I. What is Nationalism?

  Ernest Renan's famous question “Why is Holland a nation, while Hanover and the Grand Duchy of Parma are not?” raised one set of analytical issues (Renan 192). We can transpose Renan's question into Eastern contexts: “Why is Singapore a nation, while Hong Kong is not?” What is a nation? What is nationalism?
  It is nationalism which engenders nations.  As Ernst Gellner argues, “Admittedly, nationalism uses the pre-existing, historically inherited proliferation of cultures or cultural wealth, though it uses them very selectively, and often transforms them radically” (Gellner 55). Dead languages can be revived, traditions invented, and even quite fictitious pristine purities can be restored. Then, how can the nation be defined for the peoples who live across the world?
  The Jewish people, who were driven away from the native land of Israel about two thousand years ago by the Romans, are found all over the world.  Do the Jewish people living outside Israel really think of a nation and nationalism as Renan and Gellner think? The Jews had often been called “a nation without country.”
  For most Jewish people, a nation and nationalism has a very complicated meaning that cannot be defined so easily.  The Jewish nationalist (Zionist) movement rejected Yiddish which was widely spoken among European Jews and opted for a modern Hebrew which nobody as yet spoke.  The Irish national movement launched itself after 1900 into the doomed campaign to reconvert the Irish to a language most Irish people no longer understood, and which those who set about teaching it to their countrymen had only themselves begun to learn very incompletely, as Declan Kiberd comments (Kiberd 222-24). In the late nineteenth century Ireland, the Celtic Revival movements occurred while Ireland struggled politically and socially to create the Irish Free State. Around the year 1904 Ireland was full of nationalists who strained at confirming their political and cultural independence from the United Kingdom. Among the Irish nationalists Michael Cusack was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and co-founded the Gaelic Athletic Association.
  At Barney Kiernan’s pub in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom gives his simple definition when he is asked, “What is a nation?”  “--A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place” (U 12.1422-23). Bloom's definition of a nation can be righteously appropriate for the Jewish immigrants coming to Ireland.  The citizen, however, who is considered to be modeled after Michael Cusack, does not feel satisfied with Bloom's definition. For the citizen, vainly seeking for the missing twenty millions of Irish tribes who “were driven out of house and home in the black '47” (U 12.1365-66), the Irish people can be paralleled with the Lost Tribes of Israel.  He does not think that the Jewish immigrants and their descendents are “the same people living in the same place” as the Irish people are. Then the citizen says to Bloom, “What is your nation if I may ask?” (U 12.1430). Bloom immediately answers, “Ireland. I was born here. Ireland” (U 12.1431). Bloom states here clearly that he is an Irish. Additionally he continues:"--And I belong to a race, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant” (U 12.1467-68). People in the pub notice what Bloom says about his nationality, since Martin Cunningham tells the citizen that Bloom is the descendant of Hungarian Jews (U 12.1635-37). However eagerly he claims his Irish nationality, people around him do not regard him as Irish because he has a different background.  Or it can be considered that the Irish nationalists claim their nationality by eliminating a foreign element. Bloom's definition of “nation,” however, is also a model answer given by internationalists or cosmopolitans. In Europe only the nationalist Irish, who have no neighbors other than Protestants, are exclusively defined by their religion, as E.J. Hobsbawm argues (Hobsbawm 69). The strict or practical Jews also tend to define themselves by their religion.
  According to Oxford English Dictionary, “jew” (noun) is defined: “1.a. A person of Hebrew descent; one whose religion is Judaism; an Israelite”; “2.a. transf. and offensive. As a name of opprobrium: spec. applied to a grasping or extortionate person (whether Jewish or not) who drives hard bargains” (0ED 2).  The verb “jew” is “To cheat or overreach, in the way attributed to Jewish traders or usurers”(OED 2).  The English phrase “rich as a Jew” shows how English people have had a preoccupation about Jews.  Leopold Bloom, who is a Jewish descendant born in Ireland but does not believe Judaism, is not a Jew according to this definition.  If Bloom is not a Jew nor Irish, who is Leopold Bloom?  Is he a “no man” as his Homeric identity as Odysseus indicates?
   In Ulysses, on the way to the burial of Paddy Dignam, Martin Cunningham finds and slanders a solicitor named Reuben J. Dodd, saying “Of the tribe of Reuben” (U 6.251).  Reuben is one of the twelve tribes of Israel.  Dodd is insulted by both Cunningham and Simon Dedalus in a somewhat anti-Semitic manner, because of his believed Shylock-like behavior. The real Reuben J. Dodd, however, was not a Jew: it is quite ambiguous whether they know the fact or not, whether they just imply him a Jew for his “Jewish deeds.”²  Since Lenehan brings news that “Throwaway,” the horse Bloom is rumored to bet on, has won the Ascot Gold Cup at twenty to one (U 12.1219), people in the pub expect Bloom to treat them to drinks.  But Bloom, who did not actually bet on the horse, hurries to the courthouse.  People would think that Bloom is a typical Jew, a “Usurper” (U 1.744) rather than a usurer.
  Japan had to open its door to the world suddenly when Matthew Perry came from America in 1853, and soon found the necessity for national defense against the Great Powers: Japanese nationalism arose using the Japanese Emperor or the Tenno as its symbol.  The Japanese Empire founded the notorious puppet state “Manchuria” in 1932 and it was “a country” until 1945 as the Japanese Empire claimed.  But it was not a true nation at all if we followed Bloom’s definition.  In Europe only the nationalist Irish, who have no neighbors other than Protestants, are exclusively defined by their religion (Hobsbawm 69).  Chigaku Tanaka’s nationalism is also defined by the fusion of the Nichiren sect of Buddhism and Shintoism, as we will see later.
  Kenji Miyazawa was born to a rich family running a pawnbroker and secondhand clothing store in Hanamaki, Iwate in 1896.  He was raised up as an heir of his family’s pawnshop, observing many poor people selling their best or only clothes to earn their living.  He gradually had a great sympathy for the poor and cursed his family’s wealth.  He was educated in Morioka [Daiichi] High School and Morioka Higher Agricultural School (now Iwate University).  He spent most of his short lifetime in Iwate, although he traveled to many places from Sakhalin to Kansai and stayed in Tokyo several times to study German, etc. and to receive his training from the Kokuchukai (lit. Nation’s Pillar Society), a Nichiren sect of Buddhism.  He left one literary-styled poem titled “Kokuchukai” describing his arrival at the Kokuchukai building, Uguisudani, Tokyo.  He had never been abroad but had tremendous knowledge of the world at that time.  Especially in his juvenile stories, he described Iwate as “Ihatov,” a dreamland where East meets West, and Japanese contexts are merged into European ones.  As mentioned before, the words “kokka” (nation) and “Nippon” (Japan) seldom appear in Miyazawa's works.  It does not, however, suggest that Miyazawa never thought of Japan, the nation and the world.  Basically there seems to be no nation nor nationalism in his juvenile stories, and just described his personal experiences and observations about some places and some people in his poems.  He mentioned politics only several times in his letters and manuscripts.
  The following satiric poem titled “Seijika” (Politicians) shows his attitude towards the politics at that time:

He never pays respect to the “politicians” in this poem: he just describes them as “a bunch of panic mongers,” “drinking their fill all the while.”  No scholars have yet identified the politicians.  The politicians might not be congressmen but his town assemblymen: they might not be real politicians but the local gentlemen.  Miyazawa wrote this on May 3, 1927.  It was revised three times: the title word “Seijika” disappeared at the stage of the second draft.  Miyazawa, like Joyce, was not an activator in politics. After resigning his stable teaching job at Hanamaki Agricultural School, Miyazawa, he became an ordinary farmer and founded “Rasu Chijin Kyokai” (Rasu Earth Men Association) in Hanamaki to teach pedaphology and arts for young farmers.

      We are all farmers.  Very busy and very hard work.
      We want to find the way to live more joyfully and more cheerfully.
      Some of our old fathers lived that way.
      Let me tell you about the accordance of verification by modern science,
          the seekers’ hardships and our intuition.
      No individuals can be happy unless the whole world becomes happy.
      Our egos evolve from individuals into groups, and into the universe.
      That is the way the old saint trod and taught us.
      In the new age, the world tends to become one consciousness and creature.
      To live virtuously and strong is to feel the Milky Way in you and respond to it.
      Let us find the true happiness of the world.  To seek it is a virtue already.
       (The Preface to Nomin-Geijyutsu Gairon Koyo or The Institutes of the  
        Introduction to Farmers’ Arts; Works 10.18-19; trans. Eishiro Ito) 

This, Miyazawa’s famous slogan, is generally regarded as a slogan to give relief to humankind.  How can the whole world become happy?  According to Tanaka, the world must be ruled and governed by the Japanese Empire with Tanaka’s “Nippon Kokutai” (the Japanese National Substance) based on Nichiren fascism and “Odo” (the Way of the Tenno, or the Japanese Emperor): so the above slogan can be paraphrased, “no individuals can be happy unless the whole world follows Tanaka's Nichirenism.”  It became Manchuria's mental pillar with his admirers, sometimes reciting Kenji Miyazawa's works.   As Tsukasa Yoshida notes, Mr. Takano, former head of social education of Iwate Kokumin Koto Gakko“ (Iwate National Higher School) invited Miyazawa to Reclaimed Land Iwasaki, the precursor to “Rokuhara Seinen Dojo” (Rokuhara Youngmen's School) to give lectures, roundtables, etc.: Miyazawa lectured on “The Introduction to Farmers' Arts,” poems and tankas (a Japanese verse of thirty-one syllables) (Yoshida 237). The first armed colony to Manchuria (126 soldiers) trained in Rokuhara Dojo in Rokuhara, Iwate for twenty days.   They headed for Manchuria in September 1932, one year before Miyazawa's death.

