Section 7 | History, Politics and International Relations | Session 3B, Panel
Chair: N.N.
Kanazawa , Ishikawa prefecture, is known internationally as the seat of the Maeda family, second in wealth only to the Tokugawa during the Edo period, and features the garden Kenrokuen, the entry gate of the former Maeda castle, and substantial samurai and other residential districts, among many other notable sights. Beginning in the 1960s, the city also became known as a leader in historic preservation: enacted in 1968, the Kanazawa Ordinance for the Protection of Traditional Environments (Kanazawa-shi Dentô Kankyô Hozon Jôrei) stands as the country's first municipal regulations directed at protecting and maintaining a city's urban character and historic sites. How did Kanazawa come to take a prominent national role in the broad implementation of historic preservation programs? What was at stake as city leaders took on that role for the city?
Earlier studies that treat historic preservation in Japan, such as Marilyn Ivy's Discourses of the Vanishing, have highlighted social and cultural dynamics as the driving forces behind the growth of a historical consciousness in postwar Japan. In contrast, this paper sets the debates over historic preservation in the context of competition between local and national government bodies over powers of particular importance to local residents, such as control of urban renewal, economic planning, and building standards. Based on analysis of a decade's worth of publications by a leading business group in the city, the Kanazawa Keizai Dôyûkai, this paper traces political and policy debates in the city concerning preservation work from the late 1950s until the passage of the 1968 ordinance. The Dôyûkai's deliberations, and their reflection in subsequent events, reveal the group's strong influence in the development of preservation in Kanazawa, and clarify its role in introducing and reinforcing a co mmitment to local solutions to local problems and the exclusion of national authorities from the policy-making process.
While detailing the articulations of preservation theory during this critical era in Japan's move toward greater popular and governmental support for historic protection, this paper also explores the ways in which the politics of memory figure in larger, particularly Japanese struggles over the relationship of local to national administration.
Selcuk Esenbel (Bogazici University, Istanbul)
The paper is about the memory of the 1871 Nakano uprising in Takayama village today and the experiences of this author concerning the remembrance of the 1871 Nakano uprising by the members of Takayama village (Takaino in the Edo period), Takai district, Nagano Prefecture while undertaking research on the topic of the early Meiji revolt. The Nakano uprising was one of the yonaoshi, world renewal uprisings of the early Meiji years that was sparked an upheaval which began in the mountain village of Takaino just south of Nakano town and enveloped the whole region resulting in the destruction of village homes, stores, mills, in more than 150 villages. By end of the three day revolt, the fury of the peasants who felt unjustly treated by the stiff tax demands of the new Meiji government of Tôkyô, had burned down the governor's office in Nakano and killed by lynching two officials. An unusually violent event even in the history of revolts in late Meiji Japan, the uprising provoked a swift Meiji military occupation of the region by an army of a thousand troops from Kyushu and tough punishments were meted out to the local residents. While hundreds were arrested and interrogated frequently through torture, twenty-eight persons, eighteen of whom were from Takaino were executed, including the headman Oriemon who was beheaded as the ringleader. The local wealthy landlord Kubota Juemon, died in prison after being repeatedly tortured. Refusing to sign a confession, he was to be revered as a martyr for the peasant cause. All of the peasants who were punished in some form were condemned by the court to be chôteki (enemy of the court, traitors), an idea that had not entered the mind of these traditional peasant co mmunities for whom the fight was about injustice and high taxes in the familiar feudal tradition of peasant movements.
The remembrance of the Nakano uprising among the members of Takaino village today has continued to disturb relations among local families even to this day which is best seen in the bitter memories that remain to this day about the event that occurred more than a hundred years ago. In the process of undergoing this research, the author has been able to encounter the character of this bitter memory and its transition over the years on the numerous occasions of visiting this co mmunity beginning in 1971 to this day. While two world wars including the catastrophic destruction of the Pacific war and the post-war transformation and reconstruction of today's Japan took place, for Takaino families, an important part of their village's links with the past as memory was to keep the graves of the executed village members of the Nakano uprising in 1871 hidden from the public eye. To this day, older members of those families either refuse to discuss the sad events of the past in public. The uprising continues to create a social and psychological problem in the inter-family relations of the region. The experience of having to take this village memory into account during the process of writing a book on the history of the revolt itself has instructed the author into realizing the importance of co mmunity memory in rural Japan that has a different time and rhythm of modernity than the fast paced changes which we experience in the urban life of modern Japan that is frequently seen as the basis of transformation in Japanese society. The topic enables us to discuss the role of suppressed memory in a small village co mmunity and in this case a particular oral history evidence of the co mmunal and individual understanding of village history.
Curtis Anderson Gayle (Australian National University)
This paper will take up the important links that existed during the late 1940s and 1950s between Marxian approaches to the writing of history and the development of women's groups interested in writing local and regional histories. During a period when local and regional women's history had yet to make its mark in Europe or the United States, experiments in writing such histories by women were taking place in Japan. These histories were written in spaces apart from mainstream local and prefectural histories, as well as from Marxian approaches and the general narrative of Japanese history after the war.
By taking up cases in Tôkyô, Nagoya, and Ehime, this paper will demonstrate that in addition to the more obvious influences upon women's history writing groups such as the women's movement, Marxian approaches to history were in fact significant to the development of local and regional women's history. From about 1950, Marxian social projects such as the People's History Movement [Kokuminteki Rekishigaku Undô] sought to develop ideas about science and culture that could sustain the nation [minzoku] as a valid political principle from which to embark upon revolution.
Both the imperfections and the appeal of Marxian history can be found in the ways women history writing groups approached its basic notion of liberation as put forth, for instance, by Inoue Kiyoshi's in his 1949 'The History of Japanese Women'. To varying degrees, women's history writing groups sought to rewrite women, and in particular local women, into Japanese history not as an accoutrement of revolution but instead through more autonomous spaces that sought distance from historical institutions such as the Historical Science Society [Rekishigaku Kenkyûkai], local history [chihô-shi], as well as prefectural history [ken-shi]. The proposed paper will argue that even though they took exception to Marxian views of class-consciousness and political change, women's history writing groups did appropriate some of the historical methodology of early post-war Marxian history. Whilst the structural logic of Marxian approaches was not without its flaws, then, the radical phenomenology of Marxian approaches to history did provide what Nicholas Dirks has called 'levers for the struggle of new groups' to construct agency for themselves.