CHAPTER ONE Situating Comparisons
From the Columbia River to Modern Japan
I BEGIN again with a story about myself as a comparer. My first plan for this research project focused on practices of salmon management in the Columbia River basin, located in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada. I had grown up in a small town near the river’s mouth, and I had long been passionately interested in the braiding of human and fish lives within the basin. Before the mid-twentieth century, the Columbia was among the world’s richest salmon-bearing watersheds, and even after decades of serious declines in fish numbers, salmon were still at the core of the region’s identity and economy for many Indigenous and settler communities. Salmon were in local school curricula, in public artwork, at the community maritime museum, and, frequently, on my dinner plate.
When I began studying Pacific salmon, I thought I knew quite a bit about these fish. I was raised in a white wooden house built by an early twentieth-century salmon cannery administrator, and I had watched from my parents’ bedroom window as low-gunwaled gillnet boats set drifts. I took three years of salmon biology coursework at my local high school and worked at the school’s on-site fish hatchery. Later, I spent several years working at an organization that focused on salmon restoration. Based on these experiences, I thought I had a sense of the basic analytical categories and themes that would matter for an anthropological study of Pacific salmon worlds—and comparison was not among them. The units of salmon management, as I had learned them, were watersheds, fishing zones, farm fields, and irrigation district boundaries. The debates were about how to allocate fish stocks among commercial, tribal, and recreational fishers and how to best protect “wild” salmon. Although political machinations in Washington, DC, often impacted fisheries management, salmon issues were consistently considered a regional concern. In my years studying and working in salmon management in Oregon and Washington State, the people I encountered—be they hatchery workers, fisheries scientists, government officials, or environmental activists—all mapped out salmon worlds that were linked to a specific watershed (i.e., to the Columbia River basin) or, at the largest, to a salmon ecoregion that stretched from coastal California to Alaska (Woody, Wolf, and Zuckerman 2003). In their everyday practices of salmon management, people along the Columbia River did not often think globally or draw comparisons to far-off sites. In my countless interactions in Columbia River hatcheries, on fishing docks, at dams, and at meetings, I do not recall anyone even mentioning the existence of Japanese salmon.
I first learned about these salmon many years later when, as a PhD student, I opened a copy of The Atlas of Pacific Salmon (Augerot et al. 2005), a collection of geographic information system (GIS) maps that depicted salmon populations around the entire Pacific Rim, stretching in a nearly contiguous arc from California to Japan. I was dumbstruck to learn that there were salmon in Asia—in Kamchatka, Siberia, Hokkaido, and even Honshu. The wilds of eastern Russia seemed roughly comparable to Alaska and thus somehow comprehensible as salmon spaces. But salmon in Japan? It was a phenomenon that had never crossed my mind. At once, my curiosity was doubly piqued. First I wanted to know what Japanese salmon worlds were like. Then I wanted to know how it had been possible for me to not know about them.
Motivated by this growing awareness of my ignorance, I decided to reformulate my research to focus on salmon-human relations in northern Japan rather than in the Columbia River basin. Hokkaido seemed the place to start; while there are salmon hatcheries and commercial fishing in Honshu, the industry is much larger up north, with total adult salmon numbers about four times larger in Hokkaido than in Honshu when I was beginning field research in the late 2010s (Hokkaido National Fisheries Research Institute 2020).1 After I arrived in Hokkaido, however, I realized that the geographies of Japanese salmon management were far larger and more cosmopolitan than those I knew from the Columbia River and that I thus needed to reconceptualize my research. While fisheries professionals in the Columbia River rarely invoked comparisons with places beyond the bounds of the North American West Coast, in Japan, globe-spanning comparisons were one of the most prominent features of the salmon industry. Most of the fisherpeople, scientists, and Indigenous activists in Hokkaido knew of the Columbia River and the town from which I came, and some had even been there. They repeatedly pointed out the bits and pieces of Columbia River salmon worlds that had been drawn into their own—the nineteenth-century Hokkaido salmon canning label that used one from the Columbia River as its model, the Ishikari fish trap based on a Columbia River design, the Hokkaido wild salmon policies that had been directly shaped in dialogue with those of the United States. The comparisons that they showed me, however, were not limited to the Columbia River; instead, they reached out to Parisian fish markets, Chilean rivers, Alaskan management strategies, European supermarkets, and American restaurant chains.
