Maybe not so small after all

Spend any amount of time in Japan, and you hear the same tropes in conversation over and again. This is especially so when talking about Japan on the international stage. The fact that it’s an island nation is a favorite, as is the emphasis on Japan’s “smallness.” This occurs with enough regularity that you could be forgiven for assuming people think they inhabit the tiniest little nation on the planet. Geographic feelings aside, the comment comes despite Japan being the world’s third-largest economy and a top 10 global military power (officially pacifist constitution aside).

I had always assumed this to my ears too emphatic emphasis reflected the self-deprecating tendency so often found in the country’s language and customs. Then, recently, I read “Suye Mura: A Japanese Village” by the anthropologist John F. Embree. It’s a 1939 ethnographic account of village life in Suye on the southern island of Kyushu, providing a vivid depiction of a typical Japanese farming society shortly before WWII. At the time, Suye was in many ways a village in transition, still abiding by the traditional lifeways and institutions as, year by year, the industrial money economy and the modern Japanese state made its presence more fully known.

In describing the village school, Embree writes:

In every classroom is a world map or map of Asia which shows Japan in red as a very small land indeed, compared to the mainland nations of Asia. Manchuko* is colored pink, but even this pink area is not so large. In a perfectly bland manner some villager, on looking at such a map, will suggest how nice it would be to appropriate a bit more of China. Charts of various nations’ military strength, always emphasizing the smallness of Japan in comparison to these others, are hung in various schoolrooms. These maps and charts illustrate to the farmer and his child how essentially reasonable it is for Japan to enlarge, and how unreasonable are those nations that object.

And there it is: the origin of the recurring “Japan is a small country” line lies in the nation’s colonial past. Like the ongoing use of fax machines or a weather-worn roadside deity from the feudal era, this largely vestigial structure is psychic and still looms large in the minds of the people. Few here would know why the impression that Japan is such a tiny nation is still ever-present; it’s just an assumed fact. While there certainly isn’t a colonial program behind the continuing perception, it surely helps to maintain the more osseous structures of the society, including the political hierarchy that’s been in place since WWII.

*Manchuko was a Manchurian puppet state and part of the Empire of Japan from 1932 to 1945