Japan's Postwar

Michael Lucken, Anne Bayard-Sakai, Emmanuel Lozerand, J. A. A. Stockwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138016989
• eBook ISBN: 9781136705670
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia del XX secolo

Historical surveys of postwar Japan are usually established on the grounds that the era is already over, interpreting "postwar" to be the years directly proceeding World War II. However, the contributors to this book take a unique approach to the concept of the postwar epoch and treat it as a network of historical time frames from the modern period, and connect these time capsules to the war to which they are inextricably linked. The books strength is in its very interdisciplinary approach to examining postwar Japan and as such it includes chapters centred on subjects as diverse as politics, poetry, philosophy, economics and art which serve to fill the blanks in the collective cultural memory that historical narratives leave behind.

Originally published in French, this new translation offers the English speaking world important access to a major work on Japan which has been greatly enriched by the translator's great accuracy and knowledge of English, French and Japanese language, history and culture.

Japan's Postwar will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese Studies and Modern Japanese History as well as historians studying the world after 1945.

Part I

The Multiplicity of Chronologies, or the Postwar Contested

1 The postwar as a political paradigm

Eric Seizelet

Most observers of Japanese political life take as given the notion of sengo seiji, that is ‘postwar politics’. And it has become impossible to count the number of references in the literature of politics, both in Japanese and in Western languages, that refer to ‘Postwar Japan’.¹ There is, however, very little concerted reflection about the meaning of this notion. Another peculiarity is that even if, in political science and law, reference to prewar Japan makes sense in Anglo-Saxon political literature, in general terms it is hardly pertinent in Japan. Japanese usage takes account of a time division in other periods, for instance Meiji zenki to describe the political changes of the first half of the Meiji era before the introduction of the constitutional regime, or Shōwa zenki (first half of the Shōwa era), for the dominant characteristics of a political system in course of militarisation. Thus we find ourselves in the presence of an asymmetric perception of time: on the one hand ‘postwar’ is seen in its double dimension, total and global. Total, because the notion of sengo reflects a bloc of time that is indivisible and discriminating, and that distinguishes Japan before from Japan after. Global, because the political and juridical aspect is only one of the areas that affected the changes and the perception of Japanese society after 1945. On the other hand, recourse to a multiple time division circumscribes the politico-institutional evolution to a time that is determined and in the past. In short, when recourse to the above-mentioned periodisation encloses events in a clearly identified historical trajectory, the notion of sengo pulls the events and facts of a past thus referenced right into the present time.

Postwar in politics: a protean notion

The traumatic moment of defeat

Postwar is first of all a line of demarcation. It is most evident that 1945 marks a turning point in the political and institutional history of Japan. The reforms and upheavals that took place on account of the Occupation give birth to another institutional architecture, new political forces and a new power equilibrium, and not only because of the collapse of the military ‘party’. The moment of defeat also marks the emergence of a new Japan, where the willingness to change – sometimes ‘solicited’ by the American occupier – expresses a moving away from the previous period and from the dysfunctionality ascribed to the Meiji constitutional structure. But even if this way of looking at it is uncontested, we know that in Japan there has been an important debate about the scope of the reforms introduced. Tracing the reforms means also evaluating and describing the political system existing at the time, because, in contrast to Germany, defeat was not accompanied by the collapse of the political order in place. Democratisation then did not mean filling in a vacuum, but in Japan it necessarily implied taking a position and putting things in context in relation to the regime, which one sensed must have been affected by the defeat, but whose apparent flexibility might constitute a guarantee of survival. In short, sengo seiji was placed in a perspective that contrasted radically with the prewar.

