Building States and Filling Stomachs: Republican Japan (1943-1948)
A ruined district of Kyoto. What ruined it, if any single actor can be held responsible, is unclear.
The institutions though which radical changes are effected always, like trees, preserve records of their past conditions deep within themselves. The Japanese Unitarian Party was itself a marriage of Sosa Maeda’s study group of university students and Kijuro Seki’s underground trade union. The students, including one Takashi Nagai, were the Party’s mind. The union, meanwhile, was the Party’s body— its membership of peasants and factory workers were the foundation of future mass movements. In the run-up to the September Revolution of 1929, the Unitarians continued to augment themselves. Koto Nomi, a former Army officer, organized the Unitarian paramilitary force and reached out to colleagues in the Shogun’s employ. The new additions didn’t even need to join out of ideology— General Bakin Okamura, whose campaigns brought northern Japan under the Unitarian banner, served the Unitarians only out of a wish to save himself and his family. The Shogunate’s bureaucracy, meanwhile, defected to the Unitarians after the new government in Kyoto proved that it could pay salaries on time.
The strength of the Nagai regime lay in its ability to combine all the aforementioned fragments of pre-Revolution Japan into a powerful machine, one that could be used for entirely unprecedented purposes. Nagai’s machine recorded data, devised policies, and enacted sweeping changes, allowing the
Union of Japan, the youngest of the three major pre-Danube Blue states, to transform its host society as dramatically as its elder brothers did. The machine was fed by thousands of graduates from the Unitarian schools of administration, which instilled advanced literacy, numeracy, time management skills, and dedication to the Chairman. The machine requisitioned funds for Japan’s accelerated modernization, and built up the military for the eventual showdown with China. Even during the dark days of the Chinese blockade, and the breakdown of state power in the peripheries and of living standards just about everywhere, the machine was strong enough to enforce such odd rules as a ban on Shinto festivals until the Koreisai Protests of 1942 and Operation Shenfeng finally destroyed it from inside and out.
The fragments of this wondrous apparatus, seeking to protect their lives, families, and wealth, scattered across the devastated country. The new
Republic of Japan soon made good use of them.
The former First People’s Bank in Kyoto. After the arrival of Democrat Midoriya, it was converted into office space for the Administrative Renewal Association.
Japan’s new constitution, created by Chinese legislators interested in keeping the new Republic stable but weak, mandated the establishment of a legislature distinct from the executive, rather than an Estates-General that could combine both roles. However, the Constitution also permitted the executive to “in response to discrete and soluble conditions that may comprise an emergency, undertake those actions necessary and proper to guide the nation past the initial conditions that led to the emergency.” Pointing out that the state of Japan in 1943 was just one big emergency, with underlying conditions ranging from state collapse to food insecurity, Democrat
Izuku Midoriya, who previously served as Gyeongseong University's Professor of Foreign Affairs, assumed emergency powers within days of his arrival in Kyoto and used them to place a six-year moratorium on elections for the legislature. Yang Long and the Emperor made sure that China remained officially silent on the matter— chastising Midoriya for this move would only delegitimize the state-building effort in Japan. In any event, Midoriya’s declaration did not initially appear to change anything important. Midoriya would likely have ruled alone for a year or two anyways while legislative elections were organized, and his Republic was a legal fiction that accomplished little besides providing cover for Chinese occupation. Pessimism about Japan’s prospects ran particularly deep in foreign media, which read Midoriya’s creation of the
All-Japan Advisory Council (全日本諮問会議,
Zen-Nihon Shimon Kaigi) as a sign of the Republic’s need for support. This new executive department brought together representatives from all of Japan’s old anti-Unitarian movements. These men conferred legitimacy on the Republic through their participation, but they only participated for a chance at grabbing the new Democrat’s ear. In AJAC’s weekly sessions, Tokugawa loyalists interrupted the speeches of monarchist activists, and Shinto
kannushi responded to the claims of radical Buddhist monks by stating that the un-Japanese ideology of Buddhism had opened the door for equally foreign Unitarian thought. Democrat Midoriya listened respectfully to these men for the first few weeks, but his attendance at AJAC soon grew more sporadic— Deputy Democrat [1]
Norio Wakamoto often stood in for him. This lapse in interaction with the old revolutionaries coincided with the formation of the
Administrative Renewal Association (政府維新会,
Seifu ishin-kai). As it turned out, Midoriya preferred the company of technocrats to soldiers and ideologues.
A rough outline of Japan’s executive branch during Democrat Midoriya’s first term.
