “It is now morethan twenty years since a literary movement inthis country has had what I have called power”(96). Trilling goes on to describe favorably theliberal worldview he believes is common to theeducated classes in 1946 America, but heinsists that it does not produce great literature.“Our liberal ideology has produced a largeliterature of social and political protest, butnot, for several decades, a single writer whocommands our real literary admiration” (98). Itproduces literature that is “earnest, sincere,solemn,” “a literature of piety” that “hasneither imagination nor mind.” Trilling thenlists what he takes to be the great writers of

the twentieth century—Proust, Joyce,Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats—and argues that nonerespected the tenets of the liberal ideology. Heconcludes “that there is no connection betweenthe political ideas of our educated class and thedeep places of the imagination” (99).

In this environment, Trilling insists, the mostnecessary task is “to organize a new unionbetween our po l i t ica l ideas and ourimagination.” This explicitly involves rejectingthe sway of the Communist Party:

The cultural program of the CommunistParty in this country has, more than anyother single intellectual factor, given thelicense to that divorce between politicsand the imagination of which I havespoken. Basing itself on a great act of mindand on a great faith in mind, it hassucceeded in rationalizing intellectuallimitation and has, in twenty years,produced not a single work of distinctionor even of high respectability. (100)

It is the fate of those who care about literatureto remain political, he concludes, a hard fate ofwhich “the only possibility of enduring it is toforce into our definition of politics every humanactivity and every subtlety of every humanactivity” (100). The struggle to reunite thepolitical with the imagination is ultimately,Trilling argues, a question of power. “Thequestion of power has not always preoccupiedliterature. And ideally it is not the questionwhich should first come to mind in thinkingabout literature. Quality is the first, andperhaps should be the only, consideration.” Butbecause the very survival of “a particularquality” is at stake, “the question of power isforced upon us” (101). In such a moment,literature’s quality must be defended, and evenif the writer of literature serves only his ownmuse, “the democracy that does not know that

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the daemon and the subject must be served isnot, in any ideal sense of the word, ademocracy at all” (102).

I’ve already suggested points of similaritybetween Trilling’s arguments and those offeredby participants in the Politics and LiteratureDebate in Japan. In particular, Trilling sharesmany positions with Hirano Ken. Both share aseemingly unlimited faith in “literature” and itspossibilities. Both likewise reject the notionthat the “political” should enjoy primacy overthe “literary,” and for that reason both mencast a suspicious gaze at literature writtenunder the influence of communism. Trillingshares Hirano’s insistence on distinguishingliterature from the political, yet he also openlyacknowledges that his own literary criticism isoperating (reluctantly, but necessarily) in thedomain of politics. By contrast, as VictorKoschmann has noted, “Hirano’s extremelypolit ical essays about l i terary workscontradicted his professed belief in theinsularity of ‘literature’ from ‘politics.’”15 ForHirano, “politics” meant primarily thehegemony of the Japan Communist Party (JCP).As a result of this narrow definition, Hiranoremains blind to the politicality of his ownwritings.

The two critics also position themselvesdifferently in relation to the prewar proletarianliterature movement. Trilling essentiallyquarantines proletarian literature from thecanon of liberal imagination: his book is verymuch concerned with explaining why, forexample, Henry James belongs but TheodoreDreiser (who, Trilling notes, joined theCommunist Party late in his life) does not.Upton Sinclair, Jack London, John Steinbeck,and other radical writers largely disappearfrom Trilling’s version of American literaryhistory. As Christina Klein has argued, Trillingand the other New York Intellectuals weremotivated above all by the perceived need “toprotect the realm of culture from corruption byinsisting on a clear separation between art and

politics. They tended to view forms of culturethat retained any explicit social or politicalcontent as veering dangerously towardStalinism.” This led to a tendency to celebratemodernist, difficult art that tended towardabstraction and formal experimentation overpopulist works that relied on sentiment andrealism.16

Hirano Ken in 1943

(Source: Hathi Trust Library online versionof Hirano Ken Zenshū, Vol. 1)

Hirano employs a different strategy. Ratherthan isolate works of Japanese proletarianliterature, Hirano embraces them. But his mode

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of embrace is revisionist: he rewrites thehistorical narrative of the proletarian literaturemovement, providing it with new beginning andending points, a switch that has the effect ofredefining the whole character of themovement. In “‘Seiji no yūisei’ to wa nani ka”(What is “the primacy of politics?,” September1946), Hirano tries to justify his controversialequation of Kobayashi Takiji with Hino Ashiheiby composing a revisionist history of theJapanese proletarian literature movement.17

This new version situates Hirano rather thanthe JCP as the proper heir to the prewarproletarian literature movement.

Hirano’s new narrative of that movementbegins with Arishima Takeo’s “Sengen hitotsu”(One declaration, 1922).1 8 Arishima, abourgeois novelist, wrote in response toMarxist critic Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke’s claimthat literature was ultimately class based andthat writers were unable to transcend theirclass origins. Arishima accepts Hirabayashi’sassertion, acknowledging that any attempt heas a bourgeois novelist made to speak for theproletariat would amount to arrogant self-deception. According to Hirano, Arishima wasthe first to broach “subjectively….theintelligentsia’s defeat” (116). In Hirano’s view,Arishima posed a fundamental challenge toproletarian literature, one that subsequentcritics in the movement failed to confront. As aresult of this original sin, the movement wascharacterized by an inability to define theproper relationship between the proletariat andliterature, itself a product of bourgeoisieculture. Arishima’s fundamental challenge wasforgotten, and what emerged ironically was aproletarian literature movement dominated bypetit bourgeois intellectuals.

The new endpoint Hirano assigns to hisrevisionist history of proletarian literature islocated in the works of yet another bourgeoisauthor, Shiga Naoya. Shiga’s three letters toKobayashi Takiji, published after the latter’sdeath from a brutal police beating, resurrect

the contradiction that the proletarian literaturemovement was unable to resolve: thatliterature was originally a bourgeois culturalform, one that required a measure of autonomyto exist. In particular, Hirano focuses on aphrase that Shiga used to criticize Kobayashi’swritings: those works were “master-servingliterature” (shujin-mochi no bungaku) (116).Hirano concludes that the proletarian literaturemovement’s inability to address the criticismsof Arishima and Shiga spelled its inevitabledoom, that it would have failed even absent theexterna l s ta te pressures that wereconventionally narrated as causing its downfall.

With his new beginning and conclusion inplace, Hirano turns his attention to themeaning of the prewar proletarian literaturemovement for 1946 Japan. Here, it becomesclear that the direct target of Hirano’srevisionist history is Nakano Shigeharu. Henotes that when Nakano discusses therelationship between the “democratic literarymovement” of 1946 and earlier leftist culture,Nakano writes of the “so-called [iwayuru]proletarian literature movement” (119).Nakano does this, according to Hirano, becausethat earlier movement actually consisted of analliance between working-class and petitbourgeois writers, with the latter beingnumerically dominant. Hence Nakano says itshould properly have been called therevolutionary literature movement or therevolutionary petit bourgeois literaturemovement, but state repression prevented theuse of the word “revolutionary.” Both theprewar and postwar movements aimed at abourgeois democratic revolution, and as aresult, according to Nakano, the 1946democratic literature movement is the true heirto the proletarian literature movement.

