In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Qin Wang about his article “Constitution and Literariness: Takeuchi Yoshimi’s Critique of the Postwar Japanese Constitution,” from Telos 189 (Winter 2019). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 189 in our online store.
Constitution and Literariness: Takeuchi Yoshimi’s Critique of the Postwar Japanese Constitution
Qin Wang
Years after the promulgation of the postwar Japanese constitution, the literary critic Takeuchi Yoshimi wrote an essay entitled “Our Feeling for the Constitution” (1960), in which he critically examines the emotional distance between the postwar constitution and the Japanese people. Despite or because of the fact that, as a literary critic rather than a political theorist, Takeuchi’s reflections on the constitution hardly conform to any theoretical discussion of the constitution’s articles, his thoughts might radically and fundamentally put into question issues that are presumed by other politico-theoretical discussions. “The new constitution,” writes Takeuchi,
has no affinity with us. I feel it is something remote from us. Now we have these universal principles of humanity that are beautifully written in the constitution. For all its beautifulness, however, it seems too shining to be our own constitution. In other words, it would be too fantastic if we regarded it as derived from our own history. I doubt if we are qualified to own it.
Indeed, it is nothing new to argue that, due to the complicated role of GHQ (General Headquarters) during the drafting process, the postwar constitution was imposed by a power that the Japanese government could not resist. But we would misunderstand Takeuchi if we simply took him as advocating constitutional amendment or attempting to reconcile the postwar constitution with the imperial constitution. In the same essay, Takeuchi crucially argues that
the same holds true for the soldiers who fought in that war, dying while shouting out “long live the emperor.” Admittedly, the old education makes us faithful to the emperor, yet these soldiers only borrowed this form to express their wishes for freedom insofar as they are human beings. For lack of other means, they had to borrow this distorted form.
The claim that the Japanese have to express their wishes for freedom through distorted forms not only concerns, for example, the (dis)continuity between the postwar constitution and the imperial constitution, the tension between the “imposed” constitution and the Japanese “local experience,” but also concerns Takeuchi’s understanding of what the constitution appeals to, namely, the value system and political principles directly borrowed from modern Western democracy, if not from America particularly. More generally, this claim has to do with Takeuchi’s understanding of the relationship between the so-called “universal principles of humanity,” on the one hand, and the subjectivity of Japan (and of Asia in general), on the other. The distortion appears when these soldiers attempted to articulate their wishes and wills, which would be utterly ineffable if not expressed in and through ideological slogans that do not correspond to what they thought. Takeuchi’s critique of the constitution, then, aims at revealing the discrepancy, discontinuity, and dissymmetry between the expression and what it distorts, revealing the structure of distortion that troubles postwar Japan as well as Japan during the war.
In what follows, I first briefly revisit Takeuchi’s famous essay “What Is Modernity?” (1948) and then relate his literary resistance to his (in)famous argument on the two-sidedness of the Pacific War, in order to demonstrate that Takeuchi’s critique of the constitution is to be properly understood according to his idiosyncratic understanding of literary resistance. Different from both leftist support of the constitution and the rightist appeal to amendment, Takeuchi occupies a difficult position where political decision is expected to derive from “resistance,” which is productive as well as problematic.
I. European Modernity and Its Other
In “What Is Modernity?” Takeuchi examines the universality of European modernity, which results in the modernization of Asia. The latter, argues Takeuchi, “is the result of European coercion, or is something derived from that result.” Moreover, European modernization for Takeuchi is not a historical event that happened only once; rather, it is that which makes history possible. It is, to borrow terms from Heidegger, ontically as well as ontologically world history per se. Although the very condition of possibility of this process of historicization is put under different names or concepts—Hegelian spirit, capitalism, Protestantism, etc.—what does not get changed is the self-movement and self-negation of Europe, which constantly unfolds in a dialectical way. By contrast, according to Takeuchi, Asia in the same process is passively involved in Europe’s history, so that where Europe moves forward, Asia retreats; where Europe wins, Asia loses. In terms of sociopolitical institutionalization and technological developments, the contrast between European modernity and the premodern state of Asia only demonstrates that Asia, in order to become modern, has to Europeanize itself.
While Takeuchi’s argument seems to echo Hegel’s philosophy of history, in which the static Orient is determined as the past moment of the self-development of world history, Takeuchi does not affirm the unfolding of spirit but radically abstracts Asia from the reciprocal determination between Europe and history. In other words, if the self-unfolding history of European modernity, along with its concomitant theoretical self-justification, attempts to make universal claims, then Takeuchi’s strategy is to keep a distance from such a discourse of universalism. When Takeuchi writes that Asia is merely a “virtual image” of European substance, it is not difficult to hear a distant response to the hierarchical relationship between Japan and America in the process of establishing the postwar Japanese constitution:
Europe is only Europe in its incessant tension, just as reason can only be reason in its step forward. It is obvious that such an advancing reason cannot be reason in its step back. If there were something, it would not be the substantial reason, but the virtual image reflected by the substance.
Indeed, Maruyama Masao and other intellectuals have argued for the liberal values embodied in the Constitution of Japan, which guarantees individual freedoms and civil rights in contradistinction to the suppressive, emperor-oriented Meiji Constitution. For Takeuchi, such a comparison is seriously insufficient and misleading insofar as it fails to take into consideration the asymmetrical relationship between the European subject who commands and Japan’s lack of subjectivity. “Not only does Europe become possible in Europe, the Orient also becomes possible there. If Europe is represented by the notion of reason, then both reason and nonreason (i.e., nature) would be European.” If the constitution cannot represent the will of the people as it is imposed from outside on the whole society, then the process of its establishment only indicates that Japan loses another chance of resistance: neither resisting nor experiencing the self-negating dialectics, let us repeat Takeuchi’s sarcastic claim, “Japan is nothing.”
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