The Journal of Japanese Studies

One of the most exciting developments in Japanese studies in the last few decades has been a growing appreciation for diversity in Japanese society and a concomitant awakening to the historicity of Japan's cult of mono-ethnic homogeneity (tani'itsu minzoku). In the years since the bubble's bursting, social scientists have continued to model the workings of the developmentalist state, though perhaps with different conclusions. Brian McVeigh's latest book is an ambitious attempt to synthesize and critique this large body of scholarship, to reveal the workings of the ideological fields that continue to sustain myths of Japanese exceptionalism. This is a theoretically rich book that crosses the boundaries of discipline and area studies, but it has significant shortcomings.

As a social scientist, McVeigh is mainly concerned with the processes and mechanisms by which nationalisms are propagated and maintained. Since one of his goals is to make Japanese nationalism comprehensible and significant to non-Japan specialists, to show how Japan's experience is applicable to modern constructions of state and identity, he devotes the first third of the book to theories of nationalism and their salience in the Japanese context. He begins with an explication of the semantic interplay of English and Japanese terms for nation, state, race, ethnicity, and the like, followed by a historical overview of Japanese nationalisms in the modern era. He then develops the concept of "renovationist nationalism," an extension of Tetsuo Najita's "restorationism" in slightly more positivist guise, and concludes with a chapter that proposes an alternative way of conceptualizing the internexus of state and society. Along the way he quotes liberally from nationalism theorists such as Ernest Gellner, Rogers Brubaker, Michael Billig, and John Breuilly, and most of the usual suspects who treat Japanese nationalism, mainly Harumi Befu, Kevin Doak, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Oguma [End Page 498] Eiji, Kenneth Pyle, John Dower, Tetsuo Najita, and Chalmers Johnson. The preceding list is by no means comprehensive, for McVeigh marshals an impressively wide-ranging familiarity with the literature. In fact, this reviewer was so impressed that he found himself surprised when the author failed to quote or cite the most germane scholarship (Thomas C. Smith on "Japan's aristocratic revolution," for example, or Stefan Tanaka's insightful work on modernization's transformation of premodern cultural practices into "tradition"). The theory section of the book is extremely stimulating, mostly because of McVeigh's generally deft integration of these scholars' work.

McVeigh perceives nationalism as an intrinsically modern phenomenon, a product of mutually reinforcing modern developments such as state building, bureaucratization, capitalist industrialization, and the emergence of mass society (pp. 32–33). As he notes, "any given 'nationalism' is actually a vast array of 'nationalisms' that interconnect, overlap, and resonate as well as collide, clash, and compete with each other" (p. 4). Nationalism is also a moving target characterized by "conflation, multivocality, indeterminateness, confusion, and mysticism" (p. 6). In order to make sense of the inherent ambiguity and comprehensiveness of this sort of "banal nationalism" (Billig's term), McVeigh focuses on the relationship between the people and polity in a series of "domains" in which socioeconomic national cultures and political structure interact. Although McVeigh is committed to showing that Japan's nationalisms are not exceptional, he does think Japan differs from other modern national states in having a large number of such domains (p. 10) and in having a recurring strain of renovationist nationalism. For the purposes of exposition, he structures his analysis around cultural, economic, educational, ethnic, racial, gendered, and religious domains.

For such a theoretically thoughtful book, it is surprising and vexing to encounter the occasional clumsy and diverting use of quotation. For example, in order to make the point that the pre-Meiji political order was less unified than commonly assumed today, McVeigh quotes Delmer Brown's now half-century old statement that "Western and Japanese historians have tended to overstate the political unity of the Tokugawa era" (p. 41). Although the assumption of...