Comparison emerged as the key theme of my research because it was inescapable; analogic thinking was both a key practice for the people I met and something they showed me as materially sedimented into Hokkaido’s worlds. When I arrived in Hokkaido, I was already thinking comparatively, in the common anthropological sense of working analytically across the salmon worlds I knew from the Columbia River and those I was about to encounter in Japan. But the ubiquitous comparisons of the people I met in Hokkaido forced me to consider comparisons as far more than analytical or methodological tools. Such encounters pushed me to ask how people’s practices of comparison might also be studied as ethnographic objects and material world-making practices in ways that at once build on and expand existing anthropological conversations about comparison.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL COMPARISONS
Cross-cultural comparison has always been a major methodological and theoretical concern in anthropology. It is heralded as a core contribution of the discipline, an essential humanist act that allows us to draw parallels between others’ lives and our own and a practice that can denaturalize taken-for-granted assumptions of “how the world is.” But at the same time, cross-cultural comparison has also been critiqued as a colonialist endeavor, one that has been used to create developmental hierarchies and racial typologies. Anthropologists are caught in the dilemmas of comparison; we are deeply wary of echoes of nineteenth-century comparative methods, but we continue to depend on comparison as one of our most important techniques. Indeed, the very notion of “culture” does not exist separate from practices of comparison. Yet even as they have enthusiastically compared, anthropologists have also recognized the fundamental incomparability of different ways of being. As the noted anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard allegedly said, “There is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method—and that is impossible” (Needham 1975, 356).
Anthropologists negotiate practices of comparison while also struggling with questions of power and politics. To compare inevitably positions someone’s categories as the grounds of comparison, that is, as the analytic framework within which the comparison unfolds. Anthropology has increasingly grappled with the question of whose categories take on that role. In anthropology, the idea that so-called emic categories, or those of one’s fieldwork interlocutors, should fundamentally shape one’s analysis, questions, and interpretations has long played a substantial role in disciplinary practice. Yet scholars have become increasingly uncomfortable that Euro-American analytical categories, both within and beyond anthropology, remain too dominant. Overall, since the widespread critique of cultures as bounded entities, many anthropologists have moved away from explicit engagement with comparison, instead working through concepts such as connections, flows, and -scapes (Appadurai 1990). Might it now be useful for comparison to once more take on a more central role in disciplinary debates? If so, on what scholarly resources might a new mode of comparative anthropology draw?
In the last three decades, the interface between anthropology and postcolonial theory has been a particularly rich site for probing the categories through which cross-cultural comparisons are made. But the comparisons that have been the critical focus of well-known postcolonial theory texts—such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to name but one—have primarily been Euro-American colonial ones, that is, those of the West, with a focus on how its comparisons create structures of power and lasting inequalities. What, then, of the comparative practices of the people who are not Euro-American? How might we better attend to the world-making effects of their comparisons?
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, an anthropologist working in Brazil, has recently called for scholars to do just this—to take others’ modes of comparison more seriously. Addressing the problem of how anthropological comparisons too often render difference only in their own terms, typically those of the West, Viveiros de Castro asks, “How can we restore the analogies traced by Amazonian peoples within the terms of our own analogies? What happens to our comparisons when we compare them with indigenous comparisons?” (2004, 4). My attention to the role of comparison in Japanese fisheries management responds to Viveiros de Castro’s invitation to be curious about others’ comparisons. At the same time, the historical and ethnographic stories I tell cast comparison in a different light. For Viveiros de Castro, Amazonians and Western anthropologists present two very separate, and indeed inverse, modes of comparison; Amazonians locate difference in material form and worlds, while Western anthropologists tend to assume a singular physical reality while emphasizing differences in “culture”—in perception, belief, and interpretation. Viveiros de Castro’s emphasis on the contrasts between these two modes of thinking is an essential analytical move, one that engages with Latin American Indigenous thinkers and activists for whom assertions of alterity are a central part of colonial resistance.
