What is a normal Japan?

Japan’s engagement with the question of its identity during the Cold War was somewhat introspective, as it struggled to come to terms with the consequences of its attempts to ‘overcome modernity’ and its defeat in the Pacific War. However, the 1990s saw Japan emerge from beneath its sheltered position under the US umbrella and throw itself into the new post-Cold War international system. Whilst it would certainly be an exaggeration to compare the early 1990s with the mid-1850s, there is some leverage to be gained from the idea that Japan affected genuine shifts in perspective at both times:
from largely domestic issues to concerns about Japan’s identity and role in a new world order. Indeed, in both cases, Japan was pulled out of its interiority by the twin demands of the USA and the imperatives of the emerging international society: in 1854, by Perry’s ‘black ships’ and the imperial trade regimes, and in 1991 by President George Bush’s pressure on Japan to contribute troops to the UN-sanctioned force in Kuwait. In both cases, Japan’s response to this external pressure (or gaiatsu) was conflicted, uncertain, and slow, as decision-makers and the public debated how and whether Japan should take up its new responsibilities on the international stage. In 1991, under tremendous pressure, Japan prevaricated and then sent 13 billion dollars instead of personnel.

Since 1947, Japan’s foreign policy had been tame and low profile, and its orientation towards security issues had been guided by the famous ‘peace clause’ (Article 9) of its constitution, which meant that it had not engaged in any significant military activity and was ostensibly forbidden from doing so.

The US–Japan Security Treaty had effectively insulated Japan from the need to think too seriously about its role in the ‘high politics’ of the international system.

The combination of Japan’s ‘peace constitution’, its US-tutelage, and its so-called ‘nuclear allergy’, which followed on from the horrific experience of being the world’s first and only victims of atomic bombings, fed into a dominant discourse of ‘anti-militarism’, or even pacifism, in the postwar period. On the international stage, Japan had sought to represent itself as an icon of ‘civilian’ or ‘merchant’ power, self-consciously and deliberately eschewing the trappings of military, Great Power status. For Japan’s neighbours, who were understandably wary of a re-armed Japan, this had been good news throughout the Cold War. However, regional criticisms of Japan’s ‘pacifistic’ identity became increasingly prevalent through the 1970s and 1980s, as Japan’s economy bubbled to an astonishing size: pacifism and the nuclear allergy began to look like alibis that sought to transform Japan into a victim of its own history of aggression, hence alleviating the need for it to apologize to its neighbours for its conduct in the first half of the 20th century. 

In other words, the early 1990s brought the question of Japan’s international identity into sharp relief: was Japan really a pacifist polity that consciously chose to avoid military resolutions to international problems, or was this appearance merely a side-effect of the US occupation and then the US–Japan

Security Treaty? An important issue within Japan itself, which was voiced powerfully by the influential politician Ozawa Ichiro, was whether Japan’s apparent anti-militarism actually made it an aberration in the modern world. In his Blueprint for a New Japan (1994), Ozawa famously called on Japan to finally rid itself of its ‘postwar mentality’ and its preoccupation with the legacy of the Pacific War, and to become a ‘normal country’. By this, he meant a country that could take on responsibilities in the international system that were commensurate with its economic status. A popular and emotive example was the claim that Japan, as the second most generous contributor to the United Nations, should have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In concrete terms, he wanted Japan to revise its 

constitution to enable the overseas despatch of the Self Defence Forces as part of UN peace-keeping operations or other mechanisms of international security. In fact, Ozawa was one of the chief architects of the 1992 International Peace Cooperation Law, which finally made provision for the (limited) participation of the SDFs in UN peace-keeping operations, albeit too late for the first Gulf War. Japan’s first mission under this law was to Cambodia in 1992.

The question of Japan’s international ‘normalcy’ has been pervasive in politics, society, and culture since the early 1990s, and it remains unresolved to this day. For some commentators, the problem can usefully be phrased in terms of Japan’s twin deficits: first, in terms of the absence of ‘normal’ capabilities (that is, a powerful military together with legal mechanisms, and social will, to employ it); and second, in terms of the absence of ‘normal’ legitimacy in the international system (that is, the

apparent failure of Japan to ‘come to terms with its past’ and to apologize to its neighbours).

In fact, Japan’s capability deficit is something of an illusion. It’s Self Defence Forces are amongst the most technologically advanced military forces in the world. Whilst Japan maintains a strict ‘non-nuclear’ armaments policy, it has long had the necessary technology to construct such weapons, and also a space programme with the necessary delivery technologies. It is true that Japan lacks the capability to project an invasion force overseas, but its defensive capacities are second to none, and it

has a range of ‘over the horizon’ technologies that would facilitate pre-emptive strikes at the Asian mainland. In brief, despite the small size of its SDFs (in terms of personnel and percentage of GDP spent, less than 1%), Japan’s ‘non-military’ is one of the most formidable in the Asia region.