Hirano rejects this historical narrative asdishonest. He notes that the prewar proletarianliterature movement defined itself in largemeasure by its fierce opposition to bourgeoisliterature. He quotes from Nakano’s response

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to Nakamura Mitsuo’s 1935 critique ofNakano’s tenkō story “Dai-isshō” (Chapter 1,1935), in which Nakano clearly identifiedbourgeois l i terature as the enemy ofproletarian literature and attacked Nakamuraas a mouthpiece for capitalist ideology. Hiranochides Nakano for adopting in 1946 the veryposition he had a decade earlier denounced asbeing the voice of capitalism. He accusesNakano of distorting the history of theproletarian literature movement, of effacing theway it was in essence a movement that aimedto overthrow bourgeois culture, includingbourgeois literature:

It is a plain fact that proletarian literatureaspired above all to the liberation of theproletariat and wished to achieve aproletarian dictatorship. That is whyproletarian literature from the beginningtried to align itself with the ‘directedconsciousness’ called ‘world reform.’While crying out for the overthrow ofbourgeois literature, it could not but callitself proletarian literature. (121)

To claim now, as Nakano does, that this wasmerely a “so-called” proletarian literaturemovement or that it was from the start ademocratic revolutionary movement thatwelcomed bourgeois writers is, Hirano insists,to distort historical reality. So long as Nakanorefuses to fundamentally question the reasonsfor the rise of the mistaken doctrine of the“primacy of the political,” Hirano maintains, hewill be unable to achieve an effective self-criticism that would establish the properrelationship between politics and literature. Hewill only lead postwar literature into arepetition of the failure of the proletarianliterature movement.

What is needed in 1946, Hirano argues, is aclear understanding of the history of the

proletarian literature movement. The insistenceon the primacy of the political has to bereexamined as a misguided form of idealism,and the reasons for its appearance have to beunderstood. Hirano positions himself and hiscohort as the ones who must undertake thisrethinking of history. He proposes revisitingthe works of largely forgotten proletarianmovement writers such as Ikue Kenji andTezuka Hidetaka to retrace the past of idealismthat ultimately led to the notion of the primacyof the political. Clearly, Hirano places himselfand like-minded writers as the true heirs to theproletarian literature movement, and a majorpurpose of the Politics and Literature Debatewas to challenge the authority that Nakano andothers in the JCP were claiming as the present-day heirs to that movement. To borrow fromSatō Izumi’s reading of the debate, Hiranoc h a r g e s N a k a n o a n d t h e J C P w i t hmisrepresenting the past; he does so in order toundermine their claims to represent the subjectof the democratic revolution in 1946.19

In sum, both Trilling and Hirano attempt toformulate an anti-Communist, left-of-centerposition for literature. For each, this involvesdefining an autonomous space for literature, aholy ground from which it could comment onthe political without being absorbed into it.Trilling’s strategy for achieving this was toexpel proletarian literature from the canon ofAmerican literature. Hirano, by contrast,penned a revisionist history of the movementthat allowed him to lay claim to its legacy,positioning himself as its legitimate heir in1946. As I show in the following, this reflectsthe very different statuses of Marxism and itspolitical advocates in early Cold War Japan andthe United States.

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My second intertext is Ruth Benedict’s TheChrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns ofJapanese Culture (1946). Like Trilling, Benedictwas a faculty member at Columbia University,

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and her reputation as a leading anthropologistwas already well established before the war.20

Benedict launched her study of Japan in 1944at the behest of the Office of War Informationas a wartime intelligence project, but by thetime she published the book in 1946, it servedas a kind of guide for how to occupy Japan. Thebook was widely and positively reviewed inAmerican scholarly journals, though somecommentators quibbled with Benedict’smethodology and her interpretation of Japaneseculture.

Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum andthe Sword (1946)

The book also attracted wide interest among

intellectuals in Occupied Japan. A Japanesetranslation by Hasegawa Matsuji, a professor oflinguistics at Tōhoku University, appeared in1948 and became a hot topic, with such mediaas the front-page “Tensei jingo” (Vox populi,vox Dei) column in the Asahi newspaperintroducing it to a wide readership.21 It also setoff a debate among Japanese intellectuals,generating rebuttals by such prominent figuresas sociologist Tsurumi Kazuko, philosopherWatsuji Tetsurō, and folklorist YanagitaKunio.22 These Japanese debates were in turnreported back in the United States.23

When Benedict was writing Chrysanthemumand the Sword, the term “Cold War” did notexist. Nonetheless, she clearly grasped theidea. Near the book’s conclusion, Benedictspeculates on possible outcomes for Japan’spostwar future, expressing concerns about theeffect the global environment would have onthe prospects for remaking Japan into apeaceful nation: The Japanese “hope to buyback their passage to a respected place amongpeaceful nations. It will have to be a peacefulworld. If Russia and the United States spendthe coming years in arming for attack, Japanwill use her know-how to fight in that war.”24 Inother words, Benedict saw Japan’s future ascontingent on geopolitical relations betweenthe United States and the Soviet Union. At leastone early American reviewer of Benedict’sbooks explicitly shared this outlook.25

Keeping this in mind, it seems hardlycoincidental that Benedict would labor tosituate postwar Japan on the side of thecapitalist liberal democracies. She repeatedlyasserts that Japanese culture lacks the capacityto generate a “revolution.” Echoing E. H.Norman and Japanese Marxist historians, shedenies that the Meiji Restoration constituted abourgeois revolution. “There was no FrenchRevolution” (72–73), or again, “But Japan is notthe Occident. She did not use that last strengthof Occidental nations: revolution” (132).Because of their social system, Japanese “can

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stage revolts against exploitation and injusticewithout even becoming revolutionists” (302).Those in the West who, looking to postwarJapan, “prophesied the triumph of radicalp o l i c i e s a t t h e p o l l s h a v e g r a v e l ymisunderstood the situation” (302). Shepredicts Japan will follow a democratic course,albeit one distinct from the way the term“democracy” is understood in the UnitedStates. According to Benedict, postwar Japanmay reform itself in a democratic direction, butit could not be the site of revolution.

To consider Benedict’s work in relation to ColdWar thought, we must first explore the conceptof “culture” that is central to her work. TheJapanese culture she depicts is characterizedby a complex “pattern”: it includes twocontradictory tendencies, expressed by thekeywords that form her title. Benedict beginsher account by describing the contradictionsthat she believes mark Japanese culture. Shedeclares that “the Japanese are, to the highestdegree, both aggressive and unaggressive, bothmilitaristic and aesthetic, both insolent andpolite.” (2). Eventually, she pins this duality tochild-rearing practices (286), and although shedoes not use this terminology, she describes acultural identity that is suspended between anarcissistic imaginary stage (one she sees asgrounded in the mirror stage, albeit in terms ofShinto religious practice [288–89]) and a moremature symbolic stage grounded in shame andfear of social ostracism. This split accounts forthe contradictory impulses that she believescharacterize Japanese culture. Benedict nevercites Freud, but as with Trilling we see theinfluence of psychoanalytic thought in herwork.

