Early Showa and war in the Pacific

Following the collapse of the New York Stock Market in 1929, economic depression swept the globe. Japan took the yen off the gold standard in 1931 and watched its value slump by 50% against the dollar. Unemployment rose dramatically, quickly reaching over 20%. In the urban centres, where the modern life of Taisho had seemed so exciting, the darker underside of the modern condition became readily apparent. Intellectuals started to write about the crisis of capitalism and the angst of modern life. Despite being illegal after the 1925 Peace Preservation Law, the communist movement simmered in the universities. The emblems of urban chic – the moga waitresses and shop attendants – gradually became

seen as euphemisms for prostitutes in the popular imagination. Modernity began to look like an infection that threatened the soul and even the wellbeing of Japan, rather than a material boon. The

people of Japan, already struggling in the late 1920s, turned their frustrations against the political parties, accusing them of being the ‘running dogs of capitalism’. Clandestine political movements

began to agitate.

The early 1930s saw political violence rise to an all-time high, and a number of commentators have referred to it as the period of ‘government by assassination’. The first victim was Prime Minister

Hamaguchi Osachi, who was shot in Tokyo Station by a member of an ultranationalist group in 1930, following his failure to secure a more equal naval treaty with the British and Americans at the London Naval Conference earlier that year. In the following year, government authorities discovered and thwarted two separate plots for a coup d’etat.

 In 1932, the next prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, was assassinated by a clandestine group of

naval officers after he failed to support actions by the Imperial Kwantung Army in Manchuria. This series of events at the start of the 1930s effectively ended parliamentary rule and marked

the move towards greater military control of governance. Whilst large sections of the population reacted with horror to these developments, the military could count on significant support particularly in rural areas. The promise of imperial greatness, of a return to the glories of Meiji, provided an enticing

distraction from the problems of the time. 

Meanwhile, the military itself had also grown factional and restive. In particular, the Kwantung Army, which had been created in 1906 to protect Japan’s interests in Manchuria, began to agitate for action. The commander in the field, Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, had a millenarian vision of the coming of the ‘final war’ in which the nations of the world would be punished for the moral corruptions of modernity. His solution was to propose that Japan should take over Manchuria and use it as a social laboratory to

test new and better forms of organization; he wanted to forge a new post-capitalist society based on non-selfish principles. His motivation was largely Buddhist rather than Communist. To this end, without orders from Tokyo, the Kwantung Army orchestrated an attack on the Manchurian railway, which they were supposed to be guarding. They exploded a section near Mukden and proceeded to blame the attack on local Chinese forces, using this as a pretext to launch an offensive and the formal occupation of Manchuria. In Tokyo, this fait accompli was greeted with shock by then Prime Minister Inukai, who refused to condone the annexation of Manchuria as a colony. After his assassination,

the puppet state of Manchukuo was formed in March 1932. 

This ‘Manchuria Incident’ marked the start of the so-called Fifteen Years’ War between China and Japan. In the depressed environment of Japan at the time, a majority of the Japanese people received news of the Kwantung Army’s victories and the expansion of the empire with jubilation.

The international community, in the form of the League of Nations, in which Japan had played a leading role, took measures to condemn the occupation. It refused to recognize Manchukuo as an independent state, and its Lytton Report called for Japan to withdraw its forces from Manchuria in February 1933. But this was too little too late. In Japan, the condemnation of the League merely confirmed the duplicity of the Western powers, and particularly the British who dominated the council.

Japan simply withdrew from the League, claiming that it would now ‘follow its own path in Asia’, implicitly accusing the League of being a regional rather than a universal organization (a charge that was not without justification). A result was that many Japanese felt vindicated in their beliefs that the Western powers were fundamentally racist against Japan and Asia more widely; Japan became increasingly isolated from the international community and hence increasingly reliant on its own military power.

