Reconsidering Postwar Japanese History: A Handbook

Clear the decks and prepare for boarders aiming to junk orthodox versions on contemporary Japan and its historians.

If "Reconsidering Postwar Japanese History: A Handbook" editor Simon Avenell and his crew have their way, things need to be massively changed and fast. Their mission is to critically debate multiple aspects of the near eight decades since Imperial Japan surrendered in the late summer of 1945.

It is a brave bid that brings in just about every topic under the rising sun from the occupation to education, from manga to consumer culture and from political parties to the U.S.-Japan alliance.

What gives at least a degree of unity to the chapters is the editor's determination to make his authors consider the immensely challenging question of how and when "postwar Japan has been understood and narrated to date". Does it, in other words make sense to claim that Japan's postwar era is really over - as folks have been claiming for decades- or should we all wait for future changes before finally agreeing that we can finally print in extra bold letters "The End" ?

The quick answer to where Japan stands today on the shifts since defeat is surely "it depends". Much has indeed changed, yet there remain major objections to claiming that the postwar era is really over. and that the only thing lacking is a decent burial and memorial service by a brave and competent team of historians.

Clearly the vast contrast between the Tokyo of rubble and despondency in 1945 with the skyscrapers and expressways of 2023 is unarguable. Apartments may be small and local parks few and far between but the economic transformation is obvious. The textbooks on Japan's high growth era from the mid-1950s to super power status by 1990 were correct, though all the talk of subsequent "lost decades" seems a bit overdone when the country is put in its current and enviable international context.

What is lacking, however, in the handbook is any real sense of where the responsibility for the achievements and flops of the "miracle" era and after lies - we rightly get plenty on the nation's environmental faults and astute analysis of the changing power balance within the near ever present Liberal Democratic Party but the tentacles and decision-making of Japan's bureaucracy is largely ignored. Postwar Japan without the Ministry of Finance and the once mighty Ministry of International Trade and Industry before it was renamed and demoted is to imagine that politicians not only reign but actually rule both at the centre and down to the local ward offices.

Yes, Japan is infinitely richer and its assertions at the recent G7 summit in Hiroshima that it is a liberal democracy that supports a rule-based international order can generally be supported but the heart of the bureaucracy-LDP-business federations "iron triangle" remains its entrenched civil service. Officialdom still runs the show, though the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made real gains for cabinet-led government.

Equally, it is questionable whether the postwar can be said to be over when the U.S.-Japan alliance system is being rapidly strengthened. New weaponry and new statements on what Tokyo will defend in its neighborhood is largely thanks to China's own goal in reckoning that it can dynamite the alliance and see Washington's retreat from what is now termed the vast Indo-Pacific stretching from California to east Africa. This is not about to happen, though the basing of much of the U.S. military in Okinawa remains a running sore to many in the prefecture.

"Reconsidering Postwar Japanese History" is a highly ambitious handbook covering topics as varied as public opinion polls, so-called talent shows and fraught, unresolved war memories. It deliberately downplays the Allied occupation, underlines the failure to move beyond "the prevailing template of male breadwinner and female homemaker" on the gender front and notes how for all the sound and fury from some in the LDP camp there has not been and probably will not be revisions to the 1947 Constitution.

The volume's overall conclusion is to argue for "multiple postwars". where each and every topic under careful research has its own individual periodization.

This may well be nearer the truth than carrying on with the old post-1945 tram lines where GDP is god, the nation is conservative and stoutly insular but a novel coherent synthesis it ain't. The temptation, as always, is to denounce the old without carving out a new, comprehensive narrative. The tough challenge for historians today is to digest and then go beyond the revisionism on parade in this Handbook - the rewards would be enormous.

"Reconsidering Postwar Japanese History: A Handbook"

(ed) Simon Avenell (Japan Documents, Tokyo, 2023, pp 375)

Simon Avenell is Professor in the School of Culture, History, and Language at the Australian National University.

© Japan Today