In Japan, however, comparisons and comparative politics take on a different valence. In the case of Hokkaido salmon fisheries, there is no singular mode of Japanese comparison but rather sets of comparative practices that have come into being through historical encounters.2 To more fully explore this historical emergence, it is useful to bring Viveiros de Castro’s call into dialogue with another strand of anthropological work, that of Ann Stoler and Benedict Anderson, who have focused specifically on how comparisons come into being within colonial practices. By tracing the comparative practices of nineteenth-century white Europeans in Indonesia, Stoler has argued that European modes of comparison are formed within the projects of colonial administration, not prior to them. In her work on modes of racialized and sexualized governance, Stoler prompts us to think about how nineteenth-century colonial comparisons were not fully created in a European “core” and then exported to the “peripheries” but rather were made in encounters within the colonies themselves (Stoler 2001). For this reason, Stoler queries comparison-making in practice by attending to the specific biographies and trajectories of the nineteenth-century colonial officials. It was their routes and travels, she shows, that allowed them to develop particular practices of comparison. “Agents of empire,” she writes, “were themselves rarely stationary. They moved between posts in Africa and Asia, schooled their children in international Swiss boarding schools, read avidly about other colonials, visited colonial expositions in Paris and Provence, came together in colonial hill stations around the globe, and had a passion for international congresses where their racial taxonomies were honed and their commonsense categories were exchanged” (853). Stoler draws our attention to how such comparative practices coalesced into more durable structures of comparison: “Category making produced cross-colonial equivalencies that allowed for international conferences and convinced their participants—doctors, lawyers, policy makers, and reformers—that they were in the same conversation, if not always talking about the same thing” (863).
While Stoler’s work focuses primarily on the comparisons of European colonial bureaucrats, her historical and biographical approaches can be extended to explore how the comparative practices of non-Europeans similarly emerge within their travels and encounters. How might non-Europeans’ modes of comparison also shift over time as their worlds are changed by acts of comparison-making, both their own and those of others? The work of Benedict Anderson offers additional insights here. His book The Spectre of Comparisons opens with a story from Jose Rizal’s novel Noli me tangere that illustrates how colonies are haunted by comparisons with their so-called metropoles. Set in the 1880s, Rizal’s story tells of Ibarra, a mestizo man who has just returned to Manila after extensive travel in Europe. When Ibarra moves through the colonial city, he discovers that he can now only see its landscapes in comparison with those of the center. Manila’s municipal botanical gardens, he realizes, are forever shadowed by their “sister gardens” in Europe. Ibarra finds himself caught in the comparisons of the colonial predicament; he can “no longer matter-of-factly experience [the gardens] but sees them simultaneously close up and from afar.” Rizal terms this “incurable doubled vision” the demonio de las comparaciones, the devil or specter of comparisons (Anderson 1998, 2).
But at the same time that Anderson clearly shows how colonial comparisons force those in the colonies into the position of the “copy,” he also demonstrates how comparisons contain subaltern possibilities. In the introduction of Under Three Flags, Anderson offers the example of Isabelo de los Reyes, a late nineteenth-century Filipino folklorist and nationalist, who harnessed colonial comparisons to challenge the European domination with which they were entangled. Drawing on the allegedly universal science of European folkloristics and writing in Spanish, Isabelo cleverly talked back to his colonizers by using their comparisons as well as their language. Isabelo routinely placed the customs of Filipino groups alongside those of Spanish communities. By depicting Filipino and Spanish folk traditions as comparable, Isabelo sought to stake a broader claim of equivalence that would undermine colonial projects and bolster Filipino nationalism (Anderson 2005, 13–19).
