History of Contemporary Japan since World War II

Edward R. Beauchamp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136523991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The best scholarship on the development of contemporary Japan This collection presents well over 100 scholarly articles on modern Japanese society, written by leading scholars in the field. These selections have been drawn from the most distinguished scholarly journals as well as from journals that are less well known among specialists; and the articles represent the best and most important scholarship on their particular topic. An understanding of the present through the lens of the past The field of modern Japan studies has grown steadily as Westerners have recognized the importance of Japan as a lading world economic force and an emerging regional power. The post-1945 economic success of the Japanese has, however, been achieved in the context of that nation's history, social structure, educational enterprise and political environment. It is impossible to understand the postwar economic miracle without an appreciation of these elements. Japan's economic emergence has brought about and in some cases, exacerbated already existing tensions, and these tensions have, in turn, had a significant impact on Japanese economic life. The series is designed to give readers a basic understanding of modern Japan-its institutions and its people-as we stand on the threshold of a new century, often referred to as the Pacific Century.

The People in History:
Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography

CAROL GLUCK

THE present has changed in Japan, and with it the past. For an important group of Japanese historians, the postwar period came to an end early in the last decade. In the aftermath of the Security Treaty Crisis of i960, it seemed to them that the contradictions in postwar politics and society demanded both a new present and a new grasp of the past. Inevitably drawn to the period that most closely preceded, produced and vexed their own, they concentrated on the century before the Pacific War. They set out to reexamine Japan's modern experience and to do so in their own way. Rejecting Marx and modernization theory as useful methodological guides, these scholars began a search for what they call an internal—or indigenous—approach to modern Japanese history. They work largely outside the confines of the more conventional subjects of political, diplomatic and institutional history; for them, the locus of historical interest is “the people” (minshū), and the history they hope to write, “people's history” (minshūshi). Although their notion of the people is sometimes vague, even visionary, their history-writing is for the most part solid and vital—in many ways the most interesting work in the field in Japan today.

Allied partly by their shared concerns and partly by their regard for one another, these historians belong to a new school, though they constitute no formal organization and promote no single historical platform. Most acknowledge Irokawa Daikichi and Kano Masanao as the doyens of the group, whose members are associated with various institutions around the country. Few are to be found behind the venerable Red Gate—which they no longer much venerate—at Tokyo University, although their academic opponents often teach there. Because the historians of the people complement their devotion to nonelite subjects in scholarship with antiestablishment attitudes in life, Tokyo University serves as the symbol of academic power, a part of the larger elite the group eschews in its researches. By now, however, these scholars have suffered the fate of many successful iconoclasts and belong to an establishment of their own making. That they find this status disturbing reveals something of the attitude that underlies the impulse to do people's history.¹

Even in the “Irokawa age” of Japanese historical scholarship, the minshūshi writers have not yet toppled the academic establishment, nor are they likely to. Most historians of all generations remain squarely in the tradition of Japanese Marxist historiography, and a smaller number of scholars employ the methods of contemporary social science, often to examine the traditional subjects of political history. And yet it is the still smaller number of popular historians who have lately captured the imagination of Japanese, both within and without academic circles. Their approach seems to many to have created the stirrings of a new historiography and, more important perhaps, its application to Japan's modern experience has produced some new history as well.

The Social Context of Minshūshi

Forthright about their historical mission, the minshūshi group make no effort to conceal the present day concerns that have moved them to scholarship. In a society that describes itself as democratic, the social and political processes which ought to bear an intimate relation to the individual members of the society seem to these writers to have moved beyond the popular domain. They see the nation ensnared by its bureaucratic elite, to whom they ascribe the responsibility for most of the negative aspects of modern life. They write to revive the individual as an agent of historical change, to make the people into the subjects, not merely the objects, of political authority, “which has nearly all the weapons” while the people have none.² History, they believe, can help raise the political consciousness of the people to the point where “real democracy” will prevail. And it is in the service of this hope that the popular historians have developed their mondai ishiki—what in Western terms might be called their Problematik.

The attitudes toward politics and scholarship that characterize this group are very much a product of their shared experience. Born in 1925, Irokawa has commented that he is as old as the Shōwa period, and his leading colleagues were also born within the first Shōwa decade. Nearly every one of them traces the origins of his interest in modern history to the same formative events.³ Of these, first and still foremost is the Pacific War. Because of their youth—most were teenagers— they were spared the sense of having witnessed or participated in the events of the thirties, so that when the war was over they experienced not guilt, but betrayal. They felt that, as schoolchildren, they had unwittingly been made a part of the national pathology, and they wanted both themselves and the nation cured. In 1969 Kano introduced the theme of his major work by recalling that

the subject of Japan's modernity was my fate. In 1945 as a boy at the time of the defeat, I was seized with the desire for liberation from the “prewar values,” and that desire became my destiny.⁴

“Prewar values” meant the ideology of the emperor system (tennōsei), described by Irokawa, too, as “the dark destiny of the Japanese people.” What disturbed these writers about the prewar period was less the phenomenon of ultranationalism or of fascism than the fact that the people submitted, easily and in good faith, to the excesses of leadership. Where historians of the preceding generation, like Maruyama Masao, had sought to explain the political decisions and behavior of those in power, this group wanted to ferret out—and exterminate—the social values that allowed and encouraged those politics to succeed.