If, however, the notion of sengo seiji appears as an ‘immediate given’ of the political consciousness of contemporary Japan, it is in no way politically neutral. It is not a question of identifying by this periodisation just a before and an after. This is because the Second World War for Japan does not just present itself as an Asian version of a crucial turning point in universal history: beginning in the triumph of a blitzkrieg, it reached its conclusion in the unprecedented destruction of the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this sense, the point of departure of postwar, sengo, is mixed in first and foremost with defeat, haisen. Of course, the Axis powers all lived through the same traumatic experience in varying degrees. But, in contrast to Germany and Italy, for which the collapse of Nazism and fascism almost naturally opened a route to the return to a certain kind of democratic normality, Japan, for the Occupation authorities, needed to be ‘guided’ on the road of abandoning militarism and ultra-nationalism, so as to align itself with the norms of a nation henceforth pacific and democratic.² In other words, the postwar in Germany and Italy permitted reconnection with liberal traditions, however imperfect and sporadically repressed these had been, even eclipsed by the totalitarian interlude. Japan, by contrast, could only, as the occupiers saw it, offer a continuous experience of authoritarianism and despotism, disguised under an attractive modern cloak of a constitutional order that had been rapidly corrupted, and which the trauma of defeat had not been sufficient in itself to bring to an end.³

The postwar, born under a tutelary regime, and extended through the sophisticated system of subordination put in place by the security agreements, came also to rest upon a triple misunderstanding that had major consequences later for the attitude of part of the Japanese political elites concerning the new institutions. First of all, since the conversion of Japan to a system of values held by the victor was the fruit of a particular historical moment, the subsequent institutional changes were themselves affected by attitudes that were contingent and relative. Consequently, these changes found themselves exposed to the risk that they might be reversed. The ‘reverse course’ (gyaku kōsu) movement, which was initiated in the mid 1950s, should not merely be considered as the expression of reactionary and nationalist tendencies on the part of the conservative Establishment, because already in that period it seemed hardly politically realistic to revert purely and simply to the status quo ante. It was a question of symbolically blotting out the times of ‘exception’ – those of the defeat and the Occupation – in order to reconnect with the threads of a ‘historical normality’ that would allow Japan to take back its own destiny.

Secondly, we should not forget that the ‘grafting’ of democratic institutions, ‘imported in foreign wagons’, according to the time-honoured expression, carried with it a deeper wound than was created simply by the temporary removal of sovereignty. It had the effect of denying Japan the ability to draw from its own historical heritage the premises of reform, and of reducing it to the Weberian trilogy of political under-development: semi-feudalism, pre-modernity and irrationality. This ‘confiscation’ appears in all respects more destabilising than the one recurrent and condescending assessment, namely that the reforms were artificial in relation to the pervading social realities.

In any case, the defeat carried with it a profoundly ambiguous message: it was on the one hand the necessary path to democracy because it embodied a certain form of native political organisation without which the politico-institutional future of Japan would probably be different, but on the other hand the reforms of the immediate postwar period were, for Asian countries, an irrevocable ‘guarantee’ against the resurgence of Japanese imperialism. It liberated live forces, both political and union-based, carrying with them social change that was needed for the reforms to take root, but at the price of alienating sovereignty and of subordination without precedent in the history of the country. It was understood from that point that the notion of sengo could not just be reduced to a simple time division, but constituted a quite separate ideological question: it expressed in itself alone the deep ambivalence of this division, because the act of creating a new political system meant not just asserting the demise of the old regime. It was for certain analysts more deeply associated with the process of confiscation of identity.⁴ On the other hand, reference to the postwar gave to the ‘defenders’ of the present system and of its values a convenient frame of reference to denounce the endemic character of attacks by conservatives on the reforms put in place between 1945 and 1947. The postwar paradigm also fixed the appropriate roles of the principal actors in the political game, into the positions that for a long time conditioned their principal political identity. This was especially the case during the formative phase of the ‘1955 system’, coinciding with a radicalising and bipolarising of the public debate.⁵