As Anderson has demonstrated in much of his work, nation-making is always shot through with comparative practices. It requires “imagining community,” fostering a “we” and defining its boundaries by making comparisons with constitutive outsides (Anderson 1983). But while nation-making is always a comparative process, nation-making in the midst of colonial comparisons requires double work. In centers of European colonial power, national folklorists played similarly important roles in developing imagined communities. But while European folklorists could work to conjure a relatively singular audience to which they wrote, Isabelo always had to speak to two. He had to use comparative folklore both to create a “national brotherhood” among Filipinos—a category that itself did not yet exist—and to make the Philippines a legitimate and legible nation in the eyes of European colonial powers. “If in Europe folklorists wrote mostly for their paisanos, to show them their common and authentic origins,” Anderson explains, “Isabelo wrote mostly for the early globalizing world he found himself within—to show how Ilocanos and other indios were fully able and eager to enter that world, on a basis of equality and autonomous contribution” (Anderson 2005, 22).3 In a world dominated by colonial logics, nation-making outside the metropole required more than consolidation; it required the extra work of making one’s nation comparable to the core European nation-states by which it was inevitably haunted.
Yet unlike Indonesia or the Philippines, Japan has never been directly colonized. Instead, like many states on the margins of Europe, it blurs the line between colonizer and colonized. On one hand, people in Japan have been caught in unequal relations with Euro-America and in comparative predicaments that resemble those of colonial relations. But Japan, too, has occupied the position of colonizer. Beginning with Hokkaido and Okinawa, then Taiwan, Manchuria, Korea, and southeast Asia, Japanese officials undertook their own imperial projects—including the enactment of their own colonial comparisons. Furthermore, after World War II, the Japanese state has continued economic efforts and international development projects imbued with colonial sentiments. Thus, instead of simply “provincializing comparison” and seeing it from unequivocal colonies, this book examines it from a place where multiple genres of comparative practices have been in play as Japan negotiates the challenges of being modern and non-Western, a colonizer and a nation caught up in Euro-American colonial frameworks.
COMPARING FROM JAPAN
Everywhere I went in Japan, the spectral presence of something called “the West” seemed to linger. When I checked into Japanese hotels, I was typically asked if I wanted a “Japanese” (washiki) or “Western” (yōshiki) style breakfast, and when I entered a public restroom, I had to choose between stalls designated as containing either a “Japanese” or “Western” style toilet. When a Japanese friend contemplated her upcoming wedding, she debated at length whether she wanted to go “Japanese” style, wearing a kimono and holding the event at a shrine, or “Western” style, with a white wedding dress in a chapel. Japan-West distinctions were embedded in the rhythms of quotidian life, a form of so-called emic classification that has been analyzed by other scholars, including anthropologist Harumi Befu (1984). From where might these ever-present comparisons have come? To offer a broad historical answer to this question drifts uncomfortably close to stereotypes and monolithic representations of “the Japanese.” Yet some sense of overarching geopolitical histories and the binary conceptual categories commonly used in everyday life in Japan is necessary for understanding heterodox comparisons-in-action.