Japan’s fundamental tendencies may becontradictory, but in Benedict’s view theynonetheless form a coherent, “singular”cultural system (18). As critics have noted,Benedict’s version of Japanese culture isahistorical and essentialist: it seems to have noconnection to, for example, class conflict,

capitalism, or Japan’s recent imperial past.26

Moreover, it is a culture utterly foreign toAmerica, so that to understand it Americanshave “to keep ourselves as far as possible fromleaping to the easy conclusion that what wewould do in a given situation was what theywould do” (5). Benedict stresses the culturaldifference of Japan. On (恩) and other Japanesekeywords that can be t rans la ted as“obligation,” for example, escape anAmerican’s grasp; “their specific meaningshave no literal translation into English becausethe ideas they express are alien to us” (99). Yetsuch radical “difference” is to the socialscientist “an asset rather than a liability” (10).She dismisses calls for a single, homogeneousglobal culture as a kind of “neurosis” (akeyword she shares with Trilling) and callsinstead for “a world made safe for differences”(15).

Ruth Benedict in 1937 (Source: Wikipedia)

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Benedict maintains that such difference isacceptable and desirable precisely because it iscultural—which is to say not biological. Shestresses “the anthropologist’s premise thathuman behavior in any primitive tribe or in anynation in the forefront of civilizations is learnedin daily living” (11). In such assertions,Benedict’s characteristically liberal stanceemerges. The Chrysanthemum and the Swordis a continuation of Benedict’s lifelong project(shared with her mentor, Franz Boas) seen insuch earlier works as Race: Science andPolitics (1940) and her pamphlet The Races ofMankind (1943) aimed at denying race as ameaningful scholarly category. Benedict laborsto replace anthropology’s earlier stress on racewith a view that insists instead on theimportance of culture, a project that took onadded urgency in the wake of wartimegenocide. Benedict’s efforts to deny scientificvalidity to a biological conception of race wasnoted by at least one early Japanese reader.27 Inasserting the importance of cultural differenceand rejecting racial prejudice, Benedict intendsto provoke critical reflection not only amongthe Japanese but also among her Americanreaders.28

In this, Benedict lays down the prototype for akey ideological tenet of what would becomeCold War liberalism. In the ideologicalcompetition with the Soviet Union, thepersistence of violent racism in the UnitedStates was an obvious Achilles’ heel. As aresult, as Christina Klein has noted, the “ColdWar consensus” that governed Americanculture after 1945 was defined not only by“containment”—that is, by what it was against(Communism)—but also by what it was for:“integration” and multiculturalism.

In contrast to nineteenth-century imperialpowers, the captains of America’s postwarexpansion explicitly denounced the idea of

essent ia l rac ia l d i f ferences andhierarchies. They generated instead awide-ranging discourse of racial toleranceand inclusion that served as the officialideo logy underg i rd ing pos twarexpansion. 2 9

In narrating a noncoercive mode for explicatingAmerican hegemony in Asia, cultural differencewas now to be embraced, with culturalboundaries drawn only so that they could becrossed in the process of building the ties of auniversal “family of man” based on sentiment,tolerance, and mutual respect.

As a result of this stress on integration,domestic American racism became a crisis forCold War foreign relations. It was a troublinglegacy of the sort of imperialism from whichthe United States was at pains to distinguishitself. Benedict was a pioneering champion ofthis line: she identifies the Asian Exclusion Actof 1924, for example, and “our racial attitudestoward the non-white peoples of the world” asone of the causal factors behind World War II(308–9).30 As Naoko Shibusawa has argued,however, Benedict’s reifying of Japanesecul tural d i f ference of ten “ended upreconstructing racism through othercategories,” primarily culture.31 Replacing“race” with “culture” in this way draws adistinction that makes no real difference. Inth i s , Bened ic t embod ied one o f theparadigmatic ambiguities of Cold Warliberalism.

American Cold War ideologues struggled withthe propaganda nightmare of domestic racism.In Occupied Japan, this resulted in, amongother things, a deliberate foregrounding of theGreat Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, as asymbol of American democracy. Annual LincolnDay celebrations were sponsored by theAmerica-Japan Cultural Society with thebacking of Occupation authorities.32 In a

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celebratory message read at the 1951ceremony, Illinois governor Adlai Stevensondeclared Lincoln a “world statesman” whose“concept of freedom and brotherhoodrecognized no barriers of geography, race ornationality” and concluded that “in these daysof anxiety concerning the peace of the worldwe do well to look at his example of firmnessand faith that liberty and justice will prevailover tyranny.” Another congratulatorymessage, from David Sarnoff, chairman of theboard of RCA, likewise stressed Lincoln’s idealsas a tool to “dissolve prejudiced opinion.”33 Theorganizer of the event, Jiuji Kasai, repeated thisemphasis on Lincoln as a symbol of integrationand drew the connection to the contemporarypolitics of containment.

Since the Allied Occupation, the newConstitut ion was drafted and thedemocratic form of government wasestablished in Japan. But, the bulk of ourpeople do not yet understand the truemeaning of democracy, as the Communistshave been making sinister propaganda toconfuse liberty with license. While theparty politicians have been fighting fortheir own gain, the Soviet-directedCommunists have organized their nation-wide cell systems with enormous funds.They are doing their utmost to destroy ourold heritage as reactionary, and areattacking American democracy ascapitalistic imperialism in order to createanti-American feeling among the Japanesepeople . . . Against their relentless attack,the abstract theories of democracy had nopositive and concrete force. At thismoment, the life and character of AbrahamLincoln came to me in bold relief toillustrate to the Japanese people America’strue spirit of democracy in contrast withSoviet Communism. (11–12)

Program, 1951 Lincoln Day Celebration inTokyo

Returning to Benedict, in addition to herlinkage of antiracism to anti-Communism, I’dlike to zero in on another site of overlap withthe Politics and Literature Debate: her use oftwo keywords, “culture” and “literature.”Benedict is seeking, as her subtitle tells us,“patterns in Japanese culture.” “Culture” hererefers not to elite aesthetic products, such asnovels or poems, but rather “the commonplace”(11) or what has become unconscious “habit”through repetition in childhood (281). Yet as ananthropologist studying an enemy cultureduring wartime, Benedict lacked direct accessto daily life in Japan. In place of conventionalfieldwork, she relied on interviews withJapanese-Americans, previously publishedsecondary sources on Japan, and—of most