Placement and duration

The postwar moreover means placing within a historical context of indeterminate duration, since, even if it is relatively easy to fix the point of departure – the August 1945 revolution, according to the felicitous expression of the constitution specialist Miyazawa Toshiyoshi – it is much more difficult to define the end of it. Is the term ‘postwar’ still relevant today? What might we understand to be the ending of ‘postwar politics’? We might remember the 1956 edition of the white book of the Japanese economy, officially proclaiming the ‘end of the postwar’, together with the ending of reconstruction. Some years later, in 1965, the Prime Minister, Satō Eisaku, indicated at the time of the first official visit by a Japanese head of government to Okinawa – at that point under American occupation – that ‘until Okinawa is restored to the motherland, the postwar will not have ended in Japan’. Okinawa was returned to Japan in 1972 and yet the postwar continues. The major difficulty lies in the fact that the postwar was defined at the outset by the identification of a founding moment clearly situated in time, whereas no particular event, no objective fact, exists that would allow one to proclaim and date its ending. This is as though the absence of the finite and its rejection in an uncertain horizon reduced the historical continuum to the dimension of a continuous present. Certainly, the system of calculating time by imperial eras might offer a key. Might not the change of regime that took place in 1989 at the end of the Shōwa period provide a useful reference point to mark precisely the ending of an epoch? The problem here is threefold: first of all, the Shōwa era does not coin-cide with the postwar. More exactly the coincidence between the two is only partial. Calling on the Shōwa era makes reference to a time frame that obliterates the break of 1945. It definitely repositions the postwar in the context of a longer period of time, but in the framework of a linear trajectory that effaces, eclipses or smoothes over historical irregularities, since making reference just to a monarchical continuity masks the traumatic moment of the defeat.⁶ Secondly, this identification between Shōwa and the postwar introduces an ambiguity in an institutional sense. Is it a question of making distinctions about the present fundamental law within a logic institutionally demarcated? Or is it a question of emphasising the risk of institutional obsolescence, giving them a historical connotation? These two divergent approaches are not without consequence for the controversy surrounding constitutional revision. In fact, a demarcation discourse tends to set up the Japanese Constitution as an untouchable model, whereas the contextual approach legitimises the revisionist hypothesis. Thirdly, neither the reference to the Shōwa era, taken as a totality, nor indeed the use of the term ‘postwar’, make sense in themselves. They are only relevant in relation to contents defined in retrospect as representative or symptomatic of the period under consideration. Despite its apparent ‘evidence’, the notion of sengo seiji, taken as a time period, is principally an intellectual construct, a condensing and objectivising process around a certain number of reference points that are inseparable from a description of the fundamental traits of the Japanese political system.

Logic of demarcation and logic of systematisation

The logic of demarcation is a diachronic approach to the political system aiming to evaluate the factors of continuity and discontinuity between the postwar and the prewar. Historically, it is obvious first of all that the closer one is to the beginning of the postwar, the stronger the reflection of the immediate past. To be sure of this it is enough to observe the controversies around the fate of the national imperial structure – the kokutai – after the defeat.⁷ This kind of logic dominated Japanese political science until around the middle of the 1960s. The preservation of the emperor-institution – even though substantially recast – with the same incumbent, the continuation in office of political personnel that had been subjected to the democratising process without having initiated it, the prevalence of an essentially parochial political culture, the reconstruction of an embryo military apparatus in the form of the Self-Defence Forces, and the domination of the bureaucracy in the decision-making system – all these things appeared like strands of the old regime within the new clothes of democracy. The central problem that emerges then from this approach is the entrenchment of new institutions in a context marked by the complexity of a heritage marrying the formal continuity of institutions (the 1947 Constitution was put forward as an ‘amendment’ of the Meiji Constitution), and a fundamental break in legitimacy effected by proclaiming popular sovereignty. At the same time, many intellectuals, including Maruyama Masao and Yoshimoto Takaaki, conducted anguished enquiries about the idea of responsibility and the meaning to be given to the multiplicity of opportunistic politico-ideological ‘conversions’ in the immediate prewar. Political scientists remained profoundly divided in the analyses that they applied to the political system, since this double linkage prevented hasty generalisations.⁸ Taking a systematic approac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: The multiplicity of chronologies, or the postwar contested
• Part II: Intellectuals facing the future
• Part III: How should one speak? The poets’ response
• Part IV: Forgetting, commemoration, diversion: the regimes of memory
• Part V: Complex experiences: society on the road to democracy
• Appendix: Chronology, 1937-2011
• Index