Japanese Scholar and Iwanami Shoten Editor-in-Chief Baba Kimihiko: I Believe Books Have the Power to Change the World | Interviews

"Power cannot defeat justice, and no sword can sever thought."

Baba Kimihiko — Japanese scholar and editor-in-chief of Iwanami Shoten — is a China hand. He speaks, reads and writes Chinese without any trouble; he first came to Beijing to study the language back in 1982. Since then he has edited many books about China, spent more than 30 years researching the country, and written a great deal about it.

He was born in 1958 in Ina, Nagano Prefecture, in central Japan. He took a bachelor's degree in literature (1981) and a master's in Eastern philosophy (1983) at Hokkaido University, then a doctorate (2010) at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University. Because his master's was in the history of Chinese philosophy, "it wasn't easy to find a job after graduating," so he went into publishing. He spent five years at Toho Shoten, which specializes in books on China, and in 1989 joined Iwanami Shoten, where he has worked ever since.

As a scholar he is best known for Postwar Japanese Views of China: From Japan's Defeat to the Normalization of Sino-Japanese Relations (2010) and Contemporary Japanese Views of China: From the Normalization of Relations to the Emperor's Visit to China (2014). Both books ask the same question: after World War II ended, how did the way Japanese people saw China change?

Baba's answer is that you can find out by reading Japan's general-interest magazines. For a long stretch of the postwar period those magazines were Japan's public forum, so what ran in them can show, in broad outline, how Japanese views of China shifted. He worked through more than 4,000 China-related articles from dozens of forum magazines published in Japan between 1945 and 1992, hoping to trace that change.

In short, he argues that Japanese views of China passed through several distinct periods: a fresh, energetic "new view of China" (1945-1949); a gaze fixed on China's turn to socialism (the 1950s); a splintering of views on China (the 1960s); a mended relationship (the 1970s); a Japan-China honeymoon (the 1980s); and fear of China's rise (the 1990s).

In 2015 a Chinese edition of Postwar Japanese Views of China appeared, drawing attention and comment from Chinese scholars; parts of the book also ran in the academic journal Open Times (for instance, "The 'Cultural Revolution' in Japan (1966-1972): The Impact and Influence of the Chinese Revolution on Japan" and "From Decisive Battle and War of Resistance to Defeat and Pyrrhic Victory: The Transformation of Mutual Sino-Japanese Perceptions Around 1945"). Since then he has been invited to China more often to talk and lecture, has taken part in public events, and now and then publishes in Chinese academic journals.

In the preface to the Chinese edition, Baba set out a long list of worries about Sino-Japanese relations. After 2010, he argued, the relationship arguably reached its worst state since the war: misunderstanding on both sides, little real understanding of each other, wildly divergent readings of history, and a disregard for agreements such as the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and China and the Japan-China Joint Communiqué. "Japan promotes a national identity as the victor and beneficiary of the Cold War, while China seeks to promote its identity as one of the victorious powers of the anti-fascist camp in World War II. At the same time, among a small segment of the Japanese public and Japanese media, there has been a resurgence of the same self-righteous contempt for Chinese people seen during the Sino-Japanese War era, while a return among some Chinese people and Chinese media to anti-Japanese rhetoric reminiscent of the War of Resistance era has also become increasingly evident."

Why do both sides overlook parts of their postwar history? Here Baba parts company with the usual answers — Chinese people tend to think the Japanese have come down with amnesia about their responsibility for a war of aggression, while Japanese people tend to blame the Chinese government's control of speech and its patriotic education. Baba believes the largest reason for the gulf between the two publics, and the one that deserves hard thinking, is the 27 years after the war in which Japan and China had no diplomatic relations. In the humanities, for example, works of literature and art that leave a lasting impression — Japanese writers describing contemporary China, Chinese writers describing contemporary Japan — remain vanishingly rare in both countries to this day.

As an editor, he wants to use publishing to change that. In 2017 he commissioned the five-volume 120 Years of Japan-China Relations: A Selection of Literary and Critical Works. "This set of books is really about the Japan-China relationship. It's been 120 years now, and the relationship has been in a not-so-good state the whole time. We wanted to know how our predecessors faced the problems in that relationship and how they tried to repair it, so we put these essays together," he told QDaily.

But "the Japanese don't much like facing their own country's modern history," so the books sold less than half their print run. More important, Baba believes Japanese publishing has long tilted toward "the West over the East" and "the classical over the contemporary": it buys rights mainly from Europe and America and sells rights mainly to China and South Korea, and rarely brings in contemporary Chinese or South Korean work. That gets in the way of Japan's understanding of its East Asian neighbors and breeds prejudice, and Baba thinks the publishing and media industries bear most of the blame.