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interest for our purposes—Japanese literaryworks. (Benedict, in fact, began her scholarlycareer as a specialist not in anthropology but inliterature.)34 For example, her explication of theuntranslatable on from Japanese culture isgrounded in a reading of Natsume Sōseki’s1906 novel Botchan (107–9). Likewise, she citesliterary texts as sources to demonstrate thatromantic love is widespread in Japan (183),that the flesh and spirit are not at war inJapanese culture (189–90), and that Japanesemoral expectations for justice differ from thoseof Westerners (198–207). Benedict even alludesto Kobayashi Takiji and Japan’s proletarianliterature movement.35

For Benedict, literature does not function as anexceptional product grounded in the talent ofindividual genius but rather representsJapanese culture as a whole in its everydayhabits and practices. Literature for her isinherently national literature. Here, she adoptsa position contrary to that of Hirano Ken or AraMasahito (or, for that matter, Lionel Trilling),for whom literature is a rarified product ofunique authors and their existential encounterswith radical negativity; it is national only in thesense that Japan in their view had failed toproduce a figure on a par with Romain Rollandor Thomas Mann. The crisis Hirano and Araconfront is Japan’s failure, due to its criticalinability to distinguish politics from literature,to produce a true literature. Such a literaturewould not be representative of the Japanesenation but rather exceptional to it.

Ironically, the liberal Benedict’s position here iscloser to that of Communist Nakano Shigeharu.In “Bungakusha no kokumin toshite no tachiba”(The role of the writer as national citizen,February 1946), Nakano vows, “Japaneseliterature is the literature of the Japanesepeople. It is born in Japan; it finds its life firstamong the Japanese people. In the absence ofJapan and the Japanese people, Japaneseliterature itself would not exist. The fate ofJapan, and that of the Japanese people, is itself

the soil in which Japanese literature isrooted.”36 Nakano would subsequently condemnHirano and Asa for mounting what he calledthe literary reaction, bemoaning their advocacyof what he sees as an elitist notion of freedom.37

According to Nakano, in the democraticrevolution of postwar Japan, reactionary forcesmobilize literature and other forms of cultureas their primary tools, because contemporaryliterature manifests the spiritual weakness ofthe people (minzoku) that is a result of therecent war.38 He stresses that the postwardemocratic revolution must be grounded not inexceptional individuals but rather in communaleffort.

This means the participation of theinvestigators, the investigated, and thereaders, all together, in the task ofestablishing the civic self-consciousness ofthe Japanese literati. The purpose of this isnot to have a rare, fortuitous, andabsolutely flawless conscience; rather, it isfor ordinary writers in general to worktogether in paving a new road toward theachievement of civic self-consciousness.Here, too, artistic and theoretical literarycreations form a broad foundation.39

Writers can at best serve as “teachers,”pointing out the proper course that the nationalpeople should follow in their daily lives.40

A few years later Takeuchi Yoshimi woulddevelop a similar line of thought. In thenational literature debate of the early 1950s, inmany ways a continuation of the Politics andLiterature Debate, Takeuchi explicitly rejectedthe widespread view of “the writer as anisolated individual, alone with his thoughts,which require unique artistic expression” andwho must “pursue his craft alone, where he canall the more easily be true to himself and hisindividual genius.”41 For Takeuchi, the crucial

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question to explore about Japanese literatureas national literature was, “Why didn’t Japanproduce anyone like Lu Xun?”42 For Takeuchi,Lu Xun represented a genuinely national writerwhose works embodied the collectiverevolutionary national project of China. Bycontrast, Japan’s proletarian literaturemovement represented the failure of Japanesecultural modernity as a whole: it was acharacteristic instance of an external authoritybeing reproduced slavishly by a slave thatrefused to recognize its own status as slave.Moreover, he insisted, postwar critics on bothsides of the Politics and Literature Debatecontinued to miss the point.

From the perspective of Chinese literature,it is self-evident that writers act as theagents or spokesmen of national feeling.And it is on the basis of such nationalfeeling that writers are judged, i.e., howand to what extent this feel ing isrepresented. With Japanese literature,however, things are entirely different. Thequestion of whether a writer representsnational feeling is completely separatedfrom the question of how this feeling isactually expressed, such that an additionaloperation is required in order to link thetwo together. Here lies the ground uponwhich the typical Japanese question of“politics and literature” is posed. Japanesecritics see this separation as of a piecewith the radical split in consciousnessinherent in modern literature as such, butI would disagree. Rather I would concurwith [Chinese poet] Li Shou that it must beseen as symptomatic of the feudal natureof Japanese literature. In this respect, thejournal New Japanese Literature [ShinNihon bungaku] hardly represents anexception.43

Both Japan’s proletarian literature movement

and the postwar critics fighting over itslegacies ultimately became instances of thedecadence and factionalism that Takeuchi sawas representative of Japanese culture in itsincomplete modernity.

Takeuchi Yoshimi in 1953 (Source:Wikipedia)

Nakano and Takeuchi parallel Benedict in theway they take literature as representative ofJapanese national culture in its everyday habitsand practices. But there is an obviousdifference between them as well. For Benedict,literature is national but not political: Japaneseliterature reflects a national culture that isimpervious to revolution, even in the turbulentpostwar era. Labor activism in postwar Japanwas like premodern peasant revolts, sheargues, explaining that they were “not classwarfare in the Western sense, and they werenot an attempt to change the system itself”

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(310). In contrast, for both Nakano andTakeuchi, because Japanese literature isinherently a national literature, it must also bepolitical: it must become a crucial tool in anational awakening that will complete therevolution to realize modernity in Asia. Thisdifference in positions would continue toreverberate throughout the Cold War as both apolitical and literary question.

*

The third American intertext is the collectionThe God That Failed, published in 1950. Editedby the British Labour MP Richard Crossman, itconsists of six autobiographical essays byprominent writers, each depicting his ownyouthful involvement and subsequentdisillusionment with the Communist Party. Inother words, it is an anthology of whatJapanese literary scholars would call tenkōliterature. Its roster of contributors constitutesa stellar collection of midcentury Westernliterati: novelists Arthur Koestler, IgnazioSilone, Richard Wright, and André Gide(recipient in 1947 of the Nobel Prize inLiterature); journalist Louis Fischer; and poetStephen Spender. The book created a sensationupon publication, with the English-languageversion selling more than 160,000 copies withinfour years.