In an attempt to constrain the military, the last surviving genro, Saionji Kinmochi, recommended Prince Konoe Fumimaro as the next prime minister. However, even the eminent Konoe could not constrain the army’s ambitions. Within a few weeks of his taking office, on 7 July 1937 the Imperial Army exchanged fire with Chinese soldiers at the Marco Polo Bridge, south of Beijing. It is not clear who fired first, but many historians argue that the Japanese Army manufactured this skirmish as a pretext

for escalation. Whatever the truth of this, it is certainly true that the Imperial Army was ambitious for further action in China. 

In the end, Konoe himself was an advocate of Japanese expansionism. Rather than trying to restrain the army in China, he authorized the escalation of the conflict, and the army immediately launched a massive offensive. By mid-December, Japanese forces had pushed south from Beijing as far as Shanghai and Nanjing. The conduct of the Imperial Army in Nanjing was horrifying and mystifying. Japanese troops herded together tens of thousands of civilians and surrendered soldiers and murdered

them; they raped and killed perhaps 20,000 women of all ages.

The total number of casualties is still contested to this day, with numbers ranging from tens of thousands to 300,000 deaths. The terrible violence continued for nearly two months. The question of why the Imperial Army behaved in this appalling way, and why the High Command permitted the atrocities to continue for nearly two months has still not received a satisfactory answer.

A small number of right-wing revisionists in contemporary Japan argue that the Nanjing Massacre never happened; they claim that it was invented by the victorious Allied Powers after the end of

the war as a means to further punish and victimize the Japanese. 

A famous example of this view can be found in the controversial manga of Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensoron (On War, 1998). Some high school history textbooks in Japan refer to the events in neutral

terms as the Nanjing Incident (Nankin jiken) rather than as the Nanjing Massacre (Ninkin daigyakusatsu), triggering protests of atrocity-denial in China. This ‘textbook controversy’, which also

involves the under-representation of so-called ‘comfort women’ (sexual slaves of the Imperial Army) still rages to this day. 

Historians such as Inega Saburo filed lawsuits against the Ministry of Education for trying to censor their frank disclosure of Japanese wartime atrocities. Ienaga’s fight was highly publicized around the world: Noam Chomsky nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (1999, 2002).

Taisho democracy

Emperor Taisho ruled for a brief period between 1912 and 1926, when the Showa emperor, who would reign until his death in 1989, succeeded him. For many historians, the Taisho period appears
like a small window of calm in the middle of a century of war and struggle for Japan. Intellectuals and activists such as Yoshino Sakuzo advocated a kind of democracy called minponshugi (rule for the people), which he argued was compatible with Japan’s constitutional monarchy. At the same time, constitutional lawyers such as Minobe Tatsukichi argued that the emperor might best be considered an ‘organ’ in the overall structure of the state, rather than as coterminous with the nation as a whole. Meanwhile, internationalists like Nitobe Inazo placed their faith in the emergence of a new world order that would recognize diversity and multicultural membership; Nitobe himself was an undersecretary-
general of the League of Nations from 1920 and a founding director of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (the forerunner of UNESCO).
Against this background, a new middle class was emerging in the rapidly growing urban centres. This was the birth of the so-called salaryman (sarariman) – the ubiquitous, white-collared worker.
But this period also saw a new class of white-collared women working as ‘office ladies’ or as attendants in shops. In general, women in these jobs were very poorly paid, but they featured in popular culture as icons of modern life: flashy and fashionable, immersed in the consumerism of products and fads, and often represented as morally liberal, selling kisses as well as Western clothes to their customers. These were the moga or modan gaaru (modern girls). The new middle class (which contrasted with the ‘old middle class’ of former samurai families) was represented as liberal and free, moving regularly between different jobs at different companies and enjoying the trappings of modern life.

This new way of life cohabited with a new culture, and the Taisho period saw the Japanese enthusiastically embrace many American pastimes: baseball and jazz being the most pervasive.

But there were also developments in Japan’s own artistic ferment, with arguably modern Japan’s greatest authors, such as Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Tanizaki Juni’ichiro, writing darkly beautiful short stories and novels that contemplated questions of individual and cultural identity in Japan’s rapidly changing society. At the same time, there was a flourishing of avant-garde poetry and art. The advent of the ‘one yen’ book, the further development of national and local newspapers, and the establishment of rental stores for novels, magazines, and manga (graphic fiction) brought these materials to an ever wider and increasingly educated public.

