- Convenor:
-
Aya Hino
(Ruhr University Bochum)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Maj Hartmann
(KU Leuven)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- History
Short Abstract
This panel examines how time has been mobilised as a form of political power to legitimise certain future visions while foreclosing others, by tracing changes in chronopolitics from imperial ideology and utopian imaginaries of Manchukuo, through postwar futurology, to today’s party politics.
Long Abstract
The relationship between modernity and the future has always been more contested than narratives of simple progress suggest. While the early 20th century saw dominant visions of the future as an ever-expanding "horizon of expectation" tied to prosperity and knowledge accumulation (Koselleck 1979), this confidence was challenged by mid-century through the Frankfurt School's dialectic of enlightenment, neo-Malthusian anxieties about population and resources, and critical futurologists questioning whether technological progress inevitably meant human flourishing. Since the turn of the 21st century, these anxieties have intensified into what some describe as a "slow cancellation of the future" (Berardi 2009), with progressive visions increasingly displaced by ecological catastrophe, wealth disparity, and political disillusionment.
Japan's recent history offers a rich site for examining these shifting temporal politics. This panel traces transformations in how the future has been imagined, contested, and instrumentalised, with particular focus on chronopolitics—how politics intervenes in time to establish temporal registers of past, present, and future; constitutes relationships between these registers; and legitimises certain visions while foreclosing others. Four papers address chronopolitics through empirically grounded analyses: how the political centre sought to legitimise a seemingly utopian future of "harmonious" Japanese Empire as an extension of the present marked by violence and subjugation; how Manchukuo was reconceived after the war as both a "lost" utopia and a source for new future imaginaries; how Japanese Future Studies of the 1960s emerged from informal networks of conservative intellectuals to become an institutional force shaping Japan's ideological and technological trajectory; and how today's party politics taps into the affective potential of the past as both source of collective identity and location of Japan's future.
These papers suggest that Japan's politics of time has never been simply about trusting or rejecting the future, but rather about which futures are made imaginable, for whom, and through what forms of power. What has shifted is the multiplication of competing temporalities and the increasing difficulty of establishing any single temporal imaginary as hegemonic. Understanding contemporary chronopolitics requires moving beyond linear narratives, attending instead to how political projects mobilise, contest, and foreclose different relationships between past, present, and future.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how chronopolitics of the Japanese Empire mobilised two competing temporalities – linear temporality flowing from past, present, to future; and teleological temporality with the future reconceiving the past and present – to legitimise its dubious claim to a harmonious empire.
Paper long abstract
In 1940, the Intelligence Bureau of the Japanese Imperial Government circulated a series of propaganda postcards. One postcard, illustrated by prolific political cartoonist Kitazawa Rakuten, depicts individuals in traditional attire—apparently of different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds—happily holding hands in a circle around a Japanese man in a Western-style suit hoisting the Japanese flag. At the bottom of the flagpole is an inscription reading "Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere." This imagined future of a unified, harmonious, co-prosperous empire, however, stands at odds with the reality of military conquests, suppression of dissent, mobilisation of ethnic competition, systems of oppression codified in education and cultural (re)production, and exploitation of resources and labour.
How does politics intervene in time to legitimise this imagined future that is completely detached from present reality and that appears, from our present perspective, utopian? By examining various political speeches and writings from government ranks, this paper reveals two intertwined yet competing temporalities undergirding the future imaginary of the Japanese Empire. On one hand, the future as a temporal category is understood, as in many modernist accounts, in a linear fashion: it comes after the present, which is built upon experiences of the past. On the other hand, however, the future as a projection functions as a teleological end that reconstitutes the past and present as preconditions: the future imaginary of the supposedly "humane" Japanese Empire reconceives the past as the source of its legitimacy and the present as a necessary moment of struggle.
Understanding chronopolitics is not simply about identifying what kinds of futures a political project envisions; more importantly, it is about attending to how time is deployed as a political resource and thus as a form of power. The multiple temporalities undergirding the political imaginary of the Japanese Empire suggest that, through chronopolitics, time, temporal registers, and even the utopian—what Mannheim and others view as a critique of the present—become commodities wielded exclusively by power.
Paper short abstract
Japanese party politics is oversaturated with actors declaring themselves "conservative" to counter a lack of hope among the populace. Drawing on research on politics and time, I investigate how specific temporal registers create or inhibit affective investment in political futures.
Paper long abstract
In a 2024 Gekkan Nihon interview, former Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru and philosopher Nakajima Takeshi observed that contemporary Japanese party politics is oversaturated with actors proclaiming themselves to be "conservative." Across the political spectrum—from Reiwa Shinsengumi on the left to Sanseitō on the right—parties compete to position themselves as guardians of "true conservatism." These competing claims mobilise strikingly divergent nostalgic engagements with the past: the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ) valorises pre-Meiji egalitarian religious syncretism, while the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) appeals to immediate postwar individual self-sufficiency as the essence of Japanese character. This pervasive emphasis on the past and “conservation” suggests a reductive engagement with the future, potentially foreclosing any robust imagination of utopia. Such temporal dynamics take on particular significance given recent scholarship documenting a widespread lack of hope in Japan, especially among younger generations—a phenomenon linked to political disengagement, high levels of distrust, and anti-establishment sentiment (Buchmeier and Vogt 2023; Krauss et al. 2017; Weatherall, Huang, and Whang 2018).