The ARA’s members tended to be quite young— the average age was 43, with the oldest member being 54 and the youngest member 38. Almost all were drawn from Korea's Japanese emigre population, and around half were colleagues of Midoriya’s from Gyeongseong University. Most had some experience in administration, whether in organizing Japanese-language weekend classes for the emigres’ children or serving as city councillors in Busan and Daegu. Their first task was finding other people like them. Using the Chinese army’s makeshift communications network of runners, cavalrymen, and Sengupta stations, Midoriya announced the beginning of a 40-day period in which “individuals with extensive managerial experience” could travel to the ARA offices and apply for membership in a “fast track” to re-employment. Of course, the stilted language of the announcement did not hide the fact that the ARA was hiring former Unitarian bureaucrats, the sinews of the Nagai regime, for service in the Republic. However, the pervasiveness of the Unitarian state in daily life meant that most Japanese with any sort of “extensive managerial experience” had been Blue police chiefs, officers in the state-run enterprises, secretaries, and clerks. In the end, 20,000 former employees of the Unitarian state joined the “fast track.” Their personal evaluations lasted around three months: too short to be an ideological test, but just long enough to check if the aspiring employee was incompetent, brainwashed, or morally bankrupt. The first of the government’s agencies to make the journey from name on a diagram to actual organization was the Discipline Commission. Headed by
Mitsuha Miyamizu, a former headmistress in Unitarian Edo’s premier high school, Discipline was assigned responsibility for biannual personal evaluations on present and future government employees.
By February 1944, the Republic’s four Commissions had settled into a relatively comfortable pattern. After passing through Discipline’s checks, new employees entered the Cadre Training Commission’s six-week training cycle, which prepared them for one of the other two commissions. The Finance Commission’s job mostly consisted of haggling with the Chinese and Koreans for funds to run the whole operation, and ensuring that donations from overseas Japanese individuals and organizations made it safely to the state treasury. The Planning Commission was effectively an informal legislature: it was charged with turning the general directives and goals of Midoriya and the ARA into viable policies. By this point, the Republican state was capable of growing itself and maintaining its growth— but the state still lacked the ability to provide services, such as law enforcement or education, to the population at large. The ARA authorized the formal creation of the first Office, that of
Home Affairs, in the following month. The new agency was at the forefront of the Republic’s first major trial: taking responsibility for famine relief.
Ration packs of rice flour like this one were a frequent sight in 1940s Japanese households.
The years of starvation since 1941 disrupted traditional Japanese life in a way that even the Unitarians could not. Sickness and death meant that rural families had less hands to work the rugged and mountainous terrain, or maintain the rice fields which already existed. The Unitarian system of state-run granaries and collective farms broke down under the strain of keeping the peasantry alive while still satisfying the army’s increasingly unrealistic demands for grain. Unattached women or widows with kids managed their own homes and lands by themselves, receiving assistance from surviving relatives, friends, or business partners (crop-sharing and plot-leasing became increasingly common as Unitarian authority in the provinces melted away and the rural population developed de-facto ownership of the land). However, a number of factors— the lack of seeds for planting, death or sickness among much-needed animals (and people), poor condition of farmland, and the threat of banditry— made farming almost completely unviable across large portions of Japan by 1942. The very tools of farming, the building blocks of agriculture, were crumbling like sand beneath a harbor wave. The Chinese had attempted to alleviate the problem in the wake of Operation Shenfeng— troops carried extra rations with them, and distributed them in pacified areas. However, the ghost of famine could not truly be exorcised until Japan was able to feed itself again.
After a one-month period of establishing contact with the Chinese troops that maintained order in the former collective farms, the Home Affairs Office parceled out the territory to the people who still inhabited it. The land of defunct or depopulated collectives was sold to dispossessed or otherwise landless peasants from across the country. Rather than paying in cash, the hundreds of thousands of families who acquired land during this time were given ten years to produce a certain predetermined amount of produce.
To create output, however, the new landowners needed assets. Though distributing rice, soy, and wheat seeds was an obvious option, distributing
pigs turned out to be effective in its own right. Japanese people had hunted, domesticated, and consumed pigs, hogs, and boars since prehistoric times, and even official disapproval from the Imperial court and Buddhist establishment did not prevent the soldiers of northern Kyushu’s Satsuma domain from carrying herds of pigs as living rations from their campaigns, or discourage the wealthy Tokugawa elite from consuming meat to gain strength and stamina. The Home Affairs Office did not have much of a role in this project— most of the domesticated pig population had been stolen or killed off by starving farmers, and even feral pigs had become targets for the hungry— and it made way for the
Foreign Affairs and Trade Association (FATA). Democrat Midoriya placed this body outside the already-powerful ARA’s purview and directly under his own oversight, and it was he who orchestrated the FATA’s establishment of contact with
Lusang. The natives of Lusang’s islands eagerly consumed pork, and so did the Chinese who conquered them. The interbreeding of native and Chinese-imported pig breeds created an animal well-suited for the task of feeding millions. FATA authorized the sale of formerly Unitarian military surplus, landship parts, and even battleships to China (it had plenty to sell, given the fervor with which Nagai attempted to gain naval superiority in East Asia) to build up the Republic’s foreign exchange reserves. This gave the Republic enough revenue to rebuild its pig population with Lusangese imports. Near the end of 1944, China’s
Douhang Corporation began searching for land in which to build soy plantations. Sternly reminding Douhang to abide by the labor laws passed by executive order in the previous month, FATA authorized the sale of a depopulated collective farm which had not been divided up during the earlier land reforms. Though the country as a whole still depended on Chinese food imports, and Chinese doctors and army physicians were still called upon to cure complications caused by prolonged malnutrition, the hard work of 1944 gave the Japanese countryside a future.
