Gerteis, Christopher

The American Historical Review

C. Gerteis

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PATRICIA L. MACLACHLAN. The People's Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871-2010.

SOAS Research Online

First, a confession: like Aaron Herald Skabelund, I toowas born in the Year of the Dog. What this means forour interest in the canine species is anyone’s guess.What is certain is that the scholarly world’s engagementwith dogs and other animals has transformed the hu-manities from a human-centered enterprise to one nec-essarily also concerned with the non-human. At leastthree approaches to mapping the relationship betweenhuman and non-human animals have emerged. In phil-osophical terms, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida,and Eric Santner, among others, have been thinkingwith animals and as animals, struggling with the exis-tential question of “us” and “them” and tracing the his-tory of that porous divide. In environmental and eco-nomic terms, the conception of human societies asimbricated with non-human associates, from grazingherds to bacteria, has given rise to new understandingsof power, including imperial expansion. In Alfred Cros-by’s work, for instance, European colonialism wasshown to require the introduction not just of Europeanpeople but also of the whole network of European an-imals, plants, insects, and microorganisms in order todominate. This second approach highlights the depen-dence of economic and political systems on particularbiota. Third, dogs and other animals have been treatedas elements of ideological and material systems con-cerned with policing social hierarchies, pollution andpurity, good and evil. Here the values of particular po-litical orders emerge as part of the society’s thinkingabout animals and about nature in general. Each ofthese three approaches has altered, in different ways,our understanding of human dominion.Skabelund’s study shies away from such broad phil-osophical, environmental, and ideological inquiries.His book provides instead a modest cultural history ofthe roles played by canines during Japan’s encounterwith imperialism both as the object of Western aggres-sion and as an aggressor with colonies and continentalaspirations of its own. As Skabelund explains, the basicstory is this: a “modern mode of dog ownership” intenton developing breeds and keeping dogs as pets emergedby the mid-nineteenth century in Britain and spreadwith British imperialism throughout the world. At first,the canine residents in semi-colonized and colonizedareas were denigrated as mongrels, curs, and “uncivi-lized” beasts much as were their human compatriots.To the extent that recognized breeds existed in colonialareas, they fell either into the category of diminutivelapdogs like the Japanese chin or into the category ofmassive breeds like the Afghan Hound or RhodesianRidgeback. In nineteenth-century Japan, as human andcanine foreigners swaggered in, Meiji elites respondedby acquiring a taste for “Western” dogs to mark upper-class status, but as Japan shook off the yoke of Westerndomination and became an imperial power in its ownright, native breeds were defined and elevated.The Akita, in particular, attracted the attention ofSaito Hirokichi, founder in the 1920s of the Society forthe Preservation of the Japanese Dog. Saito threw him-self into glorifying the Akita’s “pure” bloodlines andsupposed qualities of bravery and loyalty, embodiedmost especially in Hachiko , an Akita who is said to havewaited daily at Shibuya Station for his master who, hav-ing died suddenly at work, never returned. Skabelundconvincingly links Hachiko to Japan’s nationalistic fer-vor while suggesting that Hachiko ’s own greatest loyaltywas not to his deceased master but to the chicken ya-kitori served by the station’s eateries. In any case, inpractice, the dog most often deployed by the Japanesemilitary was not the Akita but the “German” shepherd.After Japan’s defeat, dogs’ wartime roles embodyingnational values, serving on battlefields, and being killedand even eaten by a starving human population wereforgotten. With rising postwar affluence, the dog asconsumer accessory re-emerged, suffering from thecontradiction of being both a disposable market prod-uct and a beloved member of striving middle-class hu-man families.Skabelund wants us to see dogs, despite intensivebreeding, training, and commodification, as defyingcomplete human control and able, through their ap-pearance in photographs and taxidermy, to “bark back”at historians. Although the book is richly illustrated inthe service of this argument, the argument is not en-tirely convincing. As theorists of photography have longsuggested, the intractable muteness even of human sub-jects in images is hard to translate into language, andSkabelund never explains exactly what the dogs in hispictures and taxidermic presentations might be tellinghim. In general, his story suggests that emerging mod-ern nationalisms required jingoistic canine embodi-ment in such breeds as British bulldogs and JapaneseAkitas, though the reasons behind this quirky impera-tive remain unexplored. Addressing canine culturedoes not appear to help us distinguish among politicalformations: the concepts of imperialism and fascism,for instance, are treated as near synonyms. In short, theaddition of dogs may not sharpen our understanding ofJapanese history, but this book’s delightful anecdotes,absorbing illustrations, and rich description remind usof the complex, non-human dimensions of our histories.There is much in this volume to charm even those notborn in the Year of the Dog.JULIA ADENEY THOMASUniversity of Notre DamePATRICIA L. MACLACHLAN. The People’s Post Office: TheHistory and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871–2010. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 338.)Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.2011. Pp. xx, 358. $39.95.This is not the book I expected, and it was nice to besurprised. Patricia Maclachlan’s monograph is a well-written, argument-driven analysis of the interest grouppolitics that drive Japan’s modern state bureaucracy.Maclachlan has crafted an exquisite study of institu-tional politics as a means to further demonstrate thedistinctive role played by commissioned postmasters inJapan’s postwar electoral system; her book also under-Asia 1569AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2012 by guest on December 11, 2012http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from scores the ubiquity of the political systems driving mod-ern postal networks. This is a timely analysis of the pol-itics behind the building, and dismantling, of the state-run post office in Japan that also adds usefulcomparative context to the history of postal systemsworldwide.The history of the Japanese post office, which is notwell developed in English-language scholarship, is par-ticularly important in that the post has played a centralrole in the modernization of Japan since the Meiji era(1868–1912). Sheldon Garon’s comparative history ofpostal savings systems, Beyond Our Means: Why Amer-ica Spends While the World Saves (2012), is the definitivework on the how the post garnered the funds needed toindustrialize Japan. Maclachlan has crafted a fascinat-ing study of the commissioned postmasters who framedthe house that Maejima Hisoka built.Maejima founded the Japanese postal system in 1871along lines similar to that of the British postal system,which was modernized under the Postage Act that tookeffect in 1840. In the first chapter, Maclachlan observesthat the rapid and relatively uniform development ofthe modern Japanese postal system fostered a signifi-cantly different pathway than its British inspiration. Sheargues that the distinctive political role played by thecommissioned postmasters is unique to Japan.Although billed as a history of the postal service sinceits founding, the book primarily focuses on the post–World War II era, and its strength lies in Maclachlan’sexamination of the political power garnered by thecommissioned postmasters association (Zentoku) fromits re-constitution in 1953 to its political decline in theearly 2000s. Indeed, Maclachlan’s portrait of the fund-raising and vote getting managed by Zentoku duringthe decades of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) ruleidentifies an important link in the web of vote-gettingorganizations that includes the agricultural coopera-tives (Nokyo ) which turned out the rural vote for theLDP throughout the postwar period.However, Maclachlan’s analysis of the early postwarconflicts between Zentoku and the postal workersunion Zentei underexamines the impact of the Amer-ican-dominated Allied Occupation of Japan during theimmediate postwar years. While Maclachlan is persua-sive in her assertion that the Supreme Command forAllied Powers (SCAP) perceived the inner workings ofthe post office as a Japanese concern, SCAP was di-rectly involved in the daily affairs of the militant laborfederation that included Zentei as one of its most im-portant members. Despite Zentoku’s dissolution bySCAP in 1950, the ability of commissioned postmastersto defend their interests in opposition to those of thepostal workers’ union was significantly bolstered whenSCAP labor policy abruptly and decisively shiftedagainst militant unions in 1948.Maclachlan provides a useful comparative frame-work for the origins of post office operations in Japanand the United Kingdom, but her book is weakened bya paucity of comparative context regarding postal pol-itics since the 1980s. Although the contemporary Jap-anese Post Office is the result of its own historical tra-jectory, a postwar British influence seems likely in thatthe reforms championed by Prime Minister KoizumiJunichiro, who was an exchange student in economicsat University College London in the late 1960s, mirrorthe Hayekian economics that informed the Thatcheryears and which underpin the postal privatizationschemes introduced since. Indeed, the potential forcomparison looms large in even the title of this book:“The People’s Post Office” is the trademarked sloganof Post Office Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of thepublic limited company Royal Mail Holdings of theUnited Kingdom.I truly enjoyed this book as historicized political sci-ence, but I longed to know much more about the cen-tury of organizational change that predates the periodof its particular focus. The first two chapters offer auseful survey of the post office’s origins in comparativecontext, but Maclachlan has not fully developed whatpromises to be a fascinating historical topic. Her oth-erwise excellent contribution to the study of contem-porary Japan sets the stage for works yet to be written.CHRISTOPHER GERTEISSOAS, University of LondonSABINE FRÜHSTÜCK and ANNE WALTHALL, editors. Re-creating Japanese Men. (Asia: Local Studies/GlobalThemes, number 20.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-versity of California Press. 2011. Pp. ix, 347. Cloth$65.00, paper $26.95.Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall’s fine collectionof essays further contributes to an already fruitful yearof publications about gender and sexuality. Most recentworks on these topics have privileged studies of femi-ninity and female sexuality, making this anthology onJapanese men and masculinities particularly welcome.The thirteen essays in the volume, by historians and his-torically minded social scientists and cultural studiesscholars, address ways in which masculinities intersectwith other forms of identity, including age/generation,class, and occupation. Although the nexus of (human)ethnicity or nationality with masculinity is not specifi-cally addressed, one essay analyzes the gendering of ro-bots.The editors’ introductory chapter reminds readersthat a historical study of masculinity in Japan is deeplyimbricated with ideas of adulthood and manly respon-sibility. Thus, manhood has been performed as a socialcategory in addition to being marked by the physicalcondition of bodily maturation that is most significantin the case of constructions of femininity. The “other”in the construction of masculinities, the editors note,was not always women; “man” could be defined in con-trast to not-yet-mature boys or in contrast to men withdifferent social roles, class status, or skills in using toolsor objects. Unlike “modern” (i.e., late nineteenth- andearly twentieth-century) masculinity, which took afairly hegemonic form in Japan under state-sponsoredpolicies of nation building through the school system,1570 Reviews of BooksAMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2012 by guest on December 11, 2012http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from 

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