Of course, this middle class image of Taisho Japan was not the whole story. The working class factory workers that so characterized the Meiji period found their conditions largely unchanged. Again, it was young women who bore the brunt of this, with men toiling under similarly harsh conditions in heavier

industry. However, the Taisho period also saw the working classes becoming increasingly conscious of their plight and their power: workers began to organize into unions and ‘friendly societies’, even the burakumin began to participate in social activism in the form of the Suiheisha (Levellers’ Association).

Local disputes and strikes increased in number throughout the 1920s, as activists started to embrace liberal and even communist ideas.

The image of the Taisho period as a war-free haven is at least partially premised upon the economic boom that Japan experienced during the years of the Great War in Europe.

During the war years, Japanese industrial output increased by a factor of five as it sought to supply European and domestic demand, and its exports surged (especially textiles).

This failure at Versailles was not well received back in Japan, where protests erupted in the streets. For many commentators at the time (and since), this looked like another example of Western racism, echoing the duplicity that the Japanese perceived at the time of the Triple Intervention. The feeling of injustice was severe, especially since Japan at the turn of the 1920s had become a modern, constitutional democracy with an imposing empire and a flourishing economy: it had met all of the objective criteria to join the club of modern nations, but it was still being refused entry. It seemed, finally, that being modern was not enough: modern Japan would never be considered an equal partner in international affairs for as long as it was Japanese. This was the one thing that Japan could do nothing about, and indeed it was becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of maintaining its distinctive identity. Events at Versailles added fuel to the fires of Japanese romantics and chauvinists who were striving to rediscover, reinvent, or simply protect ‘Japaneseness’ in the modern state.

Only two years later, Britain allowed the Anglo-Japanese alliance to lapse and instead proposed a five-way naval agreement involving the USA, France, and Italy. The so-called Washington Naval Treaty of 1921, one of a number of such treaties to be signed over the next decade or so, obliged the signatories to maintain a fixed ratio of naval power (measured in tonnage of capital ships and aircraft carriers). As far as Japan was concerned, the key ratio was Britain:USA:Japan, which was set at 5:5:3, meaning that Japan would always be less powerful than the two nations that thwarted its racial equality clause. But, perhaps the last straw for those in Japan who saw a systematic racism at work in the Anglo-American world was the enactment of the 1924 immigration laws in the USA, which specifically prohibited the immigration of East Asians.

Unfortunately, this perception of an unsympathetic international environment coincided with economic collapse in Japan, which followed the wartime bubble, and natural catastrophe in the form of the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which left 150,000 people dead or missing and about half a million residences in Tokyo levelled. By the end of the Taisho period, Japan was in depression, the zaibatsu conglomerates (such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Sumitomo) were beginning to take over the economy

as private banks failed, and they were cultivating ever-closer connections with the political parties and the military. This meant that wealth was being concentrated into fewer hands, and more of the urban population was struggling to maintain their way of life.

Hence, by the start of the increasingly militaristic Showa period, Japan was ripe for change once again: the democratic window appeared to be closing.

The politics of the Meiji empire

As discussed in the previous chapter, the Meiji Restoration and the revolution that followed it was essentially imperial in character. In the so-called Age of Empires, it seemed very natural to the political and military elites that their new imperial state should also have an empire of its own, like the Great Powers of the West whose empires had already spread their tendrils throughout Asia. It was with this kind of thinking in mind that Yamagata Aritomo, fresh from his trip to Europe, endeavoured to build a powerful Japanese navy, in imitation of the navy of the greatest imperial power of the day, the small island nation of Great Britain.