To exorcise “the remnants of the emperor system” from contemporary society, these scholars turned first to examine the period during which these values were made orthodox. As university students in the late forties and early fifties, both Kano and Irokawa wrote their graduation theses on Meiji history, and the subject still remains central to their work. Kano's major study in Meiji intellectual history, Shihonshugi keiseiki no chitsujo ishiki [The consciousness of social order in the formative period of capitalism], was published in 1969; Irokawa's fourth and most recent version of what has now become his masterwork, the Shinpen Meiji seishinsbi, appeared in 1973, twenty-six years after he first began ro write an intellectual—or more literally, spiritual—history of the Meiji period. The early concern of these scholars with the prewar value system that dominated their own childhood developed over the years into a quest for ways to study the social and intellectual structures in which all popular values are necessarily embedded.

If the war set these writers the negative task of reviving a population made prostrate before authority, they found in the Security Treaty Crisis of i960 the first positive signs that the Japanese people might be roused to effective political action. Just as for many educated youth of the time, the “Anpo” protests served the minshūshi scholars as a kind of political and ideological rites de passage. Not the treaty itself, but the fate of postwar democracy seemed at stake, and the vast potential power of the people the only force that could redeem it. Though political realities failed them, the image of popular action survived to inform their scholarship, and in the wake of Anpo the message and methods of people's history began to emerge.

In November of i960 Irokawa wrote the first of his essays on the Poor People's Party (Konmintō) in the Kantō area. Formed at the local level by peasant leaders in the early 1880s, the Poor People's Party represented the lowest socioeconomic stratum involved in the struggle for people's rights in the Meiji period. Irokawa contrasted the composition of this popular protest group with the nationally organized Liberal Party (Jiyūtō), led, not by the people, but by a rising political elite. Inspired by the possibility of popular politics during Anpo, Irokawa had begun to scan Japanese history for instances of effective grass roots political organization.⁵ Kano responded to the treaty protests of i960 by turning away from his earlier studies of representative thinkers like Fukuzawa Yukichi to consider the ways in which the state affected the everyday life of the people.⁶ And Yasumaru Yoshio, who first articulated the methods of popular history, criticized the prevailing approaches to Japanese modernization in 1960, and by 1965, produced the article that has become almost a manifesto for popular historians. In it he urged scholars to concentrate on “the vast constructive energies created among the people” as the most profound modernizing force. Not only political and economic analyses, he argued, but attention to the constant “self-formation and self-forging” of the popular spirit was necessary to an understanding of Japan's modernizing process.⁷Thus Yasumaru undertook to study popular values and their relation to daily life and community social structure, concentrating on popular religions and folk morality of the Tokugawa period. In the early and mid-sixties most of these essays in minshūshi were suffused with a moderate populist optimism generated by the experience of Anpo, but as the decade progressed, the attitudes toward contemporary society changed by stages into a mood of deepening populist gloom.

Where the word Anpo had inspired these writers, the less sonorous, eventually more significant slogan of the sixties, “high growth economy,” depressed them. They used the phrase to refer to the ills that modern industrial society had visited upon Japan—pollution, the declining quality of urban life, the materialistic devotion to the GNP, and a general sense of dehumanization and helplessness among the members of a mass society.⁸ It appeared to them that a postwar orthodoxy had replaced the prewar one, and it resembled the “rich country, strong army” means to a “great nation” end that had characterized the Meiji period.⁹ If the people did not muster their resources, the massive bureaucratic machine might engulf them once again. By the early seventies the writers seemed less sanguine about the possibilities of mass action, Anpo-style, but even more determined to search the past for models of popular political behavior. In 1973 Irokawa looked to the popular past as “a potential source of energy to revitalize a debilitated modern Japanese culture.”¹⁰ Perhaps history could help save modern Japan from itself.

The war, Anpo, the contemporary superstate—these are the factors that contributed to the collective political consciousness of the new generation of popular historians. But the minshūshi writers form a school not only because they were born in the same decade and influenced by the same historical events. It is equally characteristic that they hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Contents
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Volume Introduction
• Orientalism and the Study of Japan
• The People in History: Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography
• Toward a History of Twentieth-Century Japan
• The Useful War
• Japan’s Delayed Surrender: A Reinterpretation
• Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory
• The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches: Japanese and American Perspectives of the A-Bomb Decision 1945–1995
• Reflections on the Occupation of Japan
• American Democratization Policy for Occupied Japan: Correcting the Revisionist Version
• A Rejoinder
• The Japanese Constitution: Child of the Cold War
• U.S. Policy in Post-War Japan: The Retreat from Liberalism
• The Debate on Subjectivity in Postwar Japan: Foundations of Modernism as a Political Critique
• Party Politics and the Japanese Labor Movement: Rengo’s “New Political Force”
• The Imperial Bureaucracy and Labor Policy in Postwar Japan
• Japan: The End of One-Party Dominance
• The Unraveling of Japan Inc.: Multinationals as Agents of Change
• Japan’s Non-Revolution
• Japan’s Diet Resolution on World War Two: Keeping History at Bay
• A Journalist’s Perspective on Postwar Japan
• Acknowledgments