My thesis is that the history of the Sôaikai teaches us that the concept of the state apparatus must be considered in terms of its internal splitting, between a publicly avowed appearance and its publicly disavowed, spectral, or supplemental forms of organization. The stakes of understanding this splitting of state power, however, is that it compels us to reconsider the concept of the social "margin," for the Sôaikai did not simply police Koreans in the "margin" of Japanese society. Rather, its work marked the division of Korean surplus populations in Japan as the ground for commodification and political repression. I call this the "divided margin." The divided margin represented a larger colonial and policing strategy of dividing and conquering Korean proletarian movements and working-class identification by promoting and supporting ethnic identity instead—but only to the point where the ethnic consciousness did not become radicalized to the point of promoting national liberation. The problem of political repression has to be considered in light of the failings of this effort to neutralize proletarian identification through the promotion of ethnic identity.

I then analyze anti-Sôaikai political movements by Korean workers, movements that coincided with the rise to parliamentary fame of the Sôaikai's cofounder, Pak Ch'um-gum, who became the first colonial subject elected into the Japanese National Diet in 1932. The inimitable and not quite indomitable Pak Ch'um-gum was arguably Japan's most famous colonial opportunist, and he failed consistently and miserably as a parliamentarian. As I discuss in the last pages of the article, Pak's failings as a parliamentarian reveal important aspects of how the Japanese empire tried to govern and represent its colonial populations in Korea and in Japan.

Through analyzing the discursive event triggered by Yoshinori Kobayashi's graphic history On Taiwan, (Shin G manism Sengen Supesharu—Taiwan Ron) which appeared in 2001, and the discourse of self-effacement and self-abjection present in many literary texts, cultural policies, and public opinions during the Japanese colonial period, I point out that the discursive self-abjection, or the will to cleanse the uncleanliness of one's heart, maneuvered and coerced through cultural regime, is indispensable for the formation of a non-I subject. More significantly, the discourse of the gong, the reverse side of the self-abjection, sets the frame of the spiritual totality to be shared by the individuals as parts of the whole. The two symbiotic states, self-abjection and the participation within the gong, constructed a particular mode of discourse of the psyche in East Asia during the Pacific War and paved the way for the frame of consciousness of the modern nation-state as well as the ground for subjectivation. Through such a discursive mode of psyche politics, a certain sense of community is engineered. We observe that the function of abjection operates in double directions: the internal effacement and the external exclusion. The locus of the gong, defined variously according to different contexts, which is often erected in the name of love in order to uphold the sense of community, paradoxically also serves the cause for cruelty and abjection against difference, both outside and inside the community.

To the extent that historians of political thought are interested in history, the predominant method for analyzing the meaning and context of texts for the last few decades has been the so-called Cambridge School. It is the contention of this article that while the focus of the Cambridge School on the importance of contextual readings should open up the history of political thought to extra-European contexts, in fact its method serves to close down this possibility by emphasizing the importance of continuity between places in the past and the present of the historian. In other words, this method reduces to a process of narrating the historical identity of the Eurocentric discipline. Furthermore, I suggest that the work of the wartime Kyoto School contains methodological insights into the history of political thought that might overcome this problem and provide for a more inclusive (or at least a less exclusive) approach to the field.

I argue that with Miki's participation in the Showa Kenkyukai and the production of its "world-historical answer" in the form of its signature concept of cooperativism (kyodoshugi) there occurs a sudden shift away from the rhetorical strategies and lack of epistemological confidence that characterized his journalistic writings of 1935-40. Prior to Principles of Thought for a New Japan, Miki used a rhetorical strategy of conditionals arguing that unless new principles of universal validity were created, it would be impossible to solve Japan's domestic and international problems. During this prior period of Miki's "world-historical questions," he never offered any suggestions as to what these new universally valid principles might be and worked with a questioning attitude marked by extreme epistemological doubt. In addition to his use of "only if, then... " conditionals, Miki frequently offered a sustained criticism of virtually everything for being abstract and lacking dialectical mediation, negation, and sublation. Miki was especially critical of advocates of the "Japanese spirit" and so-called Japanists who assumed that Japanese culture already possessed a universal validity capable of solving Japan's problems and winning over the Chinese to the side of Japanese imperialism. However, one must be careful not to mistake Miki's privileging of universalism over particularism or his attempts to theorize a putatively inclusive and difference-respecting multicultural and multiethnic Japanese empire, which were indeed the ideological foundations of the East Asian Community (Toa kyodotai), as radical gestures of resistance to the Japanese empire, as frequently occurs. For regardless of Miki's intentions, the effect of his oppositional rhetorical strategy in his journalism was firmly on the side of renovating and hence strengthening the imperialist Japanese state. While the Showa Kenkyukai is often regarded as a failure, its apparently empty concept of cooperativism nonetheless contributed to the justification of imperialist violence throughout East Asia.

By examining Nakai's thoughts on the essence of technology, I wish to analyze the relation between Kyoto School philosophy and the political in wartime Japan, because these have often been viewed in isolation from each other or framed simplistically in terms of political complicity or resistance to fascism. Nakai's thought during the prewar and wartime periods in particular is often either overlooked in favor of his postwar activities in the Hiroshima Culture Movement or seen as mainly engaging in a politics of building some type of counterhegemony or collective resistance against fascism through his organization of periodicals inspired by the Popular Front in Europe, such as Doyobi (Saturday) and Sekai Bunka (World Culture), for which he was arrested along with others in 1937. However, as I demonstrate, Nakai also primarily sought inventive sites of the political through his understanding of technology within modern capitalist life—or, in his language, different "points of departure," "acts within acts," para-existential "middles" of chance and opportunity, and uncanny sensations irreducible to sight, sound, or understanding. At stake for Nakai in such concepts were the critical, transformative energies of the people themselves, which were increasingly subject to the various disciplinary regimes of capital and the state.