Meanwhile, reconstruction of the urban areas continued apace. Although the Chinese army restored much of the surviving (and ruined) Unitarian infrastructure and industry to state ownership, private actors— and especially those former bureaucrats who had not been hired by the Republican state— were encouraged to buy stocks in the state enterprises. “Reconstruction” was a very literal term in Japan’s ruined cities— the first industry to be rebooted was the state’s cement corporation, followed shortly by forestry. However, with the re-emergence of jobs, money (Chinese currency was used as an unofficial unit of exchange), and property came a corresponding rise in crime. The Chinese occupation troops’ Japanese auxiliaries, who worked as enforcers and translators, became the backbone of the new urban and rural police departments. A brief dispute over the police departments split the ARA near the end of 1945: should the old prefectures of the Unitarian state be rebuilt and entrusted with policing the population, or replaced wholesale by new administrative units? After an intervention by the Democrat, it was determined that the Republican state didn’t yet have the financial or organizational strength to micromanage the affairs of over forty prefectures. Command of the police forces would pass to eight new provinces, based on the traditional regions of Japan. Graduates of the Cadre Training Commission’s courses soon carved out a niche in every new province’s administration, but their attempts to assert control over Hokkaido posed a problem. The Ainu population had held out in the north of the island for centuries, and as the Unitarian state broke down they created an autonomous administration that gained recognition and support from the Chinese. Accepting the inevitable, Midoriya recognized the separation of the
Ainu Autonomous Prefecture (アイヌ民族自治県,
Ainu-minzoku jichi-gen) from Hokkaido Province, making it the ninth subnational division of Japan. The Prefecture gained self-rule, but was also entrusted with providing for its own law enforcement. The relative poverty of the region, however, meant that the Prefectural administration was constantly cash-strapped and worryingly dependent on militias of private citizens to maintain security. Midoriya's journals show that he recognized the financial difficulties of Ainu autonomy to be a serious issue, but he ultimately decided to leave the problem to future leaders of a stronger Republic.
The nine subnational divisions of the Republic.
Meanwhile, cod conquered the streets of southern Japan.
Klippfisk, or dried and salted cod, was a popular foodstuff in Sweden’s Norwegian provinces— it lasted forever and was packed with nutrients. While it had initially been distributed in Japan as part of the international relief effort (Sweden, hoping to deal with the world on its own terms and not Germania’s, had attempted to build up independent links with East Asia) klippfisk continues even today to be the stuff of Japanese workday lunches, sold in street stalls and small shops. It is traditionally produced in bulk, and therefore sells for very little. Its high sodium content is, of course, of very little concern to the culture that brought miso soup to the world. While the popularity of klippfisk and the success of Swedish relief efforts in Japan were cause for celebration in Stockholm, it inflamed the tensions between the Swedish state and Norwegian fishing companies, who felt that Stockholm offered them little compensation for their produce and wished to trade more freely with other nations. Modern historians are fond of comparing this dispute to the later fight over the North Sea’s fossil fuels. Regardless, the improvements of 1945 and 1946 allowed Japan’s economic life to assume some characteristics of normalcy. A new currency, the
mon, was introduced at par with the Chinese currency that circulated in Japan as an unofficial unit of exchange. The planning commission also began work on a revised edition of the Unitarian tax code, which was expected to come into force in 1947.
As Japan came to its feet, China scaled back its involvement. Though the rent payments for the Bonin Islands territory on which China’s newest naval bases rested continued to be a reliable source of revenue for the Republic, China’s grants of unconditional aid were set to expire in 1960. No official time limit, however, was set on the travel visas of the Chinese military advisors who helped train Japan’s new armed forces (a light, compact force whose primary job during a war would be to defend the Home Islands until help arrived from the rest of the EASA). The ARA, another important pillar of the early Republic, was set to dissolve in 1955. Democrat Midoriya has intended for the ARA to be a temporary tool. It had succeeded admirably in its task, and future plans included provisions of keeping its offices and commissions intact, and enabling them to communicate directly with the Democrat.
The former Theater of the Undying Revolution in Kyoto. As if to comment on the the longevity of Nagai’s revolution, the Theater was chosen as the site of the Republican legislature.