Besides 120 Years of Japan-China Relations, Baba has commissioned many books about Asia, among them the eight-volume Iwanami Lecture Series: Modern Japan and Its Colonies, the fifteen-volume Portraits of Modern Asia, and the eight-volume Asia's New Century.

"As an editor, when I face a new question the times have thrown up, I want to build a methodology — so I gather specialists from different fields and use publishing to answer it. Iwanami Shoten's publishing spirit is to bring the highest level of scholarship to a general audience."

That has, in fact, always been Iwanami Shoten's position.

Iwanami Shoten is a well-known general-interest publisher in Japan, founded in 1913. It has made the promotion of elite culture its business, publishing in the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences (Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro, Nitobe Inazō's Bushido, Maruyama Masao's Japanese Thought), launching series such as Iwanami Bunko and Iwanami Shinsho, and putting out magazines including Sekai (World), Shisō (Thought), Kagaku (Science) and Bungaku (Literature). Today it has 140 employees, has published more than 35,000 titles in all, and brings out more than 400 a year.

Compared with other Japanese publishers, Iwanami Shoten has at least three distinguishing traits.

First, its list is strongly elitist. It has published a great many classics and scholarly works and carries real weight among Japanese intellectuals, and it has consistently refused to publish the more profitable manga and light novels. It has also helped spread academic research in Japan and shaped the popularization of culture. As the Japanese writer Inoue Yasushi once said: "Iwanami Bunko is my parent. From it I received beautiful things, serious things, exciting things — the root of all life."

Second, the two publishing formats it created — shinsho and bunko — have shaped Japanese publishing, and both are more than 80 years old. Bunko are roughly what Chinese readers call pocket editions; shinsho are a little taller and narrower than bunko, run to around 100,000 Japanese characters, and carry short, plain titles.

Third, its publishing spirit and ideals can be called a precious inheritance shared by publishers everywhere. Iwanami Shigeo, the founder of Iwanami Shoten, once said: "A good book comes into the world through the combined work of the writer, the proofreader and the printer — it is the afterglow of thinkers and artists, and I am only the courier who delivers it faithfully, in its time." Even at the height of Japanese militarism this courier went on boldly delivering all kinds of books, left-wing thought included, and Iwanami Shigeo wrote articles attacking the militarism of the day. He was sentenced to two months in prison (an appeal and a suspended sentence spared him the cell), and Kobayashi Isamu — an Iwanami Shoten editor and Iwanami Shigeo's son-in-law — was arrested by the military and held for three months before his release.

In the second year after the end of World War II, Iwanami Shigeo wrote in the inaugural issue of Sekai: "Let the renunciation of arms and unconditional surrender become the kamikaze of the Showa era, shattering our arrogance and turning us wholly toward a national ideal of humility and reverence. A society rooted in justice and rich in culture must be humanity's ideal. Power cannot defeat justice, and no sword can sever thought."

There is far too much to say about Iwanami Shoten — the Chinese translations alone include A Biography of Iwanami Shigeo, Iwanami Shoten and Me and The Way of a Single Book — so we will leave it there.

In December 2018 Baba came to Beijing again, this time as editor-in-chief of Iwanami Shoten, to promote the first batch of eight Iwanami Shinsho titles brought out together by the publisher Thinkingdom. Iwanami Shinsho has now published more than 3,000 books; unlike the shinsho of other publishers, it works in scholarship and nonfiction, hoping to raise the cultural literacy of people today and, through that, build a better society and a better world.

At the launch he also mentioned a phrase and a line of poetry that Iwanami Shigeo loved. The phrase was "plain living, high thinking" — simple in life, lofty in spirit. The line was "the white crane flies high and does not follow the flock," from the Tang poem 《言怀》 by Li Qunyu.

Now 61, and 30 years into his career at Iwanami Shoten, he has inherited Iwanami Shigeo's thinking. "Our main job is to 'deliver' a wider range of titles to readers, whether printed or digital. What matters most is giving ourselves to the noble work of carrying good culture far and wide. Our wish is to keep the idea of the 'courier of culture' in mind."

Q = QDaily

Baba = Baba Kimihiko

Japanese translation: Cheng Lin

Iwanami Shoten's publishing spirit is to bring the highest level of scholarship to a general audience

Q: You've been at Iwanami Shoten for 30 years, from 1989 to now. Can you talk about the influential or important books you've edited over those 30 years, and why you wanted to make them? I found three series, for instance: Modern Japan and Its Colonies, Portraits of Modern Asia and Asia's New Century.

