Japan and the Octopus Trap of Modernity

Japanese Modernity and Its Discontents: Part I

Woodblock print with hand-coloring of Actor Onoe Kikugoro I playing a sasara by Okumura Masanobu (奥村政信)

Hiratsuka Raichō 平塚らいてう (1886–1971) is an exemplar of Japanese philosopher-activists who are acutely sensitive to the conflict between “being” and “oughtness.” She was once told to get out of her home in west Tokyo, check out the streets of Ginza in the heart of the city, and witness the increasing number of “modern girl(s)” (モダンガァル) in the late 1920s. Indeed, the Japanese Champs-Élysées, as Ginza is sometimes called, showed her a wave of stunning young women who wore American-styled clothes, bold cosmetics, and trendy haircuts. Hiratsuka felt as though she witnessed the dawn of “modern woman” in Ginza that day, but on her way home in the evening train, she could not help but ask herself, “Should this really be the ‘modern girl’?”

This tension between description and normative reflection is also present in Maruyama Masao’s analysis of Japanese modernity. On the one hand, he describes what Japanese modernity looks like in reference to the records of historical reality. This is precisely what Hiratsuka did when she described her encounter with the new  “modern girls” in east Tokyo. However, for both Hiratsuka and Maruyama, it was not enough just to describe the phenomenon of Japanese modernity. Both also offer normative reflections about what Japanese modernity ought to be.

In this article and the next, I will examine two distinctions that Maruyama makes in his process of describing Japanese modernity. First, as I will discuss in this article, he distinguishes between a sasara type (ささら型) and an octopus-trap type (タコ壺型) of modernity. Second, he distinguishes between “to be” (である) and “to do” (すること) in Japanese society and culture. By understanding these two distinctions, we will be able to tease out Maruyama’s normative ideal of modernity and show how he thought the historical being of Japanese modernity could not fully realize this ideal.

Sasara and the Octopus Trap

Maruyama’s lecture “On the Ways of Thinking” (1957) uses two different artifacts—namely sasara and takotsubo (octopus traps)—as analogies for two types of society. A sasara is a tool primarily used for washing dishes. Even though it has disappeared from most Japanese households today, it was a common choice for the Japanese people when they had to scrape off sticky or burnt leftovers from pots and pans without scratching their surfaces. It has also been used as a musical instrument for the Dengaku dances since the Heian period (794–1185). In fact, contemporary readers may associate the word more with its use as a traditional instrument for (religious) festivals than as a primitive household item (which had been replaced by a plastic sponge or brush). Maruyama’s original audience for his lecture in the 1950s would immediately have understood the double meaning of the sasara both as a practical, everyday tool and a special instrument of traditional dance and music.

The octopus trap, or takotsubo in Japanese, is not much of a trap. It does not have any hooks, baits, coil springs, or mechanical systems that are designed to ensnare its prey. The fisherman simply drops a series of pots, tied together with a rope, to the bottom of the ocean and lifts them up after a couple of days to find the unfortunate mollusks who have tacked themselves to their new “homes.” Octopuses take shelter in these pots because they need to protect their soft, fragile bodies from their hostile environment. The famous poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) once recited a line to highlight the tragedy of the octopus trap—that by seeking shelter the octopus unknowingly secures its own destruction:

Portrait of Bashō by Hokusai, late 18th century

octopus traps—
fleeting dreams under
summer’s moon

In modern Japanese, takotsubo(-go) is military jargon for a soldier’s foxhole, and it is not hard to imagine that this image was still vivid in the memory of the participants at Maruyama’s lecture in 1957.

Comparing the sasara and the octopus trap, Maruyama states, “if we open a sasara on our hand, there is a binding origin from which each [of the] thin pieces are sticking outward; whereas takotsubos literally symbolize independent pots standing in parallel to each other.” He continues, “the formation and organization of academic studies (学問), culture, and society in modern Japan is visualized as a takotsubo-type instead of a sasara-type.” According to his analogy, the normative element of modernity is like a sasara. Just as the individual strips of bamboo are bound together at the bottom of a sasara, so too should a culture be able to explore a diverse array of viewpoints that are still connected by a shared historical foundation. In reality, however, Japanese modernity is more like a takotsubo. The reason for this has to do with the history of intellectual modernization in Japan, starting in the early Meiji period.

European sciences were imported to Japan in the late nineteenth century, when increased specialization and the division of labor led to rapid progress in European society. Maruyama argues that this is evident simply by comparing the list of European philosophers from the first half of the nineteenth century to that of the second half, when “the social science” was diversified into the “social sciences.” Japanese intellectuals mastered Anglo-European studies in their process of modernization precisely at the time when such specialization emerged in Europe and North America. Hence, they took such division of academic labors for granted and ignored the shared genealogical ground from which different disciplines emerged in the intellectual history of Europe. Japanese intellectuals, in other words, severed themselves from the historical root of Anglo-European academic disciplines as they adopted them as a framework for establishing their higher education in Japan.