In other words, the real sources of Japan’s ‘capability deficit’ are legal and cultural rather than material, and since Prime Minister Koizumi’s enactment of the Anti-Terrorism Specials Measures Law (2001), which enabled the SDFs to be deployed in support of US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq during the second Gulf War, the legal barriers to Japan’s military actions have been severely diluted. Indeed, the discrepancy between Japan’s flexible interpretation of its ‘peace constitution’ and the letter of Article 9

has led many to demand the revision of the constitution itself, to bring it in line with reality. This type of criticism often leads to cynical accusations that Japan’s ostensible ‘pacifism’ has more to do with public relations than substance, and that Japan is clinging to its self-constructed image as a victim of World War II for its own advantage.

This brings us to the question of Japan’s ‘legitimacy deficit’, which has been a central, volatile, and pervasive issue since the 1990s until the present day. In many ways, it boils down to the accusation that Japan and the Japanese are somehow in denial about their own history, or that they have not ‘come to terms with their past’ because of their privileged position under US patronage during the Cold War. Hence, the end of the Cold War provided an occasion for exposing, and hopefully addressing,

this problem, which effectively ties the legitimacy of Japan’s contemporary international role to the question of its ability to examine its responsibility for the Pacific War. Because this issue is so central to the themes of identity and modernity, and because it remains a ‘living issue’ for contemporary Japan,

we should spend some time on it here.

Bubbling into postmodernity

Elsewhere in the world, the miraculous growth of the Japanese economy was exciting a range of reactions. While the rest of the planet laboured under stagflation, recession, and unemployment in the wake of the oil shocks of 1973 and 1978, the Japanese economy continued to grow through the 1980s
at about 5% per annum – it had weathered the 1970s through a combination of exploiting the elasticity of its so-called ‘dual economy’, industrial restructuring (away from heavier industries), energy diversification, and creative off-shoring. At the end of the 1980s, the Tokyo stockmarket was worth 40% of the world’s market; land prices in Japan were ludicrously high (for a while the land under the city of Tokyo was worth more than Canada).
At one extreme, Japan was represented as a threatening global monster that was intent on forging a massive postwar empire, simply substituting yen for the bullets of the co-prosperity sphere: the phenomenon of ‘Japan bashing’ became commonplace in the USA. At the other extreme, Japan was seen as a mystical and inspiring model for economic development, and a range of populist books were published that claimed to unlock the secret connections between Japanese work ethics, Confucian organization, the spirit of bushido, and business success. The world clamoured around the invented image of  the salaryman-samurai.
Meanwhile, in Japan, despite claims that the vast majority of the population was now a homogeneous middle class with shared life-goals and equal access to the resources of an affluent state, the Japanese society that entered the 1980s and 1990s was still unsure of its place in the world. The Nihonjinron industry boomed, as the Japanese population consumed hundreds of treatises that sought to explain the uniqueness of the Japanese people from ethnic, psychological, sociological, and religious perspectives. The new generation came to be called a new species (shin jinrui). They were confident and proud of Japan’s affluence, but never having known the hardships of the previous generation, they were complacent about the wealth. The banks made casual loans: very famously the Industrial Bank of Japan lent an Osaka woman 2 billion dollars against a small chain of restaurants, which she proceeded to lose on the stockmarket after taking financial advice from her psychic. In the end, it turned out that she had faked the ownership deeds on the restaurants. Corruption in business and politics seemed to be growing, and the people lost faith in their politicians after the drama of the Lockheed Scandal in 1985 and then the Recruit Scandal in 1988, the repercussions of which would contribute to the brief fall from power of the LDP in 1993, for the first time since its establishment in 1955.

This ‘new species’ of Japanese citizen was not content to quietly and selflessly dedicate its life to Japan’s economic growth, and it complained about the long hours of work and the lack of time to enjoy the spoils of Japan’s affluence. The term karoshi (death from overwork) became a commonplace, and emergency hotlines were even established to try to prevent the overworked from breaking down or committing suicide. At the same time, the previous generations complained that the ‘new species’ had lost all social consciousness and discipline, the characteristics that had defined their postwar identities.