From the outset of its self-identification, Japan has been constituted by comparisons. The islands—as feudal alliance—grew up as a comparative margin in the greater Chinese imperial domain, inheriting its written script and civilizational arts. Yet feudal Japan’s ambitious elites explicitly altered them, drawing difference into political relations. Until the nineteenth century, Japanese scholars made countless comparisons with China as they struggled to define an identity at once connected to and distinct from the mainland. But in the context of such comparisons, boundaries were rather fluid. With identity linked more to differences in manners, customs, and the style of one’s poetry than to a notion of cultural essence, people could slip easily between categories. Although there was a vague sense of a “Japan,” feudal domains—not the “nation”—were the important grounds for identity-making. Indeed, before the nineteenth century, the word kuni (country) was not often used, and when it was, it “more often referred to the local region or domain than to Japan as a whole” (Morris-Suzuki 1998b, 13; see also Roberts 2002 on identity in Tokugawa Japan). Although the Tokugawa state (1603–1867) held varying levels of influence over the islands of the North Pacific, its borders were uncertain, and in outlying areas, tenuous ties to the central government were the norm.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Japanese intellectuals began to map the world—and their relations to it—more extensively. Drawing on Confucianist models, they depicted the world in terms of concentric rings of foreignness, envisioning a geographical gradient from intimately familiar to utterly exotic. As historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki has shown, Tokugawa intellectuals, like many mainland Chinese scholars, saw difference primarily through spatial comparisons, with i (barbarian qualities) increasing as one moved farther away from the ka (the settled center) (1998b, 15). Such modes of comparisons were far from benign in either China or Japan. As we will see, they had devastating effects on Ainu communities and the island now most widely referred to as Hokkaido. Yet they constituted a mode of governance, economy, colonial rule, and cultural thought that differed dramatically from the forms that would soon come to dominate governmental practices, as well as public culture.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese elites began to radically alter their comparative practices. For the previous two centuries, foreign exclusion policies had seriously circumscribed contacts with Europeans and kept trade relations under tight shogunal control. But by the nineteenth century, the growing number of British, French, American, and Russian vessels plying Asian waters made the foreign exclusion policy and the political control it provided seem increasingly untenable. From their writings, it is clear that Japanese elites were well aware of the Opium Wars and the mounting power of Europeans to subjugate China. After watching Britain force Chinese ports to open to trade, build a colony on Hong Kong, and back the Qing dynasty into signing what are now known as the “unequal treaties,” Japanese elites worried about their own future. It seemed that an arrangement of power was beginning to take shape in East Asia, one in which the United States and Europe were likely to become ever more aggressive. Japanese officials and intellectuals began to fear that if they did not do something quickly, they would become a colony of the West.
The arrival of Perry’s Black Ships in 1853 upended both intellectual thought and everyday life across much of the archipelago. This assertive military visit from a powerful American fleet catalyzed unrest among political elites and contributed to the Meiji Restoration, which ousted the shogunate and returned power to the emperor. However, it created more than a political regime change; it also created a shift in comparative practices. By the nineteenth century, Euro-Americans had begun relying on a mode of comparison that brought temporality into understandings of difference, such that otherness was reconfigured as backwardness and Euro-American lifeways were cast as “development” and “progress.” From the late eighteenth century onward, European and American social theorists, including Condorcet, Comte, Spencer, Morgan, and Tylor, participated in the elaboration of such ideas via vigorous discussions of sociocultural evolution that positioned different groups of people along a continuum ranging from the most “primitive” to the most “civilized” (Fabian [1983] 2014). Crucially, these authors defined civilization in highly Eurocentric terms, linking it not only to Enlightenment science, high arts, formal schooling, and economic industrialization but also to emergent governance structures, such as the nation-state.