Not specifically an American product—amongthe authors only Wright and Fischer were UScitizens—nonetheless the work became acultural Bible of the American-centered anti-Communist bloc that emerged during the ColdWar. The book’s wide promulgation abroad wasdue in large measure to direct and indirect CIAsponsorship, the CIA having bankrolled theCongress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), theorganization responsible for the book’spublication. With this support, The God ThatFailed was quickly translated into sixteen

languages.44

A Japanese edition translated by MurakamiYoshio and Yarita Ken’ichi appeared under thetitle Kami wa tsumazuku in 1950. The bookattracted considerable attention in Japan. Itwas reviewed in the Asahi newspaper, andTakeuchi Yoshimi published a positive review inNingen. He raises questions about thecontributors’ level of understanding of EastAsia but finds in The God That Failed anopportunity to again criticize the Japaneseliterary world by negative comparison:

On reflection, I wonder who amongJapanese literati can be said to havewritten this sort of confession. They knowhow to drown themselves in emotions andhow to make sharp comebacks, but theynever narrate their own experiences offailure for the sake of those around them,those who would come after (exceptingonly some fragments from TanakaHidemitsu and the unfinished confession ofTakami Jun). They were simply playing atpolitics and were never authentic literati.Japan never had even a real tenkōliterature. 4 5

After publication of the Japanese translation ofThe God That Failed, its authors continued toappear before Japanese readers. Translationsof essays on the problems of politics andliterature by Spender, Silone, and Gideappeared in a number of Japanese intellectualjourna ls around 1950. The CCF wasparticularly act ive in Japan, hostinginternational conferences in Tokyo in 1955 and1960. Stephen Spender, the editor of its houseorgan, Encounter, would travel to Japan in1957 and meet with a number of Japanesewriters and critics.46 Arthur Koestler wouldfollow in 1959.47

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Kami wa Tsumazaku (1950) the Japaneseedition of The God That Failed, trans.Murakami Yoshio and Yarita Ken’ichi

The God That Failed includes numerousreferences to Asia and Japan—in particular tothe attempts by Western Communist parties todevelop policies toward fascist Japan duringthe war years. Moreover, it also provides muchev idence o f the ant i rac i s t pos i t ioncharacteristic of Cold War liberalism.Containment cannot be achieved withoutintegration and respect for cultural difference,the various writers realize. As Crossman notesin his introduction, Richard Wright’s flirtationwith Communism “is a reminder that, whateverits failures in the West, Communism still comes

as a liberating force among the Coloredpeoples who make up the great majority ofmankind.”48 Wright himself acknowledges thatit was Stalin’s advocacy of respect for minoritycultures that attracted him to the CommunistParty : “ I had read wi th awe how theCommunists had sent phonetic experts into thevast regions of Russia to l isten to thestammering dialects of peoples oppressed forcenturies by the czars . . . And I had exclaimedto myself how different this was from the wayin which Negroes were sneered at in America”(130).

In particular, when we read The God ThatFailed as an intertext of the Politics andLiterature Debate, one feature is highlighted:Japanese literary critics in 1946 were alreadyrelying on keywords and concepts that incoming years would become central to thethought of anti-Communist intellectuals aroundthe globe. The Italian novelist Silone’sdescription of the act of writing literature, forexample, echoes the existentialist language ofstruggle and individuality that had a few yearsearlier appeared in Hirano’s and Ara’s essaysin Japan: “For me writing has not been, andnever could be, except in a few favoredmoments of grace, a serene aestheticenjoyment, but rather the painful and lonelycontinuation of a struggle” (81). Silone alsorelates the appeal of Communism to youth inlanguage remarkably similar to that used byAra in his essay “Dai-ni no seishun.”

Hirano’s explication of the problematicrelationship of the bourgeois writer toproletarian literature likewise foreshadowslanguage used by several God That Failedauthors. Koestler writes sarcastically of theposition of middle-class literati within theproletarian culture movement:

A member of the intelligentsia could neverbecome a real proletarian, but his dutywas to become as nearly one as he could.

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Some tried to achieve this by forsakingneckties, by wearing polo sweaters andblack fingernails. This, however, wasdiscouraged: it was imposture andsnobbery. The correct way was never towrite, say, and above all never to think,anything which could not be understood bythe dustman. (49)

Wright comments on the tension he felt amongsupposed comrades who looked down on himfor being a bourgeois intellectual, a label thatshocked him given that he had only a primaryeducation and was sweeping streets for a livingat the time. Spender writes of the “creativeartist” whose “sensibility, which is decided forhim in his childhood, is bourgeois. He canscarcely hope to acquire by an act of politicalwill a working-class mentality” (236).

The language that Hirano uses to define thedifference between “politics” and “literature”would also be replicated in The God ThatFailed. According to Hirano, “the definitivecharacteristic of politics is that the end justifiesthe means.” By contrast, “In matters ofliterature and art, in particular, the veryprocess of edging ever closer step-by-steptoward the end is in itself the end. In theirdomain, not even the slightest separation of‘means and end’ is permitted. In other words, itis from the means themselves that the end tobe realized must be worked out.”49 Hiranocondemns the JCP and proletarian activists forthe ethical failing of believing the end(revolution) justifies whatever means are takento achieve it. Literature for Hirano defines ahumanistic ethical practice in which the meansmust be an end in itself. Nearly all The GodThat Failed authors similarly invoke thelanguage of a Kantian categorical imperative: itclearly became a kind of cliché of anti-Communist writing. Koestler insists that “theend justifies the means only within very narrowlimits” (68), while Fischer writes,

My pro-Sovietism led me into the furthererror of thinking that a system founded onthe principle of “the end justifies themeans” could ever create a better world ora better human being.

Immoral means produce immoralends—and immoral persons—underBolshevism and under capitalism. (225).

Likewise, Spender writes that to accept theCommunist view meant that “one did not haveto consider, except from the point of view oftheir effectiveness, the means which wereused” (235).

In sum, bringing in The God That Failed as anintertext allows us to see how the Politics andLiterature Debate participated in the creationof a vocabulary of clichés that would be sharedby anti-Communist intellectuals around theglobe. Reading the two sets of texts side byside also allows us to see differences in thecontemporary situations of the United Statesand Japan. In the Anglophone world, The GodThat Failed provided a rare public platform forformer Communists, normally the target ofsilencing under Red Scare censorship. Readingits various autobiographical narratives, wefind—especially when compared with the moreone -d imens iona l wr i t ings o f o thercontemporary anti-Communist thinkers—thatthe representation of Communism presented byThe God That Failed writers is diverse andcomplex. Moreover, their accounts of theinjustices generated by contemporary Westernracism, imperialism, and capitalism are oftensharply critical.50 In other words, The God ThatFailed provided an opportunity for a leftistsocial critique that found few other mainstreamoutlets under prevailing political conditions inthe United States. It seems that leftist writerswho foregrounded their anti-Communistcredentials were permitted a wide degree of

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latitude in criticizing liberal capitalist society.On the other hand, as the informal censorshipimposed on novelist Pearl S. Buck andjournalist Helen Mears in the late 1940s and1950s indicates, intellectuals who criticizedAmerican foreign policy—that is, openlyopposed US Cold War policies toward theCommunist bloc—risked losing access to publicforums for commenting on America’s domesticsocial problems.51

This suggests one important differencebetween the Politics and Literature Debate andThe God That Failed. The authors whopublished in The God That Failed and similarvenues in the United States did not have toengage in direct debates with actualCommunists. Their opponents were largelyexcluded from mainstream literary and politicalpublications and were thus denied effectivepublic venues from which to answer thecriticisms launched at them. This situation wasdecisively different from that in 1946–47 Japan.Hirano, Ara, and others who criticized the JCPfrom the standpoint of liberalism or humanismdid so in a situation that required them torespond directly, and sometimes with obviousdiscomfit, to counterarguments launchedagainst them by Nakano and other JCPintellectuals.