Although Saigo Takamori’s plans for an invasion of Korea in the early 1870s were thwarted by the genro (who cut short the Iwakura Embassy in Europe in order to prevent it), and by Yamagata

Aritomo in particular, the government’s objection to the plan was not its imperial ambition but rather the method and rationale of the venture. Indeed, in 1876 Yamagata himself argued that Korea was an essential part of Japan’s ‘zone of advantage’ and that its relative weakness (as a less modern society)

both made it vulnerable to Japan’s regional ambitions and to the ambitions of the West, which in turn constituted a vulnerability for Japan itself. It was imperative, he argued, that Korea should fall into Japan’s sphere, since it was certain to fall to someone. 

With this kind of imperial competition in mind, and conscious of Japan’s new power on the regional stage, Japan imposed the Treaty of Kanghwa on Korea in 1876. The process was almost a precise duplication of the way that Commodore Perry had imposed the Treaty of Kanagawa on Japan just twenty years earlier, and its terms were similarly exploitative. Until Korea modernized, Yamagata and others argued that it was not worthy of an equal treaty. Hence, throughout the 1880s Japan sent

emissaries to Korea to advise it on how to modernize its education system, its economy, and its political structure, just as Japan was receiving similar advice from Europe.

The situation in Korea was very complicated, not least because of the traditional competition between Japan and China for influence over the peninsula. The Treaty of Kanghwa as well as the presence of so many Japanese advisors aggravated the Chinese rulers as well as many Korean people. In Japan, opinion leaders attempted to reconcile the apparent hypocrisy of Japanese foreign policy through recourse to the rhetoric of Pan-Asianism: Japan was helping Korea to help itself, as an Asian brother helps another under threat from the West. Nonetheless, violence against the Japanese emissaries in Korea was not infrequent, until finally in 1894 there was a full-scale uprising against foreign influence. The Tonghak Rebellion, which was partially a religious movement, partially popular xenophobia, and partially anti-Japanese in sentiment, undermined stability in Korea to such an extent that the leaders called for military aid from their traditional patrons, China, in order to restore order. Greatly offended by this, and under the pretext of defending their zone of advantage, the Japanese sent troops of their own into Korea, where they came into conflict with the Chinese. The result was the first Sino-Japanese War of modern times. 

Thanks to the modernization drive instigated by Yamagata Aritomo, the Japanese army was vastly superior to that of its giant neighbour. In addition, in pursuit of a ‘British Empire for Japan’, Japan had built an impressive navy; for the first time in history it enjoyed naval parity with China, and technological superiority. The outcome of the war was a clear victory for Japan, whose privileged position in Korea was therefore confirmed. Moreover, as compensation for the war, Japan

claimed the island of Taiwan (Formosa), the small but strategically  important Liaodong peninsula on the Chinese mainland, and a huge cash indemnity from China.

During the same period, unionization and ‘friendly societies’ started to gain in popularity, and support for a fledgling socialist movement began to appear. A Social Democratic Party was founded in 1901, but was instantly banned. The movement radicalized into anarchism and communism under the leadership of activists like Kotoku Shusui and Katayama Sen, who would eventually be executed for High Treason in 1911. The orthodoxy of Japan’s nation-building project, even in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, never embraced the political left, since it threatened to challenge the one emblem that held the whole Meiji state together: the figure of the emperor himself.

Hence, the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912 was a real turning point in modern Japanese history. Meiji had overseen the unification of Japan into a single nation-state, and then the modernization of that state into one that could stand equally with those of the West as an imperial power. However, at the time of his death, Japan was already witnessing the start of a new phase of politics, as popular opinion turned against the militarization of the state and sought to forge Japan into a genuinely participatory democracy. Political parties became more coherent and more focused on issues, rather than simply clubs that parliamentarians joined. Indeed, in the year of Meiji’s death, the leader of the Seiyukai  party, Hara Kei, succeeded in forcing a stalemate with the military about its new budget. Not even the elder statesman Yamagata Aritomo could resolve the situation in favour of the military, and this ushered in a

period that has come to be known as the ‘politics of compromise’.

Hara would go on to become Japan’s first commoner, party-based prime minister in 1918.