Baba: You know a lot (laughs). From the day I joined Iwanami Shoten until now — the first thing I worked on was the eight-volume Iwanami Lecture Series: Modern Japan and Its Colonies, and after that a series of books centered on East Asia.

Modern Japan and Its Colonies came out in 1992, against the background of the textbook fight over war responsibility and the comfort women issue. Its main focus was the questions of war responsibility and imperialism thrown up by Japan's modernization, and above all by the war.

Portraits of Modern Asia, in fifteen volumes, looked mainly at the new countries founded in Asia after World War II, and asked how they grew under their leaders — Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong in China, Sukarno in Indonesia.

Asia's New Century, in eight volumes, came out of the fact that after 2000 many Asian countries developed fast — the Four Asian Tigers, China — but along a different path from Europe and America. So the series looked closely at how those countries were developing.

Q: What effect did these books have? What discussions did they set off? I've heard many of the topics were controversial.

Baba: As an editor, when I face a new question the times have thrown up, I want to build a methodology, so I gather specialists from different fields and use publishing to answer it.

After Modern Japan and Its Colonies came out, research into the history of Japan's former colonies — Taiwan, mainland China, Korea, Southeast Asia and other places — became popular, especially among younger scholars, and opened up a new field.

Portraits of Modern Asia offered a new angle on each country's historical image, while Asia's New Century, set against globalization, opened a new field beyond Europe, America and Japan.

Q: Apart from those three series, have you edited other books you think were influential or important?

Baba: After Asia's New Century finished, in 2004 I commissioned the eight-volume Iwanami Lecture Series: The Scholarly Knowledge of "Imperial" Japan, and in 2010-2011 the ten-volume Iwanami Lecture Series: A General History of Modern and Contemporary East Asia. Then, three years ago, we published the five-volume 120 Years of Japan-China Relations: A Selection of Literary and Critical Works. That set is really about the Japan-China relationship. It's been 120 years now, and the relationship has been in a not-so-good state the whole time; we wanted to know how our predecessors faced the problems in it and how they tried to repair it, so we put these essays together.

The Japanese are very fond of Chinese classics like the Analects, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin. We made this set because although Japan knows classical Chinese culture well, when it comes to modern China there is almost nothing familiar. The one thing people know is Lu Xun's essay "Mr. Fujino," about a teacher and student, one Japanese and one Chinese. Beyond that, nothing — so we went looking for similar work.

Japan has in fact always been very interested in China and has produced a lot of writing about it, so we also hope Chinese readers come to know that writing better.

Q: You've been an editor for more than 30 years. Has your understanding of the work changed? What makes a good editor?

Baba: At the start I picked books I was interested in myself and edited within a very narrow range. But as I went on I gradually noticed that publishing is not just a private act — it is about spreading one person's wisdom to the public, turning it into common property. A lot of scholars appear in the course of that, and I think that is one of the important tasks of editing.

Q: So the core of it is creating a forum — and the series you just mentioned are products of that idea?

Baba: Yes.

Q: In your 30 years at Iwanami Shoten, what important changes have you seen in the publishing of books?

Baba: Mainly that over the last five or ten years, as the internet has grown, e-books have appeared. That's the biggest change.

Q: Is there anything that hasn't changed? I've seen you say that Iwanami Shoten is a kind of landmark in Japanese publishing, and that almost every publisher believes in Iwanami's publishing spirit. What is that spirit?

Baba: Iwanami Shoten's publishing spirit is to bring the highest level of scholarship to a general audience.

Q: Many Chinese publishers want to do the same thing, but haven't made the shift very well. Does Iwanami Shoten have experience it can share with them?

Baba: Whatever else it is, Iwanami Shoten is a business. On the one hand it needs to spread more knowledge and scholarship to the public; on the other, to keep going, it has had to change as society changes. (Note: after Iwanami Shoten pushed ahead with a digitization plan in 2014 and made universities and specialized academic institutions its customers, for instance, its results improved.)

Chinese publishing has many private companies, and they should be able to play an important part in raising academic standards. Japanese publishers work in many specialized categories — medicine, natural science, social science — and also divide their lists finely by age, sex and other factors: books for primary and secondary school pupils, for university students, for working adults. Japanese books also come in many formats — standalone volumes, bunko editions, dictionaries — so Japanese publishing is in fact very varied.