This difference was a by-product of whatMarukawa Tetsushi and Ann Sherif have calledthe air-pocket situation that characterized ColdWar Japan, buffered from the most drastic andviolent manifestations of the global strugglethat characterized the era. Unlike Germany,China, Korea, or Vietnam, postwar Japan wasnot partitioned into rigidly Communist and anti-Communist zones. And while Japan saw itsshare of Red purges, unlike the United Statesits Communist Party remained throughout theCold War a viable political party. This air-pocket condition (perhaps most similar to thatof France, Italy, and other undivided WesternEuropean countr ies ) was one o f thedistinguishing conditions that shaped Japanese

literary criticism in the period, and we see itsimpact on the Politics and Literature Debate aswell. It does not mean, however, that Japan wassomehow immune from the Cold War: this air-pocket situation was itself a product of theglobal Cold War.

*

In conclusion, as an extension of the precedingdiscussion, I’d like to touch on the history ofJapanese studies, especially Japanese literarystudies, in North America. Like postwarJapanese literary criticism, Japan studies in theAmerican academy was a product of Cold Warideological struggle, specifically the promotionof area studies as a new academic field thatcould contribute to the projects of containmentand integration. The founding figures ofJapanese literary studies in the United Stateswere by and large trained within the world ofthe three intertexts discussed in the preceding.Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Swordwas itself, of course, a foundational text ofpostwar Japan studies. Trilling influenced anumber of early scholars of modern Japaneseliterature, including Donald Keene, who studiedwith him at Columbia.52 Edwin McClellan,another seminal scholar of Japanese literature,trained in the 1950s at the University ofChicago under the direction of FriedrichHayek, a key figure in Cold War conservativeanti-Communism.53 Edward Seidensticker,future translator of The Tale of Genji, was inthe late 1950s and early 1960s employed asJapan liaison by the CCF, the organizationbehind The God That Failed. Seidensticker wasbased in Tokyo and reported to, among others,undercover CIA agent Scott Charles at theorganization’s headquarters in Paris. Duringthe course of his employment Seidenstickertraveled on CCF business around the world,including visits to London, Paris, Basel, Cairo,Karachi, Bombay, New Delhi, Seoul, and

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Manila. In his autobiography, he indicates thathe was aware at the time of the CCF’s CIAconnections.54

I began this essay by listing articles fromNingen as a way of capturing a snapshot ofJapanese literary critical discourse circa1946–47. Let me conclude with a list of articleson Japan from another literary journal,Encounter, during the first five years of itsexistence:

Dazai Osamu, “Two Stories,” trans.Edward Seidensticker (no. 1, October1953)

Melvin J. Lasky, “A Sentimental Travellerin Japan (I)” (no. 2, November 1953)

Melvin J. Lasky, “A Sentimental Travellerin Japan (II)” (no. 3, December 1953)

François Bondy, “ ‘Asia’: Does It Exist?”(no. 4, January 1954)

Edmund Blunden, “Eight Japanese Poems”(no. 5, February 1954) (translations ofhaiku by Bashō, Buson, and others)

William Barrett, “The Great Bow” (bookreview of Eugen Herrigel, Zen and the Artof Archery) (no. 7, April 1954)

J. Enright, “Notes from a JapaneseUniversity” (no. 8, May 1954)

Raymond Aron, “Asia: Between Malthusand Marx” (no. 11, August 1954)

Ken’ichi Yoshida, “The Literary Situationin Japan” (no. 18, March 1955)

John Morris, “Reflections in a JapaneseMirror” (film reviews of Seven Samuraiand Children of Hiroshima) (no. 21, June1955)

Christopher Sykes, “Hitler Leads toHiroshima” (book review of MichihikoHachiya, Hiroshima Diary) (no. 25,October 1955)

Hilary Corke, “Opening Up” (book reviewof Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Some PreferNettles) (no. 31, April 1956)

Ibuse Masuji, “Crazy Iris,” trans. IvanMorris (no. 32, May 1956)

Herbert Passin, “Letter from Tokyo:Headhunters, Watersprites, and Heroes”(no. 36, September 1956)

Mishima Yukio, “Hanjo,” trans. DonaldKeene (no. 40, January 1957)

Herbert Passin, “A Nation of Readers” (no.42, March 1957)

Angus Wilson, “A Century of JapaneseWriting” (book review of Donald Keene,ed., Modern Japanese Literature) (no. 42,April 1957)

Herbert Passin, “The Mountain Hermitage:Pages from a Japanese Notebook” (no. 47,August 1957)

Dwight MacDonald, “Fictioneers” (bookreview of Yasunari Kawabata, SnowCountry) (no. 48, September 1957)

Bertrand de Jouvenel, “Asia Is Not Russia:Or America Either” (no. 49, October 1957)

Edward Seidensticker, “The World’s Cities:Tokyo” (no. 50, November 1957)

Stephen Spender and Angus Wilson,“Some Japanese Observations” (no. 51,December 1957)

Nakashima Ton [Nakajima Atsushi], “TheExpert,” trans. Ivan Morris (no. 56, May1958)

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Edward Seidensticker, “On Trying toTranslate Japanese” (no. 59, August 1958)

J. Enright, “Empire of the English Tongue”(no. 63, December 1958)

The editorial staff of Encounter largelyoverlapped with the team that produced TheGod That Failed. A CCF publication secretlybankrolled by the CIA and British intelligenceservices, Encounter was aimed at a widereadership in Europe, Asia, South America, andAfrica. Its propaganda targets were notMarxists or proponents of anti-Americanism butrather centrist or left-of-center intellectualsprone to advocate a stance of geopoliticalneutralism—in Japan, those who would allywith the Japan Socialist Party and who mightread, for example, Shiseidō’s monthly journalJiyū, also bankrolled by the CCF.55

The journal’s editors knew that to be effective,they had to keep the journal free of the smell ofobvious propaganda. When we page throughissues of Encounter from the 1950s, weencounter the names of Trilling and severalGod That Failed authors. As the preceding listshows, we also encounter the names of thescholars who built the field of Japanese literarys t u d i e s i n N o r t h A m e r i c a : K e e n e ,Seidensticker, and Ivan Morris. Some of theearliest translations of giants of modernJapanese literature first appeared in thejournal, and it regularly reported on thecurrent state of l iterary criticism andintellectual discourse in Japan.

The inaugural issue of Encounter (1953),featuring Edward Seidensticker’s

translations of stories by Dazai Osamu

For the first generation of scholars of Japaneseliterature in the United States during the1950s, Encounter seems to have been animportant venue. Through it, their earlytranslations and criticism reached a broadaudience of general readers. It is unclear howmany of them (besides Seidensticker) knew ofthe journal’s ties to the CIA, or how they wouldhave responded to such knowledge. But it doesseem clear that the Cold War propagandavehicle Encounter played an important role inestablishing Japanese literary studies as adiscipline and in presenting its scholarship to a

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global audience.