The formation of academia in modern Europe, regardless of its propensity towards specialization, was like a sasara, because specialized discourses were rooted in a shared intellectual narrative. The formation of academia in modern Japan, on the other hand, only superficially implanted the end result, namely the division of intellectual labors, as the starting point of their modern education. Japanese academics could not develop a shared self-consciousness in which they could recognize their works as a part of the same, wholistic intellectual enterprise. Without the classical sense of being intellectuals, that is, to “know the world and self as what they are,” how could they possibly see a shared ground in which they could account for the mutual relevance of academic findings beyond the pre-established borders of disciplines?   

“As a result,” Maruyama argues, “there is no communication between natural and social sciences today and philosophers and social scientists are unintelligible to each other in Japanese academia.” “Specialization in philosophy is a contradiction,” but in reality, “philosophers” in Japan “know nothing about social sciences and social scientists think that what philosophers are doing has nothing to do with their work.” Like an octopus that seeks shelter in the confined space of a takotsubo, so too have Japanese intellectuals taken refuge in their own narrow specializations without being able to see the broader relevance of their fields to a common intellectual project. In short, Maruyama suggests, Japanese modernity turned the sasara-type genealogy of (Anglo-European) ideas into an Octopus-trap-type fragmentation of the same ideas.  

The best way to understand Maruyama’s description of Japanese modernity as a takotsubo society is to see it as a kind of “radicalization” of Francis Bacon’s idola fori. According to Bacon, members within a group speak a shared language and communicate in images that are only intelligible to themselves. What we see in Japanese modernity, according to Maruyama, is a national franchise of these “idols of the market place” through the continuous specialization and internal diversifications that multiply these groups.

Japanese Modernity and Its Discontents

What are the problems of living in a modern Octopus-trap-type society? Maruyama has many things to say about this, but I will mention two important points. First, he says that groups of intellectuals lack a critical attitude toward the language they speak (especially when it sounds unintelligible to others outside it). Suppose we temporarily step out of our group and face a question raised by another. Our natural response would be to argue that their question is not relevant question to us. Further, since we have remained shut off from the rest of the world, we start assuming that all thinking that deviates from ours is “error.” At the end, we will impose our way of thinking on others, thus universalizing our jargon as the truth.

Second, communal advancement that is possible in the sasara-type society becomes impossible for the octopus-trap-type society. If multiple groups of intellectuals shared the common ground on which they divide and conquer a grand intellectual project, the advancement of one group will ultimately have a positive impact on the others. The same goes for social structure. If the working class makes progress, their prosperity and happiness could lead to an economical and cultural enrichment of the other classes (thus benefiting the social whole). It is a sign of a takotsubo society when the advancement of one group takes place in isolation, often to the detriment of other social classes.

Maruyama thinks that modernity should constitute a sasara-type society and culture. He also believes that Japanese modernity is an octopus-trap type that falls short of that ideal. In academia, specialists, like the octopus, are too soft. They are incapable of growing an intellectual exoskeleton that would allow them to swim freely around the vast sea of knowledge. Nor are they equipped with the spine of a generalist to conduct a genuine self-critique over their pre-established framework of thinking.

Tamakatzura Tamatori Attacked by the Octopus by Utagawa Kuniyoshi 歌川国芳

The solution to this devastating problem of modern Japan cannot be a simple conversion from a “closed-” to an “open-society.” A takotsubo is never closed to begin with, and, as Maruyama rightly notes, modern Japanese society of this type is magically “capable of internationalizing itself with multiple counterparts overseas” only to solidify the thickness of the domestic pot. Mass communication, too, has proven to be hopelessly inept. Far from breaking down communication barriers between intellectual foxholes, it instead seems only to feed the “victim mentality” that “our . . . truth is never spoken outside the bounds of our specialization.”  

Maruyama does not offer any robust solution to this problem in his lecture “On the Ways of Thinking.” He only suggests that we should first realize the fact that our language in the octopus-type society pluralizes into multiple dimensions and also that our intellectual discourses may not share any point of reference. If this is the case, then we should cultivate multi-dimensional or cross-disciplinary thinking in such a way that we can refrain from easily buying into the dualistic division between pre-established truth and illusions and avoid uncritically embracing the logic of cultural diversity or internationalization. To explore Maruyama’s solution to the problem of Japanese modernity, that is, to break free from the open-confinement of a takotsubo society, in the next article we will examine another distinction he makes between “to be” and “to do.”

Takeshi Morisato, PhD, is a Visiting Researcher at KU Leuven in the Department of Japanese Studies.