UC San Diego

Comparing the cases of the 4-H Clubs in Ohio and the progressive educational reforms in rural Saitama, Japan in the early twentieth century, this project points out that pragmatism laid the "cultural infrastructure" for the integration of farmers and their wartime mobilization in the two societies. I demonstrate that the pragmatic ideas of action, experience, and subjectivity transformed the key constitutive element of the relationship between the farmer and everyday farm work, and remade the engagement in everyday farm labor into a site of manifestation of nationalist subjectivity for the rural populations. I demonstrate that, in both the U.S. and Japan, pragmatic reconstitution of how people organized their everyday activities crystallized as the new "schema of practice"--A schema that farmers employed to construct, reflect, and imagine the structure and components of their everyday action and how they engaged in it. By pointing out the common mechanism of mobilization through the "schema of practice," I challenge the conventional assumptions that distinguish "authoritarian" pre-war Japan and the "democratic" United States based on ideological permeation. I argue that the nature of political ideology and the alleged presence (or lack) of political subjectivity do not directly explain people's political behavior. I reject ideology as a causal factor of political mobilization. I contend that nationalistic conduct was instead embedded in the everyday schema of action and experience, unmediated by the ideological structure. This project also illuminates the dissimilarities in the schemas of practice between two societies, and the resulting mechanisms of mobilization. In the United States, the subjectivity of the actor was defined as emergent through the objectification of action, in which the actor was externalized from his action. On the other hand, in Japan, the integrity of the rural subject was sought in the total immersion and unification of the actor and action--called "practicism" (jissennshugi). The desirable image of a good farmer was sought in the state of the internalization of the actor in action