I conclude with this detour to remind us thatnot only postwar Japanese literary criticism butalso the framework through which we in theEnglish-speaking world study Japaneseliterature are rooted in the global Cold War.The Cold War is generally said to have endedaround 1990 with the fall of the Berlin Wall andthe collapse of the Soviet empire in EasternEurope, although continuing tensions in East

Asia (Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa, China) make theCold War seem more like, to paraphraseWilliam Faulkner (whose 1955 goodwill visit toJapan was another US Cold War propagandaeffort), a past that isn’t even past yet. ThePolitics and Literature Debate can help usunderstand the position of Japanese literaturein the Cold War—if we keep in mind that thelens through which we examine it is also alegacy of that ideological struggle.

Michael K. Bourdaghs is Robert S. Ingersoll Professor of East Asian Languages andCivilizations and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of A FictionalCommons: Natsume Sōseki and the Properties of Modern Fiction (forthcoming in 2021);Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop (2012; Japanesetranslation 2012), and The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and JapaneseNationalism (2003). He received a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship to support work on anongoing book project tentatively titled Japanese Culture in the Age of Three Worlds:Rethinking Postwar Culture as Cold War Culture.

Notes1 See, for example, Marukawa Tetsushi, Reisen bunkaron: Wasurerareta aimai na sensō nogenzaisei (On Cold War culture: The contemporariness of the forgotten enigmatic war)(Tokyo: Sōfūsha, 2005), and Ann Sherif, Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).2 On Adorno, Horkheimer, and Auerbach as figures of Cold War culture, see Andrew Rubin,Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2012), 74–86, 90–108. On René Wellek and Austin Warren, see MarkWalhout, “The New Criticism and the Crisis of American Liberalism: The Poetics of the ColdWar,” College English, 49, no. 8 (December 1987): 861–71.3 Rubin, Archives of Authority, 39–43. On US Cold War cultural policy in Japan and Okinawa,see Chizuru Saeki, U.S. Cultural Propaganda in Cold War Japan: Promoting Democracy1948–1960 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 2007), and Michael Schaller, The AmericanOccupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Oxford University Press,1985).4 See, for example, Nora Waln, “Is Japanese Youth Going Communist?” Saturday EveningPost, August 6, 1949, 36–37, 76–78; Joseph Yamagiwa, “Fiction in Post-War Japan,” FarEastern Quarterly 13, no. 1 (November 1953): 3–22; Harry Emerson Wildes, “The War for theMind of Japan,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 294 (July1954): 1–7; and Anthony West, “Letter from Tokyo,” New Yorker, June 22, 1957, 33–73.

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5 Sherif, Japan’s Cold War, 14.6 See, for example, George Orwell, “The Future of Socialism IV: Toward European Unity,”Partisan Review, July–August 1947, 346–51.7 Louis Menand, introduction” to The Liberal Imagination, by Lionel Trilling (New York: NewYork Review of Books, 2008), vii.8 George Watson, “The Empire of Lionel Trilling,” Sewanee Review 115, no. 3 (2007): 484–90.The “Holy Writ” passage appears on 484.9 Lionel Trilling, Bungaku to seishin bunseki, trans. Ōtake Masaru (Tokyo: Hyōronsha, 1959).On the efforts to transmit Trilling’s writings around the globe, see Rubin, Archives ofAuthority, 68–69.10 Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey, trans. Saitō Kazue and Ōtake Masaru as Tabiji nonaka ni, in Gendai Amerika bungaku zenshū (Complete works of contemporary Americanliterature), (Tokyo: Arechi shuppansha, 1958).11 See, for example, Nishikawa Masami, “Lionel Trilling-cho, ‘The Liberal Imagination,’Morton Dauwen Zabel-cho, ‘Literary Opinion in America’ ” (Lionel Trilling’s The LiberalImagination, Morton Dauwen Zabel’s Literary Opinion in America), Eibungaku kenkyū 28, no.2 (1952): 254–57; Ōtake Masaru, “Futatabi Toriringu ni tsuite” (Another consideration ofTrilling), Tōkyō keidaigaku gakkai 12 (1954): 67–95; and Ōnuki Saburō, “Lionel Trilling noshōsetsuron” (On Lionel Trilling’s novels), Kenkyū ronshū: Shinshū daigaku kyōikugakubujinbun shakai 3 (1953): 64–73. The last appears to be a Japanese translation of an essay byTrilling on fiction, but I have been unable to identify the original source.12 Taniguchi Rikuo, “Amerika bunmei kara no tōsō: Henrī Jeimuzu ni kansuru oboegaki”(Struggle from American civilization: A note on Henry James), Ningen 5, no. 10 (October1950): 16–29.13 Russell J. Reising, “Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, and the Emergence of theCultural Discourse of Anti-Stalinism,” boundary 2 20, no. 1 (1993): 94–124.14 Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, xv. Subsequent references to this work are givenparenthetically.15 J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1996), 75.16 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 66.17 Kobayashi Takiji was the leading figure of the prewar proletarian movement and became amartyr-figure on the Japanese left after his murder by Japanese police in 1933. Hino Ashiheicame to prominence in the 1930s as the author of pro-military propagandistic novels. SeeHirano Ken, “What is the ‘Primacy of the Politics,” trans. Miyabi Goto and Ron Wilson, in ThePolitics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism 1945-52, ed. Atsuko Ueda,Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda (Lanham, MD: LexingtonBooks, 2017), 115-125. Subsequent references to this essay are given parenthetically. For theoriginal Japanese, see Hirano Ken, “‘Seiji no yūisei’ to wa nani ka,” reprinted in Hirano Kenzenshū (Collected Works of Hirano Ken) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1974-1975), 1:216–25.18 On Arishima’s notion of “representation” in politics and literature and its reappropriation inthe postwar debate, see Satō Izumi, Sengo hihyō no metahisutorī: Kindai o kioku suru ba (Themetahistory of postwar criticism: Modern sites of memory) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2005),