Although there was much internal disagreement, most of Japan’s powerful nineteenth-century elites felt that the island’s best hope for avoiding Western colonization lay in modern nation-state formation—in making a different kind of Japan. Soon, most Japanese elites adopted ambitious plans for bunmeikaika, namely civilization and enlightenment, diving into the project of creating a nation in dialogue—in comparison—with those emerging in the United States and Europe. During the Meiji period (1868–1912), Japanese elites adopted a Prussian-style constitution, built an English-style navy, studied French army tactics, and instituted an American-style education system (B. Walker 2005, 129). Meiji era Japanese intellectuals and government officials worked as hard as they could to build a Japan that would be legible to existing Euro-American nations, that could occupy the same categorical level as those of Europe. Unconsolidated early nineteenth-century Japan seemed to Euro-Americans to be a terrain ripe for colonization; as a real first-rate nation, “Japan” would no longer be a target. To join the ranks of the “civilized” instead of the “backward,” Japan had to become comparable to the West rather than to other Asian countries. In his famous essay “Datsu-a ron” (Leaving Asia), nineteenth-century author, translator, and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi argued that Japan needed to escape from Asia and enter the West:
Once the wind of Western civilization blows to the East, every blade of grass and every tree in the East follow what the Western wind brings.… The spread of civilization is like the measles.… In my view, these two countries [China and Korea] cannot survive as independent nations with the onslaught of Western civilization to the East … We do not have time to wait for the enlightenment of our neighbors so that we can work together toward the development of Asia. It is better for us to leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with civilized nations of the West. (Lu [1885] 1996, 351–53)
Leaving Asia and becoming civilized entailed not only military and economic infrastructural projects (such as railroads and factories) but also efforts to create new daily habits and “modern” sensibilities. Things like meat eating, pocket watches, and umbrellas changed the rhythms, tastes, and aesthetics of everyday life in urban Japanese contexts, often as part of government-led initiatives yet also extending far beyond them. Because the changes were so material, resistance to Meiji enlightenment efforts often explicitly centered on things, such as gas streetlights and kerosene home lamps (Steele 2007, 59, 65). Anti-Western critics denounced them not only as symbols of enlightenment efforts but also as entities with rippling material effects, expressing concerns about how such objects might disrupt domestic economies, bind people to new regimes of purchasing, create import dependencies, produce new safety hazards such as a greater risk of fire, and—specifically in the case of lamps—alter bodies through eyestrain (Steele 2007).
Yet whether one was for or against Meiji era civilization initiatives, the categories of public debates took on a nearly singular form. As historian Carol Gluck describes it, “The Meiji frame was almost always the kokumin kokka, the nation-state, the national people, national progress, or its lack” (Gluck 1997, 12). Within this frame, the binary between East and West became one of the primary analytics for conceptualizing both geopolitical relations and Japanese identity—“the metaphorical coin used to debate the nature and extent of change in every corner of Meiji experience” (Gluck 1997, 13; see also Racel 2011, 71). The increasing use of East-West comparisons was part and parcel of new geopolitical arrangements and imaginaries into which Japanese elites were thrust by European and American military incursions but in which they were also engaged participants.
The writings of Fukuzawa, the previously cited nineteenth-century proponent of Meiji enlightenment efforts, gesture to the fact that the East-West binary was actively constructed within Japanese intellectual work and not only via labors of Europeans. In his Outline of a Theory of Civilization, Fukuzawa noted that he “equate[s] the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘the West.’ Although Europe and America differ geographically, the latter’s civilization derives from Europe, and so I feel justified in using the general term ‘European Civilization.’ The same holds true in the case of the term ‘western civilization’ ” (Fukuzawa 1973, quoted in Racel 2011, 83). Across otherwise substantial political and philosophical differences, Meiji intellectuals routinely conceptualized the same binary civilizational geographies, producing a pervasive comparative sensibility that shaped everyday material worlds alongside elite discourse. As Gluck has noted:
Since acquiring civilization entailed Euro-Americanization (ōbeika), the “West” embodies the standard of modernity, which in turn posed the challenges of defining the “East” along a new axis of identity. The juxtaposition was palpable in such things as lamps and haircuts, powerful in institutions like parliaments and extraterritoriality, enticing in challenges to create new forms of individual subjectivity or the novel (shosetsu)—all relentlessly pitted against some essential Japaneseness that had itself to be improvised on the fly. (1997, 13)
It is important to note the condensations common in these conversations: civilization (bunmeika), Westernization (ōbeika/seiōka), and modernization (kindaika) were often used interchangeably from the nineteenth century onward, covering “roughly the same semantic domain” and linked to a shared set of comparative practices (Befu 1984, 71).