Chinese publishers put out a great many books too, but as a rule they lean in certain directions and should think about others, publishing in a more balanced way. Looking at Chinese publishing lately, there are a great many light novels, and a great many children's books and test-prep books, but something like Japan's bunko and shinsho — compact, handy paperback series issued one after another — still hasn't broken through widely. So I hope Chinese publishing will pay attention to categories and formats too, and aim at a more balanced kind of publishing.

The "Cultural Revolution" hit Japan's intellectual world very hard

Q: Besides editing, you are a scholar yourself. Personally, what feelings, experiences or stories do you have about modern Chinese history?

Baba: I once published a book called Postwar Japanese Views of China. The Chinese revolution, or the founding of the People's Republic, had a very deep effect on the Japanese of that time. In broader cultural terms, because Japan was then under American control, it had a large effect on Japanese intellectuals of the day.

I've long been interested in how Japan's intellectual and ideological world changed after World War II. The research at the time stressed the influence of Western thought on Japan, but I felt that Asia, and China in particular, was also one of the very important factors shaping Japanese thinking. The "Cultural Revolution" in particular hit Japanese intellectual circles very hard: it changed not only how Japan thought about its own modern history but also how it thought about the Japan-U.S. relationship. For them, the experience of the Chinese revolution was a valuable reference.

(Note: In 2018 Baba published a new book in Japan, The Cultural Revolution in World History (《世界史のなかの文化大革命》), but as a China hand he was reluctant to say much about it, finding the subject sensitive. Still, something of the impact of the "Cultural Revolution" on Japan's intellectual world can be seen in his earlier paper in Open Times, "The 'Cultural Revolution' in Japan (1966-1972): The Impact and Influence of the Chinese Revolution on Japan."

In the conclusion of that article, for instance, he writes: in March 1966, in the early days of the "Cultural Revolution," the split with the Chinese Communist Party cut a deep and decisive scar into the commentators who wrote "on China." It made the opposing camps within Japan's forum debate over "China theory" still more extreme, and produced splits not only in the movement itself but inside research organizations, leading to irreparable, fierce confrontation accompanied by violent struggle.

With the appearance of the Red Guards, the "Cultural Revolution" also greatly changed the traditional Japanese image of China. The old image, built around peasant revolution, gave way to a fresh image of urban revolution with young people in the leading roles, and that brought a gust of new air to Japan's student movement. Mao Zedong Thought, reinterpreted through the movement, also worked in step with the New Left student movement and pushed it along. At the same time, Japanese commentators arrived at distinctive views such as the "theory of Chinese-style communes" and the "theory of self-reliant economy," which later offered useful insights for "communitarian theory" and the "theory of endogenous development."

With the criticism of the Red Guards and the September 13 Incident as the turning point, the "Cultural Revolution" gradually quieted down inside China. In Japan, because the New Left movement destroyed itself, enthusiasm for the "Cultural Revolution" cooled fast, and the commentators who had backed it fell silent. Even now the inside story of those heated Japanese arguments about the "Cultural Revolution" is largely unknown. The splits that opened among commentators as "Cultural Revolution theory" rose in Japan have never been repaired, and the wounds Japan's forums took still wait on time to heal. The generation that does not know that period has never even had the chance to learn that such an argument took place.)

Q: You wrote Postwar Japanese Views of China and Contemporary Japanese Views of China, covering Japanese views of China from 1945 to 1992. What has marked Japanese views of China from 1992 to now? Has anything new changed?

Baba: Between 1992 and 2010, Japanese perceptions of China changed a good deal. In that period China's economy grew very fast, its GDP passed Japan's to become the world's second largest, and its economy kept expanding.

In fact, in the late Qing, before the Opium War, China's national strength was far greater than Japan's. But from the Opium War to 2010, over more than a century, Japan's national strength was far greater than China's. So after more than a hundred years China has again passed Japan and become a great power. Facing a China that is a great power once more, Japan needs to set new rules and principles for living with it in peace.

Q: In your article "Changes in Postwar Japan's Asian Consciousness as Seen Through Book Publishing," you say that among the China books published in postwar Japan, the first bestseller was the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, and later China Can Say No. I'm curious: after China Can Say No, what other Chinese books sold well in Japan? Why do you think they sold?

Baba: In Japan, although a lot of people care about what happens in China, the publishing industry leans toward books that show China in a fairly negative light, which leaves Japanese readers with prejudices and a poor impression of the country. That is largely the responsibility of the publishing and media industries.