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165–87.19 Ibid., 178–79.20 See, for example, Margaret Mead, “Ruth Fulton Benedict 1887–1948,” AmericanAnthropologist, n.s., 51, no. 3 (July–September 1949): 457–68.21 For “Tensei jingo” columns that touch on The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, see the Asahinewspapers of February 8, 1949, and May 4, 1950.22 On the Japanese reception of Benedict’s work, see Sonia Ryang, “Chrysanthemum’s StrangeLife: Ruth Benedict in Postwar Japan,” Occasional Paper 32 (July 2004), Japan PolicyResearch Institute, University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific Rim. See alsoMinzokugaku kenkyū 14, no. 4 (May 1950), for a special issue devoted to Benedict, includingessays by Yanagita and Watsuji; Tsurumi Kazuko, “Kiku to katana: Amerikajin no mitaNihonteki dōtoku-kan” (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: An American view on theJapanese sense of morality) Shisō 276 (March 1947): 221–24; and Tsuda Sōkichi, “Kiku tokatana no kuni: Gaikokujin no Nihon kenkyū ni tsuite” (The land of the chrysanthemum andthe sword: Regarding research on Japan by foreigners) Tenbō 65 (May 1951): 6–25.23 John W. Bennett and Michio Nagai, “The Japanese Critique of the Methodology inBenedict’s ‘Chrysanthemum and the Sword,’ ” American Anthropologist, n.s., 55, no. 3(August 1953), 404–11.24 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946;repr., New York: Meridian, 1974), 315. Subsequent references to this work are givenparenthetically.25 “What Mrs. Benedict has done by way of interpreting Japanese culture needs to be done bythe same investigator, or by someone else equally competent, for the culture and life of theRussian people. In such interpretations lies the road to that world understanding which isneeded in order that the United Nations may develop and become effective” (Emory S.Bogardus, review of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, by Ruth Benedict, Social Forces 25,no. 4 [May 1947]: 454–55).26 See, for example, Ryang, “Chrysanthemum’s Strange Life.”27 “The author situates the cultural anthropologist on the front lines of the race problem as ascientist who resolves the anxieties and discord that are entangled in this problem” (HayashiSanpei, “Kokuminsei hihan no ichi shiten: Rūsu Benedikuto-cho Kiku to katana” [From theperspective of critique of nationality: Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword],Amerika kenkyū 5, no. 5 [May 1950]: 69–74).28 See Richard Handler, “Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture,”American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (June 1990): 252–73, and Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: TheAnthropologist as Author (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 102–28.29 Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 11.30 See Lisa Yoneyama, “Habits of Knowing Cultural Differences: Chrysanthemum and theSword in the U.S. Liberal Multiculturalism,” Topoi 18, no. 1 (1999): 71–80.31 Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 296.32 On the Lincoln Day celebration, see Saeki, U.S. Cultural Propaganda, 118–24. See also thecommemorative pamphlet The Lincoln Day Celebration (Tokyo: America-Japan CulturalSociety, 1951).

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33 Stevenson’s and Sarnoff’s messages are reproduced in Lincoln Day Celebration, 5, 8.Subsequent quotations from this work will be cited parenthetically.34 On Benedict’s literary past, see C. Douglas Lummis, “Ruth Benedict’s Obituary forJapanese Culture,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Volume 5, Issue 7 (July 19, 2007),accessed August 31, 2020.35 “Japan also has her proletarian novels protesting desperate economic conditions in thecities and terrible happenings on commercial fishing boats,” but Benedict identifies these asbeing outside the mainstream of what she calls character novels, presumably referring to theI-novel genre (166).36 Nakano Shigeharu, “The Role of the Writer as National Citizen,” trans. Scott W. Aalgaardand annotated by Richi Sakakibara and Mariko Takano, Politics and Literature Debate inPostwar Japanese Criticism, ed. Ueda et al., 159-69; this passage appears on 159. For theoriginal Japanese, see Nakano Shigeharu, “Bungakusha no kokumin toshite no tachiba,” inNakano Shigeharu zenshū (Complete Works of Nakano Shigeharu) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō,1979), 12:25.37 Nakano Shigeharu, “The Humanity of Criticism I: Concerning Hirano Ken and AraMasahito,” trans. Joshua Solomon and Kaori Shiono, Politics and Literature Debate in PostwarJapanese Criticism, ed. Ueda et al., 105-14. For the original Japanese, see Nakano Shigeharu,“Hihyō no ningensei I: Hirano Ken Ara Masahito ni tsuite,” in Nakano Shigeharu zenshū,12:84.38 Nakano Shigeharu, “The Humanity of Criticism II: On the Literary Reactions, et Cetera,”trans. Joshua Solomon and Kaori Shiono, Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar JapaneseCriticism, ed. Ueda et al., 137-49. For the original Japanese, see Nakano Shigeharu, “Hihyōno ningensei II: Bungaku handō no mondai nado,” in Nakano Shigeharu zenshū, 12:96.39 Ibid., 144-5.40 Nakano, “The Role of the Writer as National Citizen,” 166. For the original Japanese, seeNakano, “Bungakusha no kokumin toshite,” 32.41 Richard F. Calichman, ed. and trans., Introduction to What Is Modernity? Writings ofTakeuchi Yoshimi, by Takeuchi Yoshimi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 3.42 Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Ways of Introducing Culture (Japanese Literature and ChineseLiterature II)—Focusing Upon Lu Xun,” trans. Richard F. Calichman, in Takeuchi, What IsModernity?, 46.43 Takeuchi Yoshimi, “The Question of Politics and Literature (Japanese Literature andChinese Literature I),” trans. Richard F. Calichman, in Takeuchi, What Is Modernity?, 86–87.44 David C. Engerman, foreword to The God That Failed, by Richard H. Crossman (New York:Columbia University Press, 2001), vii–xxxiv. See also Frances Stonor Saunders, The CulturalCold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000).45 Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Kurossuman hen Kami wa tsumazuku” (Crossman, editor, The God ThatFailed), Ningen 5, no. 12 (December 1950): 148–49.46 Stephen Spender, “Some Japanese Observations,” Encounter 9, no. 6 (December 1957):49–51.47 On Koestler’s visit, see Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo Central: A Memoir (Seattle:University of Washington Press, 2002), 87–91.48 Crossman, The God That Failed, 9. Subsequent references to this text are given

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parenthetically.49 Hirano Ken, “An Antithesis,” trans. Junko Yamazaki et al, Politics and Literature Debate inPostwar Japanese Criticism, ed. Ueda et al., 87-92; this passage appears on 88-9. For theoriginal Japanese, see Hirano Ken, “Hitotsu no hansotei,” Shinseikatsu, May 1, 1946, 183.50 Engerman, foreword, xxiii.51 On Buck, see Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 123–35. On Mears, see Shibusawa, America’sGeisha Ally, 61–63.52 When Keene traveled to London in 1940, Trilling provided a letter of introduction to E. M.Forster. See Donald Keene, Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2008), 70.53 See the expression of gratitude to McClellan for editorial assistance in Friedrich Hayek, TheConstitution of Liberty (1960; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 42.McClellan’s pathbreaking translation of Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, published in 1957 by theconservative Henry Regnery Company, was produced to allow Hayek to read one of the workstaken up in McClellan’s dissertation, “An Introduction to Natsume Soseki: A JapaneseNovelist” (Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, 1957). Prior to his encounterwith Hayek, McClellan had studied with another seminal figure of American conservatism,Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind (1953). See Hirotsugu Aida, “The SosekiConnection: Edwin McClellan, Friedrich Hayek, and Jun Eto,” 2008.54 On Seidensticker’s work with the CCF, see his Tokyo Central, esp. 87–95. Seidensticker’scorrespondence and receipts for salary and travel expenses with the CCF are archived in thepapers of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, series IV, box 11, SpecialCollections Research Center, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. Scott Charles, one ofSeidensticker’s main correspondents at CCF, is identified as a CIA agent in Saunders, TheCultural Cold War, 243.55 For a detailed account of the history of Encounter, see Saunders, The Cultural Cold War.