Initially, efforts to craft and inhabit such binaries appeared to pull Japan closer to the economic, military, and cultural parity with the West that such binaries constructed. As Japan embraced Western-centric forms of modernization, it began to work its way toward the top echelons of international hierarchies. Drawing on physical and institutional infrastructure from the Tokugawa period—including standardized weights and measures, an integrated road system, a wealthy merchant class, systems of credit, and extensive intraregional trade—Japanese elites were rapidly able to build both a strong economy and a powerful military. Japan’s victory over Russia in the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War displayed the success of such endeavors. The conflict marked the first time that a “non-Western” country had defeated a “Western” one, and both Euro-Americans and Japanese took note of the significance of the occasion. Just after the war, a Japanese author, in an English-language article published in the New York Times, wrote:
To rise in a bound from the rank of “yellow monkey” to the position of a great power is certainly a most prodigious feat; yet this is, in a sense, what Japan has accomplished. Only yesterday she was regarded, at least by the Russians, as a “yellow monkey” with a thin veneer of civilization; to-day all nations look upon her as one of the world’s greatest powers. (Kawakami 1906)
After this buoyant beginning to the twentieth century, Japanese intellectuals believed that the primitive/civilized continuum offered a mechanism through which they could claim the mantle of “world power.” They may have been caught up in the West’s culturally specific mode of comparison, but it appeared that they could achieve military, economic, and cultural parity within such frameworks.
In the early twentieth century, Japan continued to change in the midst of imperial aspirations. In the run-up to World War II, Japanese intellectuals yearned to do more than just work their way up the West’s ladder. Some sincerely sought to make more just and non-Western-centric worlds through the construction of new Asian alliances; others sought to maintain, but invert, existing hierarchical structures. As historian John Dower explains, “In the modern world, [as] Japanese researchers repeatedly observed, racism, nationalism, and capitalist expansion had become inextricably intertwined. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as they described it in the abstract, would break this pattern by creating an autarkic community governed by reciprocity and harmonious interdependence.” In practice, their colonial policies were “so structured economically and politically as to ensure that the relationships of superior and inferior would be perpetuated indefinitely” (Dower 1986, 266). Ultimately, Japanese governmental elites ended up flipping models of hierarchy—putting Japan at the top—rather than reconfiguring them. Keeping models of civilized/backward in place, they endeavored to replace Western pretenses of universalism with Japanese ones.
As Japanese soldiers took over increasingly large stretches of Asian territory, Japan itself changed—not only its physical boundaries but also its approaches to identity and belonging. During Taisho (1912–26) and early Showa era colonialism, the category of “Japanese” increasingly yoked together nation, culture, and ethnicity into a single unit, such that blood and nation were made isomorphic. One famous example of this nation-building scholarship is philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō’s 1935 book Fūdo, in which he claimed that Japan’s four-season climate and environmental features made the Japanese people distinct, uniquely balanced, and superior to other peoples (Watsuji [1935] 1988). Yet even frameworks that espoused Japanese superiority and incomparability were entangled in deep conversations with Europe. Watsuji developed his work, for example, in critical dialogue with that of Heidegger (Befu 1996). More generally, as historian John Dower shows in his book War without Mercy, “The affirmation of Japanese supremacy reflected Western intellectual influences as well as Western pressures” (1986, 265). Japanese intellectuals, he shows, drew extensively on German ideas of Volk, blood purity, and social Darwinism. A 1943 document written by Furuya Yoshio, a medical doctor who held a position in the Japanese government, illustrates the use of ideas that echo those used in European, including Nazi, formulations of nationalism: “No nation in this part of the Orient can stand comparison with Japan in point of racial virility and organizational ability. The racial vigor of Japan is the most potent factor that has enabled it to attain its present distinguished position in the polity of nations” (quoted in Dower 1986, 276).