Eager to capitalize on the popularity it had painstakingly earned over the past five years, the Midoriya government announced two major initiatives in 1948. The first was the creation of a
Supreme Court of Judicature (大審院
Dai-shin'in), with the power to impose binding precedent on prefectural courts, review the acts of the executive and legislative, and serve as a final court of appeals. Though the Court was not exactly independent— its first Chief Justice was
Okuyasu Nijimura, a lawyer friend of Midoriya’s who had handled cases for the Japanese emigre community in Korea— its creation set an important precedent for independent oversight of a government which has not yet faced serious constraints on its power. Meanwhile, the ARA’s statistics office conducted a national plebiscite, asking the public if “Izuku Midoriya should remain as Democrat of the Republic of Japan for another five-year term.” Though some saw this plebiscite as a poor substitute for a free election and either voted No or abstained, 73% of respondents ultimately voted “Yes.” Izuku Midoriya would not face re-election until 1953, but the moratorium on the legislature was set to expire in 1949. The AJAC was redesigned as the
All-Japan Legislative Congress (全日本立法議会,
Zen-Nihon Rippō Gikai) in which each province gained representation proportional to its population.
Midoriya’s supporters, allies, and admirers, campaigning under the banner of the
Party of Hope (希望の党,
Kibō no Tō), were almost guaranteed to win a majority of the Congress’s 400 seats. However, not every struggling farmer had been reached by the government's famine relief, and not every aspiring technocrat had friends and connections in the ARA. The new
Coalition for Purification (浄化連合
Jōka Rengō), led by a Buddhist monk named
Hiroyuki Sawano, reached out to these and other disaffected constituencies. Sawano’s personal philosophy, formed over years of conducting ceremonies in secret for the people of his town in the far north and noting that he was performing more and more funerals as time went on, hinged on the pan-Buddhist concept of the “three refuges.” To be a Buddhist was to take refuge in the
Buddha (the fully enlightened one), the
Dharma (the vision of righteousness articulated by the Buddha), and the
Sangha (the monastic community). A proper government, no matter what form it took, would honor the Buddha, enshrine the Dharma, and reward the Sangha. The Unitarians might have failed miserably at all three tasks, and the Republic seemed ready to follow in its footsteps. Sawano claimed, however, that the Republic was not beyond redemption— its power could, like that of any other form of government, be used to fix the Unitarians’ errors by strong leaders of faith and conviction. Sawano’s grandiose vision distinguished him from the other members of the Sangha and laity who thought like him, and allowed him to rise as a leader among them. The CP became a nationwide movement by riding the wave of religious revival in the repressed but recovering country. With increasingly abundant donations from foreigners, the CP built up a symbiotic relationship with more locally-based organizations. In August 1948, supporters of Sawano provided funding and fervor to
Obon festival celebrations from Hakata to Hakodate. Out of genuine belief or effective enticement, the organizers of the festivals made sure to distribute the pamphlets of their benefactors. Even the Shinto establishment, insofar as there was one, largely aligned with the CP— Shinto and Buddhism were viewed by most Japanese as complementary traditions, and the CP did draw heavily on Shinto symbolism to appeal to Japanese nationalists. Midoriya, the ARA, and the formerly Unitarian civil servants viewed Sawano as a distasteful nuisance. Nevertheless, through his charisma, his personal strength— the man traveled back and forth through Japan to meet the people of the provinces, perform ceremonies, and train new monks to replace those killed by the events of the last two decades— and the conditions of his time, Sawano stood ready to fight the PH for control of the Congress.
This picture of Hiroyuki Sawano features all the things (a cup of tea, a paper fan, traditional robes, and a devout soul with strong convictions) that made pre-Unitarian Japan so great in the first place. It became a potent symbol of the CP campaign in 1949.
Meanwhile, the sudden rediscovery of Prince
Yasahito (優仁親王,
Yasahito Shinnō), who had been studying abroad in Rome while the September Revolution erupted, made the monarchist movement viable again. Exiled in Europe, the young prince tried to complete his studies but was forced to drop out for lack of funds. He survived as the owner of a small restaurant specializing in re-interpretations of Japanese cooking with Italian ingredients until he was found and approached by the monarchists. As the head of the one of the old Imperial Family’s four cadet branches, Yasahito’s claim on the throne was fairly valid. The hastily-formed
Imperial Rule Assistance Association (大政翼賛会,
Taisei Yokusankai) did not have the organizational strength or incumbent advantage of the PH, and lacked the grassroots appeal of the CP. Though it presented a united front to outsiders, contemporary minutes and memos portray a low-intensity struggle between the ultranationalist figures within the party and the relatively progressive prince. However, if neither the PH nor the CP won a majority in the Congress, the monarchists could well become kingmakers.
[1] Vice President.
But seriously, I think that the anime names stop here.
