The 18^th April 2018 was an enjoyable day spent in excellent company at a seminar on “East Asia in Europe and Europe in East Asia” at the Centre for East Asian Studies at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The three other speakers, the audience, and the welcoming hosts made it a pleasantly memorable visit.

I was invited to speak on Uchimura Kanzō’s 1911 lecture/article “A Story of Denmark: A Story of how Faith and Forestry Saved a Country”, which I argue was – in Karl Mannheim’s sense of these words – an originally utopian tract, which later became a defining text of postwar ideology and which has lately come to be reinterpreted in utopian ways.

The story has been an enduring source of the generally favourable, albeit stereotypical, Japanese image of Denmark and the wider Nordic region. Its original purpose, however, was to construct an idealized image of Denmark in order to criticize certain aspects of the political reality of Meiji Japan and to suggest that following the Danish rather than the British example was more appropriate for Japan and all modern states. Denmark, as imagined by Uchimura, thus became a Christian, pacifist and liberal utopia with universally applicable lessons in normative political theory and public policy to teach the world. This notion that Denmark after 1864 offered an alternative to Anglo-American militarism and imperialism that could turn Japan into a truly great global power with a spiritual world-historical mission was an idea that stuck in Uchimura’s mind. As he would go on to argue some years later, in 1924:

Denmark by reducing her armament to the strength (or rather weakness) of mere police never thinks to have put herself in danger of losing her independence. Denmark in her martial weakness and rural strength is now per capita the richest country in the world, and essentially the strongest…

Now is the time for Japan to awake from sleep. This Western civilization with its big budget for fighting machinery is to be completely disowned. She is to start a new civilization, a civilization which is civilization indeed, a warless civilization, Denmark on a bigger scale, an army and navy on police-standing, an empire founded on the goodwill of the world, a secure, industrious, peaceful nation, the leader of “Christian” Europe and America, in the divine policy announced by God’s prophet, twenty-six centuries ago” (Uchimura 1932 [1924]: 572-573).

The text uses the story of the war veteran and engineer, botanist and patriot Enrico Dalgas’ lead role in the afforestation and regeneration of the depleted heathlands in the Jutland Peninsula to argue for faith-based ethical politics, freedom of religion, ecologically sustainable capitalist modernisation, pacifism, anti-colonialism, international trade based on comparative advantage, and a conception of citizenship that includes religious and ethnic minorities as full members of the polis. This, he believed, had all been achieved in Denmark in a mere four decades, and his wish was for Meiji Japan’s “frivolous and flippant statesmen” to change course and turn the country into a “Denmark on a bigger scale”. Following the British example, Uchimura warned prophetically, would only lead to disaster.

Uchimura’s warning fell on deaf ears, and it would take years of war and devastating military defeat for Japan to abandon the militarism, imperialism and great power ambitions it had pursued since the Meiji Restoration. Japan in August 1945 found itself in the same state as Denmark after the Second Schleswig War – defeated, demoralised, impoverished and territorially reduced to a small nation state. And it was in the post-war context that “A Story of Denmark” began to be read again as a prescient warning that had not been heeded, but which could now guide a new Japan to become a pacifist, religiously tolerant country that would pick itself up by its bootstraps as the Danes had done. The new Japan would base its security and prosperity on human development, peaceful relations with the outside world and international trade in the sectors in which it excelled. Because the text spoke to the concerns of the post-war era, it quickly re-emerged from obscurity and became established as a classic studied by generations of middle school pupils. In this sense, it became one of the ideological pillars of the post-1945 trading and developmental state.

“A Story of Denmark” has been reprinted on average every three and a half years since 1946 and seems to enjoy renewed popularity after the 2011 seismic and nuclear disasters. And now, at the close of the Heisei era, it is arguably being read for purposes of utopian critique, particularly with regard to energy and security policy. The aspects that are seized upon today are thus its spiritual, ecological and pacifist arguments. From the vantage point of post-Fukushima Japan, the text and Denmark’s later development illustrate that it is possible and desirable to power an advanced economy without nuclear energy. And with some disregard to post-cold war Denmark’s participation in US and NATO-led military operations, the pacifist ideals of the text rather than actual Danish history are tools with which to argue against remilitarisation and revision of the constitution.

The political reception history of this text, or what in German is called its Wirkungsgeschichte (“history of effects”), is a fascinating example of how ideas thought and written in a particular historical context acquire a life of their own and in ways neither imagined nor intended by the author. What is also curiously interesting is the way in which Uchimura’s arguments here prefigure Francis Fukuyama’s idea of “getting to Denmark”, which was published a century later in his 2011 book on The Origins of Political Order. Both conceive of “Denmark” as “the logical endpoint of social development” and “Denmarkness” (“stable, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and honest societies”) as something to strive for.

I am grateful for having had the opportunity to discuss this with such an engaged and insightful group of scholars and students as I had in Madrid.