Japan’s encounter with the modern world

At first glance, the origins of modern Japan seem to coincide conveniently with the dramatic arrival of US Commodore Perry in 1853. Before his arrival, Japan looked like a feudal monarchy that had been hiding in self-imposed isolation from the world for 250 years; within 50 years of his visit Japan had literally undergone a revolution – it had a modern, industrial economy, a constitutional government, and the beginnings of a colonial empire. To many commentators, this astonishingly rapid transformation was occasioned by Japan’s shocking encounter with the superior technology and power of the Western nations. In this version of the story, Perry broke traditional Japan and forced it into the modern world. However, as we will see in this chapter, the reality is not so simple.

The arrival of Perry

After the annexation of Texas in 1845, the war with Mexico, and finally the incorporation of California into the Union in September 1850 during the so-called ‘gold rush’, the USA was expanding westwards energetically. The imperial ambitions of the USA and its desire to compete with Great Britain for lucrative trade opportunities in Asia encouraged it to look even further west across the Pacific Ocean to Japan. In this spirit, the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry with his four fabled ‘black ships’ in July 1853 seemed like a natural step in the process.

Perry was famous in naval circles for his passion for modernization, and particularly steam-powered ships; even before he had made his first, famous trip to Japan in the USS Mississippi he had already earned the epithet ‘the father of the steam-navy’. It is not without significance, therefore, that it was

the presence of four black steam-ships that intimidated the local government officials in Uraga Bay (near Edo, present-day Tokyo) to take the unprecedented step of allowing Perry to come ashore and present a letter from US President Millard Fillmore. 

Until that time, an official policy of isolationism (sakoku) meant that foreigners had been forbidden from the mainland of Japan, with only a small number of Dutch traders permitted to stay on the tiny, artificial islet of Deshima near the outlying city of Nagasaki since 1641. The letter contained a series of demands for more open trade with Japan, and Perry left Uraga with the ominous promise to return the next year with a more substantial naval force, ready to force compliance if it was not forthcoming.

In fact, the USA was a later comer: European ships had been trying to crack open Japan for at least the previous 50 years. 

Russian vessels started to show interest in the northerly island of Hokkaido as early as 1792. Already developing a serious stake in China, the British sailed to Uraga Bay in 1818 to make a half-hearted request for the opening of trade relations, but their advances were rejected. In 1825, the shogunate government, or bakufu, became so concerned about the appearance of foreign vessels that it issued the order that coastal warlords should expel foreign advances by force if necessary, and in 1837 a US

merchant ship was shelled. Indeed, for the first 50 years of the 19th century, the bakufu really believed that it could keep the Western world out. It was not until an emissary of the Dutch King William III in 1844 tried to explain to the shogun that the world had changed since the expulsion of the Europeans in

the 17th century that the bakufu really started to rethink its place in the world. Comprehensive British victories over China in the so-called Opium Wars in 1842 seemed to prove the point.

If the British could humiliate the colossus of China so effectively, how could the smaller and more peripheral nation of Japan escape a similar fate? Lest they provoke serious military retaliation from the Western powers, the bakufu quickly rescinded its order to fire on foreign vessels. It was in this context that Perry first arrived in Uraga Bay.

When Perry returned with nine ships in February 1854, he found government officials willing to sign the Treaty of Kanagawa (31 March 1854). This treaty opened the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate, and also provided for the stationing of the first US consul on mainland Japan; Townsend Harris would take up this post in Shimoda in July 1856. The Treaty of Kanagawa opened the floodgates, and the European imperial powers quickly secured similar deals: France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia all signed new treaties in the wake of Perry’s return. 

By 1858, the so-called Unequal Treaties regime was firmly in place: without a shot being fired, Japan found itself in a similar position to China after the Opium Wars (with the notable exception that the Western powers agreed to prohibit opium trade with Japan). Japan had lost control of its tariffs, had

opened its borders to trade and commerce with the West, and had even granted the privilege of extra-territoriality to the Western powers (which meant that foreign nationals were exempt from Japanese law even on Japanese soil). Rather than being justified by military defeat, however, these measures were imposed on Japan on the basis that it was not an equal member of international society – it was not a modern, industrial, constitutional polity. As we will see, this humiliation was itself a powerful force fuelling the development of a strong sense of nationalism in late 19th-century Japan, as well as a key factor driving the revolution to come. At all costs, Japan sought to end the Unequal Treaties.

