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- Convenors:
-
Max Ward
(Middlebury College)
Reto Hofmann (Curtin University)
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- Discussant:
-
Louise Young
(University of Wisconsin-Madison)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- History
- Location:
- Lokaal 1.11
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel challenges established historiographical assumptions about postwar Japan and explores new horizons for research including in postwar political, cultural, and intellectual history. The papers present new ways to understand the nature of postwar Japan up to the present.
Long Abstract:
The historiography on postwar Japan has generally been framed within overlapping binaries, including: change and continuity across the 1945 divide, the relationship of Japan and the United States, or the Cold War in Asia versus Japanese pacifism. This panel challenges this set of binaries by focusing instead on processes of reinvention. It does so in light of the recent work on empire and de-imperialization, a transition which profoundly shaped the remaking of the Japanese state, nation, and economy. The three papers of this panel present new research that changes our understanding of crucial dynamics that cut across the twentieth-century and defined postwar Japan in profound ways. In the first paper, Kim Brandt addresses the role of mass consumerism and nationalism in generating the high economic growth of the 1960s, or Japan's so-called economic miracle. While conventionally consumerism is seen as a symptom of a depoliticized subject, this paper shows how consumerist nationalism—or nationalist consumerism—developed in the 1950s to mobilize society once again for international competition. In the second paper, Reto Hofmann examines how the Japanese Right came out of empire. Contrary to the common impression that the architects of the wartime New Order faded away, the paper illustrates the extent to which they contributed to the making of the postwar ruling class and its political culture. In the third paper, Max Ward analyzes the writings of police official and security specialist Sassa Atsuyuki, and reads his work not simply as a postwar history of the police but as figuring the police as both the subject of Japan's postwar history as well as central to the broader Cold War order. Discussing the papers, Louise Young will bring attention to the meaning of "post" as a shedding of the discredited skin of defeat: a nationalism remade as consumerism, conservative establishment reinventing itself, and the idea of policing rescued from the tarnished police state.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -Max Ward (Middlebury College)
Paper short abstract:
Challenging conventional depictions of the postwar Japanese police, this paper explores the writings of police official Sassa Atsuyuki, arguing that his writings depict the police as both the central subject of Japan’s postwar history as well as operating within a broader Cold War order.
Paper long abstract:
Studies of the postwar Japanese police usually approach the agency as both severed from prewar institutions and practices, as well as isolated from international trends in Cold War policing. In both approaches, the police serve as a kind of synecdoche for understanding the particularities of Japan, presented as embodying distinct cultural attributes informing the professionalism, efficiency, or social networks that made postwar Japan what one foreign observer called “heaven for a cop.” However, what is missing in these analyses is not only attention to how the legacy of prewar policing informed the postwar police, but also the global context that Japanese police officials saw themselves as operating within. To challenge these approaches, I turn to the writings of police official and security expert Sassa Atsuyuki (1930-2018) who wrote voluminously on his international travels, collaborations, and experience overseeing some of the most important domestic police operations in the postwar period. I argue that Sassa’s writings are not simply a history of the police, but present the police as both the subject of Japan’s postwar history as well as operating within a broader Cold War order. When read critically, Sassa’s writings allow us to reconsider Japan’s place within the Cold War, how legacies of the prewar informed representations of the postwar police, and the central but often overlooked importance of police power in shaping postwar Japan.
Kim Brandt (Columbia University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the "Japan Boom," or the 1950s popularity of goods and services celebrating native culture, to show how the postwar development of consumerist nationalism--or nationalist consumerism--contributed to Japan's transwar rise as a world power.
Paper long abstract:
My paper examines what I am calling the “Japan Boom,” or the 1950s popularity of goods and services celebrating native culture, to argue that for many ordinary Japanese, the acquisition of habits of consumption beyond the subsistence level was closely linked to nationalism. In making this argument, I seek to deepen our understanding of the so-called economic miracle of the 1960s. The conventional account of Japan’s recovery after defeat and occupation has long focused on rising industrial productivity and U.S. patronage, with emphasis on the export of manufactured goods to Western markets. Until recently, the rapid growth of a domestic market for such goods was largely taken for granted—much as if consumerism were a natural outcome of growth, rather than a basic factor driving it. In somewhat similar fashion, the tendency has been to assume that popular Japanese nationalism (re)emerged as a consequence of economic growth, rather than preceding or even promoting it. By exploring the linkage between early postwar consumerism and nationalism, I show how consumerist nationalism—or nationalist consumerism—developed in the 1950s to mobilize society once again for international competition and the drive to global status and power.
Reto Hofmann (Curtin University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the Japanese imperial Right transitioned into the postwar period. In so doing, the paper sheds new light on the extent to which the Right was able to influence the political culture of democratic Japan.
Paper long abstract:
Recent scholarship has given us a substantial understanding of the makers of empire—those right-wing intellectuals, politicians, and bureaucrats who, from the early 1930s, militated for a New Order at home and in Asia. We know little, however, about how this cohort transitioned into the postwar years. This paper examines how the imperial Right found ways to reintegrate itself into the political culture of the 1950s and 1960s. It focuses on Yabe Teiji (1902-1967), a political scientist and government advisor, showing how he reformulated anxieties over democracy, kokutai, and communism that dated from the 1920s for the new age. In showing his enduring belligerent spirit, the paper argues that after World War II, old authoritarian ideals coexisted with progressive emancipatory ones, a tension that remained at the heart of postwar Japanese political history.