After defeat in World War II, many Japanese intellectuals worried that in the process of competing with the West, they had reaffirmed the power of the West to make the rules. As early as 1948, Takeuchi Yoshimi, a Japanese scholar and prominent postwar intellectual, argued that it was imperative that the Japanese realize that there was no way to “overcome modernity” (Takeuchi 2005)—not industrialization nor foreign exclusion nor a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Japan’s pathology, he stated, lay in its failure to recognize its inability to be free from the West. From his view, Japan’s engagements with Western modernity had been flawed from their beginnings because Meiji era elites did not recognize that they were caught in a double bind. The Japanese, Takeuchi argues, have repeatedly failed to see that they cannot escape a world shaped by Western dominance even if they escape formal colonization. Modern comparisons, he explains, are non-optional and, no matter how made, offer no respite from a Western-oriented world; no amount of maneuvering will lead to freedom from them. To underscore his own unavoidable intellectual entanglement with Euro-America, Takeuchi (2005) drew on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to explain how the Japanese, no matter what they do, are forced into the position of slave vis-à-vis the West.
Rebuilding Japan after the war became yet another project of making Japan differently—a project of capitalist expansion rather than military imperialism in which Japanese intellectuals dreamed of global hegemony through economic success. In the 1980s and early 1990s, as Japanese investors purchased American landmarks, including Rockefeller Center, Pebble Beach golf course, and Radio City Music Hall, it really did seem that Japan was upending—economically, at least—Euro-American dominance. But even at the height of Japan’s transnational economic strength, Japanese intellectuals continued to struggle with Euro-American comparisons that characterized them as derivative. Japanese people were frequently depicted as uncreative technicians rather than as inventors; from electronic goods to pop music, their production—material and cultural—was widely depicted as imitative rather than original, reiterating established, racialized stereotypes.
Since the Japanese economic collapse in the mid-1990s, similar comparative predicaments remain present in the archipelago, including within scholarly contexts. As Japanese anthropologists have pointed out, they continue to inhabit unequal relations of academic power, which require that they know and engage Euro-American scholarship, while Euro-Americans (even those who conduct fieldwork in Japan) are free to ignore Japanese anthropological theory. If Japanese scholars allow themselves to be interested in questions different from those of Euro-American disciplinary peers, their work is often illegible to major English language journals and thus is limited to circulation within Japan. If they want their research to participate in the valorized space of international scholarship, Japanese scholars can end up caught in a catch-22; they “must conform to the dominant discourse at the center in order to be recognized,” but when they do, their work is seen as unoriginal. “Conformity to the center may be derided as imitative, whereas nonconformity will likely result in dismissals of their work for being incomprehensible” (Kuwayama 2004, 39, 40; see also Asquith 1996, 2000).
The experiences of Japanese intellectuals over the past century and a half make it clear that there is no easy way out of Western-centric comparisons. Attention to such dilemmas does not absolve either the Japanese state or elites of responsibility for acts of Japanese colonial aggression, which are not any better or more legitimate than those of Europe or the United States (Kondo and Swanson 2020). Their violences cannot be justified as products of Western-generated dilemmas. Furthermore, Japanese concepts related to history, ethnicity, and difference are not inherently good because they emerge from more-than-Western traditions.
Unequal dialogues with Euro-American categories and comparisons are mandatory for people in Japan, but despite their inequalities, they are indeed dialogues, not monologues. At the same time that they are structured by nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories, they are not entirely determined by them, thus producing unexpected comparisons whose particularities warrant attention. Consider a Hokkaido citizens’ study group, organized by a local NGO, in which I participated in 2009–10. The aim of the group was to develop future visions for the island that might challenge its patterns of resource extraction. For one session, participants were asked to prepare short presentations in which we compared Hokkaido to some other place as a technique for imagining alternate and more sustainable futures for the region. The vast majority of participants selected European Nordic countries—Finland, Norway, and Sweden—as key reference points for envisioning good governance, eco-friendly lifeways, gender equality, and recognition of Indigenous rights.4 On one hand, such comparisons show the continued role that “the West” continues to hold within the geographies through which Hokkaido’s futures are iteratively conceptualized. Yet these were also different comparisons with different content, which indeed sought to compare creatively and, in opposition to previous comparisons, with the aim of imagining a more just and less extractive Hokkaido. As I engage the people and salmon at the heart of this book, I try to follow the imbrications, reverberations, and contradictions of their multiple yet omnipresent comparisons—while allowing them to come up against and transform my own.