It is important to note that it would be an exaggeration to argue that these humiliations damaged a coherent or pre-existing sense of national pride in Japan, since prior to the mid-19th century Japan was a relatively divided, fragmented, and non-centralized territory, knitted together by bonds of loyalty, military dependency, and religious imagery. Indeed, in many ways, the humiliation of the Unequal Treaties was fundamental in the process of creating a modern sense of national consciousness in Japan.

The significance of the modern, industrial power of Perry’s fleet in these events should not be underestimated. Indeed, the image of the ‘black ships’ quickly became iconic in Japan, representing

the menace of Western power as well as the threat of traditional Japan being overcome by the cultural and technological force of modernity. An intriguing anecdote concerning Perry’s return to Japan in 1854 illustrates this point: contemporary accounts describe the way in which the Japanese officials arranged for a sumo contest to be staged for the American officers, presumably in an attempt to intimidate the foreigners with the power and martial spirit of the Japanese. However, the US delegation is reported to have been singularly unimpressed by the spectacle, finding the performance laughable. For their part, the US delegation assembled a 100-metre circle of track and made a gift of a quarter-scale steam locomotive for the Japanese officials to ride. It is a testament to the astonishing impact of industrial technology that this toy train was far more intimidating than the primal power of sumo wrestling.

Perry had probably been aware of the effect that his black ships and his little locomotive would have. Before embarking on his mission, Perry had read much of the available literature about Tokugawa Japan, and he is even thought to have consulted with the famous Japanologist, Philipp Franz von
Siebold, who had lived in the Dutch enclave on Deshima for eight years before returning to Leiden in the Netherlands.
Nonetheless, information on the secretive and isolationist nation was scarce. Only a tiny number of Westerners had any first-hand knowledge of Japan, and even those who did (like Siebold himself )
had only limited exposure to the real social and political circumstances of the unfamiliar land. Orientalism was rife; the romance of the ‘mystical East’ coloured most accounts. Western
accounts of Japan in the early 19th century portrayed it as a feudal kingdom, untouched by the hands of industry and modernity. Most accounts also mentioned how favourably Japan compared to the other ‘barbarian peoples’ encountered by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa: the Japanese were
apparently cultured, clean, and unfailingly polite. Townsend Harris, for instance, famously described Japan as the embodiment of a golden age of simplicity and honesty.

What’s modern about modern Japan?

For many people today, modern Japan is best recognized as an economic powerhouse. According to many commentators, Japan is today’s most successful industrial (or even post-industrial) economy, combining almost unprecedented affluence with remarkable social stability and apparent harmony. Despite its recent economic troubles, and despite the rapid rise of China, Japan remains the second largest economy on the planet according to most indicators, behind only the United States.
Japanese goods and cultural products are consumed all over the world, ranging from animated movies and Playstation games, to cars and semiconductors, to management techniques and the martial arts.
In many ways, this image of Japan makes it into an icon of ‘modernity’ in the contemporary world, and yet the nation itself remains something of an enigma to many non-specialists, who see it as a confusing montage of the alien and the familiar, the traditional and the modern, and even the ‘Eastern’ and
the ‘Western’. As we will see, part of the reason for this confusion lies in the assumption that whilst modernity generates little cultural dissonance in the so-called ‘West’, in Japan and elsewhere
the trappings of modernity appear incongruous or even inexplicable. At the base of this assumption is the deeply felt entanglement of modernity with European and American history. Indeed, this perceived entanglement is at the core of many of the world’s contemporary protests against globalization

and capitalism: to many people the steamroller of the modern looks like the expansion of the West.

As an example, let’s pause to consider a recent spectacle.