II. Arthur Griffith's Nationalism/Anti-Semitism in Ulysses

  James Joyce began to write Ulysses in Trieste which belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire at that time. In 1915 when Italy declared war on the dual empire, Joyce, who had an English passport, was forced to leave Trieste.   Joyce was an emigrant, a wandering Irish, who would have thought that “nations only exist in the plural” and that “the principle of nationality” required the phenomenon of internationality, as Andras Ungar says (Ungar 52). Joyce became closely acquainted with Italian Jews of Hungarian origin and with Austrian citizens including Ettore Schmitz known by his penname Italo Svevo, so it was quite convenient for him to transfer this type to Dublin.  
  In another point of view, Joyce set Bloom's family background in Hungary because he knew Griffith's pamphlet The Resurrection of Hungary.
  Arthur Griffith (1872-1922) was an Irish patriot instrumental in the final achievement of Ireland's independence in 1921-22 and first president of the newly formed Irish Free State in 1922.  As Don Gifford notes, in the early twentieth century he organized Sinn Fein (“Ourselves”), a movement that agitated for independence by disrupting the British government of Ireland (largely by civil disobedience) (Gifford 55).  In 1906 he founded a newspaper named Sinn Fein.  He wrote the pamphlet The Resurrection of Hungary in which he insisted that “the Hungarian policy” or the dual monarchy was“certainly the largest idea contributed to Irish politics for a generation,” as Attila Faj tells (Faj 69).
  The pamphlet had first been published in a series of 27 articles from January 31st to July 2nd, 1904.   Padraic Colum, Joyce's friend and author of the biography Arthur Griffith, commented that “it would be a mistake to read The Resurrection of Hungary as history; it is a parable; it is, if one is careful not to use the word in a derogatory sense, a myth -- an arousing myth. The acceptance of the myth on which an Irish policy could mould itself entailed effort and discipline” (Colum 78).   Richard Ellmann notes that Griffith visited the Martello Tower Joyce stayed at in the same year (Ellmann 172).  In Trieste between 1906-1907, Joyce supported Griffith and the Sinn Fein policy, even if its effect would be at first only to substitute Irish for English capitol (Ellmann 237-38).  “The Sinn Fein policy comes to fighting England with the knife and folk,” and Joyce added in commendation, “the highest form of political warfare I heard of” (Ellmann 238).
  The hero of The Resurrection of Hungary, Francis Deak, is brought on the scene after the armed resistance of the Hungarians is broken, and Kossuth, the military leader, after being interned in Turkey, has gone into exile, though showy Kossuth was described less admirably than Deak who was a quiet, humorous man with a conviction (Colum 79).  Griffith's comment is, “Deak stood by the Constitution of Hungary, as an Irish statesman had we had them instead of Irish agitators, would have stood by the Constitution of 1782--illegally suspended since 1800” (Griffith 39).  “Keep your eyes on your own country,” Griffith has Deak say to the Hungarians. He adds, “From which it may be inferred that a policy of Passive Resistance and a policy of Parliamentarism are very different things, although the people of Ireland have been drugged into believing that the only alternative to armed resistance is speechmaking in the British Parliament” (Griffith 39).   In this pamphlet Griffith dreamed that an Irish Deak should use the same non-violent methods to regain independence from the English government as Hungary did from the Hapsburg dynasty in 1867; the passive resistance, the withdrawal of the Irish members of Parliament from Westminster, the boycott of English products, the establishment of some international relations independent of the United Kingdom, etc.  Ironically, in Irish history, it was not an Irish Deak but Michael Collins, an Irish Kossuth, appearing to get independence with violence in 1922.
  In Barney Kiernan's pub, Joyce makes a laughing stock of the chauvinists who had sworn to Griffith's non-violent method, presuming that it was suggested to him by Leopold Bloom. Here Bloom is the man of the tolerant Irish mentality and the preacher of universal love versus “force, hatred, history, all that” (U 12.1481).
  Partly the idea for Sinn Fein derived from a similar Hungarian resistance to Austrian control in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Bloom's contemporaries believe this gossip because Bloom has a Hungarian background and because Griffith was persistently rumored to have a Jewish adviser-ghostwriter:

      So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, John Wyse
      saying it was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his
      paper all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off
      of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk about
      selling Irish industries. (U 12.1573-77)