Drawing on post-foundational discourse theory (Marchart 2010; Marttila 2015) and emerging research on politics and time (Caballe 2024; Knott 2024), this paper examines how contemporary political actors who self-identify as "conservative" construct temporal registers—interrelated discursive articulations around signifiers of the past, present, and future—and how these constructions shape or inhibit affective investments in political futures. In doing so, the paper grapples with the following questions: Why do these politics of time generate so little hope? And why do some party discourses succeed while others fail in fostering affective attachment to their future imaginaries? Attending to temporal registers, as the paper seeks to do, offers a productive heuristic for analysing the affective potentials embedded in political actors' divergent temporal engagements. The paper concludes by discussing the ramifications for democracy when particular temporal registers come to dominate political discourse.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the emergence in late 1960s Japan of Future Studies as an anti-Marxist intellectual strategy that developed a new science of the future, competing with New Left politics by reframing Japan’s crisis as one demanding technocratic expertise.
Paper long abstract
In 1967, social scientist Katō Hidetoshi and bureaucrat Hayashi Yūjirō casually suggested that Japan host the next Committee for Mankind 2000 conference. This offhand remark, taken seriously by international futurologists, catalysed the establishment of the Japan Association for Future Studies in 1968 and positioned Japan within a global movement concerned with managing rapid technological and social transformation. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Japanese futurists, this paper examines how Japanese Future Studies emerged from informal networks of conservative intellectuals to become an institutional force in shaping Japan's ideological and technological trajectory. The founding figures – which also included anthropologist Umesao Tadao, critic Kawazoe Noboru, and science fiction writer Komatsu Sakyō – envisioned Japan’s transition from what Hayashi termed a ‘hard to soft society’, imagining post-industrial futures centred on information-based economic structures and social harmony. To realise this vision, they set about developing a new science of the future itself.
But crucially, Future Studies must also be understood as a strategic intellectual response to Marxist hegemony in postwar academia. During the late 1960s, New Left movements convulsed Japan's universities and streets, challenging both Cold War structures and the alienating forces of advanced capitalism. New Left thinkers argued for the rupture of linear temporality and programmatic thinking altogether. In response, the futurists constructed an alternative crisis narrative: Japan's transformation represented not a crisis of capitalism requiring revolutionary politics, but a crisis of imagination demanding new forms of technocratic expertise. By appropriating claims to scientific authority, Future Studies therefore provided anti-Marxist academics with frameworks for envisioning ‘desirable futures’ that could compete with both the utopian appeal of socialism and the radical temporal politics of the New Left.
Yet this anti-Marxist intellectual positioning did not emerge in a vacuum. This paper situates Future Studies within longer genealogies of technocratic governance stretching from the utopian imaginaries of prewar Manchuria through Cold War institutions like the Policy Science Research Group. By analysing how these futurists mobilised sociotechnical imaginaries in service of particular political visions, this research illuminates the complex relationship between scientific expertise, future-oriented planning, and anti-communist intellectual strategy in postwar Asia.
Paper short abstract
Manchukuo attracted diverse utopian projections in the 1930s-40s. This paper examines how photographs from that era functioned as material sites in post-war temporal negotiations, revealing Manchukuo's symbolic role as a "lost" utopia and as an inspiration for reimagining the future.
Paper long abstract
During the early 1930s, the puppet state of Manchukuo became a site for intellectuals, artists, and bureaucrats from diverse political and ideological backgrounds to project their utopian visions. Contradictory notions of Manchukuo coexisted: as an earthly paradise for a multi-ethnic, harmonious society, but also as an experimental ground for techno-fascist dreams favouring modernisation through rationalisation and social reorganisation (Mimura 2011; Moore 2013).
Even after the fall of the Japanese Empire, Manchukuo’s legacy persisted in career trajectories of politicians and technocrats who had formative experiences there, and in the technological imaginaries they carried forward (Moore 2009; Yang 2010). Manchukuo thus represents continuity between the pre-war and post-war periods, which are otherwise viewed as disjunctive, given the supposedly radical post-war political, ideological, social, and economic transformations.
This paper analyses how Manchukuo functions as a location for post-war chronopolitics by treating photographs from the 1930s and 1940s as sites for temporal negotiation. Manchurian amateur photographers and prominent metropolitan photojournalists - including Kimura Ihei, Horino Masao, Kuwabara Kineo, and Hayama Hiroshi - produced rich repertoires documenting the development of the multi-ethnic puppet state, its industrialisation, and ‘pioneering’ Japanese settlers building new lives. These images presented Manchukuo as embodying idealised visions of imperial and universal progress, capturing utopian expectations and desires that continued to resonate in post-war contexts when many of the original materials were republished and reinterpreted by the photographers themselves and by audiences.
Rather than merely viewing photographs as windows into the past, these photographers and audiences found in these images of Manchukuo links to the post-war present and to the future. By examining selected photography publications and their reception, the paper identifies two symbolic functions of Manchukuo: as a ‘lost’ utopia and as a source of new (utopian) imaginaries. Photographs of Manchukuo are thus material objects through which the meaning of the past was renegotiated and pressed into the future.