Q: You've done a lot of research on Japan's general-interest magazines, which were once an important public forum there. But you believe that once the internet era arrived after 2000, the "forum" those magazines built has essentially vanished. China is in the same situation. How do you feel about the disappearance of that public forum?

Baba: After 2000, as the internet and mobile phones grew, general-interest magazines did take some blows — but I think they had already started to decline in the 1970s. The student movement was in decline then too, and people's interest in these matters was gradually falling off. It was only after 2000 that the internet really hit these magazines.

Social apps have in fact kept widening the points at which people connect, giving them more topics and a wider social life. But information is not only a matter of passing more of it to other people; it has to be information grounded in fact. That is also the job of general-interest magazines.

Newspapers and magazines alike have declined mainly because of the growth of the telecoms industry. Telecom companies have kept increasing the number of sellers of advertising, and in turn magazines' advertising revenue has kept shrinking, so their reporting function has shrunk too.

Newspapers and magazines are not like communication tools such as Facebook — they live on reporting, not on advertising — so as they develop they will recover their function of reporting facts.

I believe books have the power to change the world

Q: You once said: "I miss the hot blood of my youth, the wish to change the world — and that came from books. By criticizing reality and looking for ways out of real problems, books teach people to have a critical spirit." Can you talk about which books stirred that in you when you were young? What did you think and do at the time? Looking back now, how do you feel?

Baba: When I was young I read a number of books on socialism and the Chinese revolution. They gave me a sense of direction for changing the world. I also read some modern Japanese novels that described the anguish writers felt during Japan's modernization, and those books struck a chord with me too.

Q: So you were a left-wing young man back then?

Baba: You could say that.

Q: Are you still one?

Baba: These are murky, unclear times, so I can't give a good answer. I read all sorts of books to think through the problems of the world today.

Q: Do you still believe you can change the world? Are books one way to do it?

Baba: Changing the world takes a considerable price, so it isn't really possible now. Rather than changing the world, it is more a matter of maintaining it — how to go on living with more people, how to deepen understanding between people.

As for books, of course I believe they have the power to change the world. So even if the world is to be changed, it shouldn't be with weapons; it should be with books and knowledge.

Q: You just said that books on socialism and the Chinese revolution influenced you deeply when you were young. Your own research shows that many Japanese intellectuals before you were also deeply influenced by them and longed for socialism and the Chinese revolution, and that the ideal later collapsed. Have you gone through that kind of shift?

Baba: I don't think socialism is in a state of failure now. Socialist practice failed in some countries, but capitalist countries have run into plenty of problems too — the wealth gap, the problem of human desire, the problem of the global environment. On those questions socialism can still give our societies something to think with.

Q: 2018 was the 150th anniversary of Japan's Meiji Restoration, and people in China paid it a lot of attention and discussed it a good deal. I'm curious whether there were any significant discussions of the Meiji Restoration inside Japan in 2018. What do you think about it yourself?

Baba: It's been 150 years since the Meiji Restoration, so it drew a great deal of attention. Rethinking its history hasn't reached any conclusion; there's just been a wave of popular interest — the stories of figures like Saigō Takamori and Yoshida Shōin — and that's all it is, a fashion. 2019 is the last year of the Heisei era, and a new era is coming. Because the era name is about to change, there will be new research on the Meiji Restoration as well.

Japanese academia has no settled view either: whether to call it a revolution or a reform, there are many positions. The main approach at present looks at the Meiji Restoration through Japan's Westernization. There's also a newer angle that considers it from an Asian point of view — for instance, what is the difference between China's modernization, which began with the Opium War, and Japan's?

Earlier research all held that the Meiji Restoration was launched by new-style samurai from the Chōshū and Satsuma domains, and was a reform from the top down. From the 1980s a new approach emerged that thinks about the Meiji Restoration from the history of ordinary people — how ordinary Japanese faced these new-style samurai and the feudal system, and voiced their discontent — and the daily habits and religious beliefs of ordinary people also came in as new angles.

My own main interest is the difference between the Chinese and Japanese paths to modernization: China's began with the Opium War in 1840, Japan's with Perry's arrival in 1853. In fact China and Japan influenced each other, and they also diverged. That, in turn, connects to the later First Sino-Japanese War and Japan's wars of aggression.

I'm also interested in how the Ryukyu question was handled, since after the First Sino-Japanese War Ryukyu became a Japanese prefecture. Earlier research on the Ryukyu question was all done from Japan's point of view. I hope we can now think about it from a wider vantage point — from an East Asian point of view, for example.

Cover image: a still from the film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, via Douban.