Perceptions of modern Japan: FIFA World Cup 2002

There was a measure of European scepticism when Japan and Korea were chosen to co-host the 2002 FIFA World Cup finals. Was the first World Cup in Asia going to be another World Cup like USA 1994, when it was hosted by a rich country that didn’t really know anything about football (or ‘soccer’) in an attempt to make it more popular there? The European public knew even less about these ‘Far Eastern’ nations than they knew about the USA: they knew about Nintendo, Sony, and Daewoo; they knew about karate and taekwondo; they knew about Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and the Korean War. They didn’t know that Japan’s ‘J-League’ was one of the world’s most lucrative football leagues;

and they certainly didn’t know that Korea would make it through to the semi-finals (where they would lose to Germany), having beaten the ‘Great Powers’ of Italy and Spain on their way, finishing above pre-tournament favourites such as England, Argentina, and the reigning champions, France. In general,

the tremendous passion for (and ability in) football in Japan and Korea took Europe by surprise.

It is interesting to reflect on why the scale of interest in football in East Asia was surprising to so many people. A partial answer resides in the kinds of popular images of Japan to which the ‘Western’ public have been exposed. During its coverage of the World Cup, for example, the venerable BBC produced two beautiful advertising sequences for the games. The first, screened in the weeks preceding the games, was a two-minute segment in the style of ‘anime’, the virally popular medium of Japanese

animation that currently accounts for 60% of all televised cartoons in the world. The short film commenced with a dramatic voice-over that would be familiar to fans of ‘beat ’em up’ video

games and martial arts movies: ‘Every four years great heroes come from the four corners of the earth to compete for the greatest prize known to man . . . ’. In the background, a stylized flicker of kanji (Chinese characters used in Japan) and hangul (Korean characters) pulsed ominously. Then the advert exploded into life as a science-fictional spectacle: a ball is kicked into the air like a rocket; computer screens and neon lights flash and beep as they trace it; a futuristic flotation tank holds a man with a

gleaming, metallic cyborg leg (he turns out to be the superhumanly talented French captain, Zidane); and then a flurry of anime football heroes (none of whom are Japanese or Korean) flash through the streets of a neon-riddled (Japanese) city in pursuit of the rocket.

The two-minute commercial was slick and stylized, full of references to popular culture, and riddled with implications that Japan was somehow a cool and futuristic utopia, a science-fictional realm of cyborgs and computerization of the kind that William Gibson famously depicted in his cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer (1984). In addition, none of the actual football seemed to involve anyone from Japan or Korea, although there were lots of people in the streets watching the foreign football-heroes appreciatively. 

The second sequence was screened during the opening credits of every match. This was a much more romantic montage of images: beginning slowly with a temple on a lake at sunrise, followed by a close-up of the eyes of a Buddha statue, a fluttering Japanese flag, some sumo wrestlers, a fluttering Korean flag, and then some koi carp. At this point, a football is kicked into a light-blur that then guides us through the rest of the images: Buddha again, a cityscape (with neon lights and a temple), a football stadium (with a Brazilian player), some traditional Korean dancing, David Beckham, some more Korean dancing, another sumo wrestler, another temple, a lingering shot of a geisha (or gisaeng), and then a slow romantic shot of Mount Fuji. At this point there is a sudden change of pace, as though we

are being brought into the modern era: a Shinkansen bullet-train explodes into view, more unidentified footballers, more trains, more neon lights and crowded streets with illuminated screens (showing footballers), more traditional Korean dancing, and finally the ball-blur flashes between the uprights of a great torii (sacred Shinto gateway) as though it were a goal.

Of course, the imagery here is cliched and unimaginative, but this is precisely why it reveals so much about the ways in which Japan is represented in the so-called West. Leaving aside the bizarre absence of Japanese football players in these commercials, we see a characteristic mixture of traditional

culture (sumo, geisha, Fuji, Buddhist icons) and hyper-modernity (bullet-trains, neon cities, cyborgs), of the mysterious and the technological. Japan is represented as an enigmatically different ‘other’ that has somehow appropriated (and then transformed) the trappings of modernity that should be so familiar to a

Western audience. The audience is supposed to be affected by seeing a sumo wrestler and a high-speed train in the same sequence.