Peasants, Rebels & Outcasts: The Underside of Modern Japan

Modernization was intended by Japanese leaders as a way for the tribe to use technology, science and weaponry from the West in battle array to become stronger militarily and economically. The role of the peasants in this plan, from the point of vision of Japanese leaders, was simply to a greater extent of the same role the peasants had play before the Meiji Restoration. The government under modernization wanted to involve the nation into the modern world, but the peasants were to be used as the workhorses of old, carrying the nation into the modern age on their bare shoulders:

Hence, the late order that was established by the Meiji government failed to improve importantly the condition of the mickle at the lower levels of the mixer order. In fact, for many it meant greater hardship and suffering. In particular, the peasantry (already expected to give up the resources and manpower to build the wealth and power of the nation) was asked to sacrifice its lives, somatic resources, labor, and individual interests for the sake of the nation-state (11).

It is clear, then, why the peasants resisted modernization, and why the process had more than negative than positive impact on their lives. Modernization was intentional to improve the lives of "the small elite at the top of the social pyramid" (11). it was also designed to take more from quite a than give more to the peasants. The peasants were expected to give even more under modernization than th

Again, the main point of all this racist intellection---similarities and differences a billet---is to create in the minds of the people on each post---especially the minds of the soldiers who do the actual killing---a way of thinking which produces the willingness and the desire to kill. The other side deserves to die because it is either animalistic or demonic, either an ape or a devil---with two sub- mankind and super-human qualities. The main result of racist propaganda of this sort is a portrayal of the other side as not human.

One's own side is the epitome of human bread and butter and all that is good about(predicate) it, and the other side cannot be seen as having any human qualities---or else it will be harder to kill them: "On neither side did the propagandists offer much ground for the recognition of common traits, equal acts, or compatible aspirations" (32).

Ironically, as Hane points out a take of times, the training the peasants had received prior to modernization played a part in their resistance to that modernization. They had been inculcated with the command to stay in their place at the bottom of the social ladder. now modernization was encouraging them, at least to some degree, to take reward of opportunities to rise above their peasant destinies. the thought was alien, unwelcome, and even terrorization to people who had been for so long accustomed to the simplest way of life in which they knew their place at the bottom of the ladder.

Hane, Mikiso. Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

such a claim could be supported by many examples of American military aggression in the past, but this sort also handily ignored Japan's "own energetic activities as a late-developing imperialist and colonial nation" (30).

Until the end of mankind War II, the peasants continued to rely on peddlers who came around sporadically to fill the household medicine bag with cure-all potions. . . . And as long as superstitious beliefs about the causes of
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