Three authors are singled out for the three periods in the history of Japanese area studies: Robert N. Bellah for the 1960s, James W. Heisig and John Maraldo for the 1980s, and Kevin M. Doak for the 2000s. In no way can these authors claim to be representative of the main tenets covering the entirety of the discipline, but their works show the continuing but increasingly aging fantasies of scholars in the field of Japan. Their scholarly works were shaped by the binary framework of universalism (the West) and particularism (the "Rest"). They were apparently guided by the scholars' desire to project the distinction of the West from the Rest, but most importantly they were designed to deny complicit mutuality between Japan's past and the United States' progressive imperial nationalisms. In an indirect manner they testify to the fact that the discipline of area studies cannot be synthesized with that of American studies—Asian American studies, for instance—because some topics essential for the latter, such as racism, colonial guilt, and the traces of imperialism, have scarcely been addressed in the former.

What is at stake in this article is to assess to what extent the comparison of U.S. and Japanese nationalisms would slacken the disciplinary exclusivity of area studies and transform its mode of knowledge production. The essay is a prelude to a transpacific study in which our historical inquiry will put the United States and East Asia in a continuous field of inquiry.

Story 1. The Story of the Zapatistas, the Masked Army: how the indigenous Indians have changed their ancient tradition of living in harmony with nature and are now "destroying" nature in order to farm and subsist.

Story 2. The Story of the "Straw-Hat Plot of Land": how the poor peasants in Guizhou Province in southwest China are compelled to farm on steep slopes, showing that China does not have an overall strategy that takes care of the nation's environmental protection and sustainable development.

Story 3. The Story of "Enclosures": how the grave traffic jams and air pollution in Beijing partly stem from a monopoly by the authorities over land and capital.

Story 4. The Story of Disease from Food: how food security is compromised with the excessive use of pesticide, chemical fertilizer, and heavy metal in farming and husbandry.

From the four cautionary stories is derived the Story of Rural Reconstruction, which the author has been engaged in, together with many volunteers, and which works for the integration of environmental protection and the reconstruction of rural culture. As Western-style modernization is not appropriate for China, which is superpopulous with extremely scarce resources, Chinese peasants should revive traditional patterns of small peasantry in growing grain and raising pigs at the same time and use natural energy conducive to environmental protection. Peasants should also organize themselves and, through collective effort and cooperative labor, transform human resources into social capital and use the surplus rural labor for changing the conditions of the villages. The James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute (YIRR), set up in a village in Hebei Province, of which the author is the director, has been an experiment on self-reliant ways of development through the contribution of volunteers and villagers. Their production and daily life have been environmentally friendly, ecologically sound, and organically cyclical, in pursuit of sustainability.

A series of contingencies but also of precise intellectual choices had made the physical boundaries of the university porous and the ritual identity of its community open to contention. In the May Fourth years, the students explored and expanded the fragmentation of the communitarian bond by stating and living a radical refusal not only of disciplinary rules but also of basic rites of courtesy and belonging. In this sense, the analysis of everyday life of students at Beijing University shows not only that sociological categories or communitarian identities are no guarantee of politics, but also that politics among students can exist only by challenging the bond signified by the very category of students.

This analysis also provides an insight into how we should reconceptualize our understanding of politics beyond what are usually recognized as political moments (demonstrations, parades, elections). In the case of May Fourth Beida, politics can best be seen as deployed in daily life, fragmented in the gestures and movements of individuals and their interaction and production of organizations. It was precisely by challenging the distinctions between the cultural and the political, the intellectual and the quotidian, that student activists struggled over what a "student" and a "university" could be.

Roland Barthes's analysis of fashion discourse provides a specific critical apparatus for situating Heian poetics and consumer discourse on common ground. I borrow his insights on how classes of commodities and language concerning their uses enter into creative cross-referencing, in a way that resembles how premodern tanka attributed qualities according to seasonal and other (formally and informally) classifiable associations. While the Heian mode forms the template, Tawara's poetics is shown to operate in precisely this ahistorical consumer mode, passively absorbing and reflecting dominant media-projected attitudes.

While thematically arranged, usually in sequences more or less centered on romantic entanglements, these poems reflect the rational, national, industrial capitalist environment and its totalizing effects. Critical lines of escape are left only in the force of fresh juxtaposition of words and consumer items, thus providing a contained sandbox for aesthetic play without endangering corporate decorum and sponsorship.

A running theme in her tanka is the ever-elusive partner in love, a motif providing the basis for the building up toward an always-deferred satisfaction, jouissance. By alluding to Heian serial relationships, she aestheticizes alienation from her partners on her dates. By echoing classical matrices of seasonal words, poetic places, and conventional associations in all stages of romance, her accounts of consumer objects carry their own advertised associations as well as a reified canonical force.

Thus her verses expand the intertextual modality in premodern Japanese poetry seamlessly into consumer culture, and one must examine the subject being reproduced here. Slavoj Zizek is helpful in understanding the appearance of passivity in her positioning. Jouissance, in Zizek's Lacanian usage, is used to understand the mechanism by which Tawara personally and socially excuses herself from having to engage her material in a more critical way that would alter rather than simply reflect her media- and advertising-defined environment. Jouissance is the key to her postponement of personal intimacy as well as public involvement and, ultimately, to understanding her ahistorical poetics.