Book Review

Asia

The title of this book by Michael Lewis nicely captures the tensions that run through the study between national integration and regional marginalization, between the pull of central funding and control and the push for genuine local autonomy. One of the author's main arguments is that what caused Toyama and other prefectures on the periphery to lag economically behind Pacific Coast areas after 1868, and to become part of the subordinate "backside of Japan" (Ura Nihon), was not some kind of geographical or environmental determinism but, rather, conscious policy decisions by central government officials and metropolitan businessmen. A corollary theme is that local elites and party politicians, in the course of "supplicating" the government for resources primarily to control Toyama's raging rivers, tended over time to put the centralizing priorities of the state ahead of those of their home region. To fill the resulting void in local political representation, ad hoc groups of Toyama residents periodically resorted to public protests and riots in opposition to central initiatives that harmed their interests. Such outbursts of resistance made for a much more contested process of nation building than standard accounts suggest, one that rendered post-1868 Toyama "both a part of the greater nation and a distinct section apart from it" (p. 5). With the rise of "grassroots imperialism" in support of Japan's growing empire, the local populace ultimately came to embrace national priorities, especially after the Japanese takeover of Manchuria beginning in 1931, even as the prefecture itself remained ironically an internal "colony" of sorts. Lewis concludes by examining postwar legacies of Toyama's pre-1945 relationship with the center, ranging from continuing perceptions of the prefecture as Japan's domestic "other" to continuities in patronage politics and dependency that originated with the determined efforts of local "river politicians" to tap the national treasury in the Meiji period (1868–1912).

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Each of the substantive chapters, especially those on "river politics," popular protest, and local imperialism, is a gem of information and insight. The fascinating analyses of these subjects make signal contributions, showing the late nineteenth-century antecedents of the well-known pork-barrel politics of the twentieth century, the stunning variety and premodern heritage of local protests, and the popular basis of prewar Japanese imperialism. These chapters will make for lively reading in topical courses such as the ones I teach for undergraduates on protest and rebellion and on colonialism and imperialism in modern East Asia. Lewis enlivens the text with excerpts from satirical newspaper articles and illustrations of contemporary posters and advertisements. And by supplying detailed and often colorful vignettes of local worthies responding to metropolitan initiatives, he effectively personalizes the story of regional-central interaction and restores human agency to the local level in what historians have typically portrayed as a top-down process viewed from the center.

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