Instead of dedicating themselves to a single company in ‘lifetime employment’ arrangements, the new species were increasingly furitaa, seeking freelance work with a sequence of employers to enable them to travel and to fit their work around the demands of the rest of their lives. This emphasis on leisure and ways of forming identities that were not dependent upon work found expression in the creation of multiple ‘micro-masses’ or subcultures: office ladies and college girls adopted a new form of the ‘moga’ (modern girl), defining a subculture in terms of rampant consumerism, and building their identities amidst designer handbags, European shoes, and stylized haircuts. In the 1990s, this movement became associated with the phenomenon of enjo kosai, ‘compensated dating’, which labelled the practice of young girls (often of school age) dating older men in return for being bought the latest consumer

goods. Although, in general, the moga was a leisure-time identity: at work or in school, the same moga would present themselves impeccably in their uniforms. This subculture and its moral experimentation is captured in the work of authors such as Yoshimoto Banana, whose name is deliberately as

ludicrous in Japanese as in English. 

Alongside the moga were other subcultures, such as the iconic ‘otaku’ (geek): usually young men who became obsessively interested in one topic or another – frequently ‘anti-social’ activities such as computer games, anime, or manga, which the otaku would collect in vast numbers, perhaps spending the weekend engaged in ‘cosplay’ reconstructions of their favourite characters.

The development of these new consumerist subcultures touched off what some have referred to as the ‘otaku panic’. Despite evidence that the moga and the otaku continued to function in their jobs and continued to work longer hours than nearly every other society on the planet (with the exception of South Korea), critics argued that these micro-masses demonstrated the ‘hollowing out’ of Japanese society and culture. The older generations feared for the moral and cultural collapse of their

nation. A conservative drive to preserve a more traditional Japan emphasized the need for people to get out of the sprawling urban centres and to ‘discover Japan’ by visiting rural areas, which were still less transformed by the postwar boom. This nostalgia and romanticization of the countryside was accompanied by genuine growth in domestic tourism. However, for creative intellectuals such as Yoshimoto Takaaki (the father of Banana), these social movements revealed that Japanese society was moving through modernity and out the other side, into a postmodern condition in which individuals were no longer slaves to the material expectations of their society, but in which they were free to define the meaning of their lives for themselves. Postmodern Japan was about individual people, and not about Japan at all.

This mood was captured in the work of the world-famous novelist Murakami Haruki, whose important duology, A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance, Dance, Dance provided bookends for the 1980s. One of the central themes of these best-selling, postmodern novels is the way in which individuality is consistently destroyed by the homogenizing imperatives of the system itself. For instance, the eponymous ‘sheep’ is a sinister presence that inhabits the minds of people like a supernatural parasite and gradually eliminates its host’s personality, replacing it with its own; the host enjoys a sense of power and comfort that accompanies this possession, and in particular comes to feel free of any sense of responsibility for his/her actions. As a critique of the totalizing national culture that Murakami and others perceived in Japan, the sheep is a powerful symbol. At some point all the possessed characters must choose whether

to surrender the last vestiges of their personalities to the sheep, or to fight it and expel it. Those who choose the latter become tragic figures: they go insane or commit suicide, while the sheep simply moves on to someone else. In one interpretation, the micro-masses of the 1980s and 1990s appear to be

fighting the sheep. In another, the sheep is not conservative Japanese culture, but rather commercialism itself, in which case the micro-masses are as possessed by it as anyone else.

There is no escape.

This feeling of despair became characteristic of the so-called ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s, after the collapse of the bubble economy and the death of the Showa emperor in 1989. Unable to sustain the artificially inflated and over-confident economy, the stockmarket crashed and Japan’s cultural confidence was dented. Despite remaining the world’s second largest economy and running trade surpluses with nearly all of its trading partners, society’s faith in the sheep and in the politicians (already

shaky amidst the corruption scandals of the 1980s) was shattered. 

At the same time, with the end of the Cold War, there was unprecedented international pressure on Japan to take a more active and leading role in world affairs: Japan’s indecisive (and entirely financial) response to the First Gulf War in 1991 only served to underline the fact that Japan had still not come

to terms with a coherent postwar identity.

The mid-1990s saw a succession of crises that triggered deeper self-reflection about Japan’s identity and role. If the place of Japan in the US-led world order was brought into question during the Gulf War, this question became painfully personalized in 1995 when three US servicemen kidnapped and

raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl. This incident restarted the perennial debate about why the USA should still be allowed to maintain bases in Japan, now that Japan was a powerful country in its own right. In the same year, a group of revisionist intellectuals started the Liberal View of History Group, which sought to revise society’s perception of Japan’s 20th-century history in a way that would allow the Japanese to be proud of its ambitions and conduct during the Great East Asia War. For some, such as the influential writer and critic Kato Norihiro, Japan’s treatment of its past and its identity bordered on being pathological: under pressure from the USA in the postwar period, Japanese society had become sick, masochistic, and schizophrenic – what was needed was a frank discussion about

what Japan’s real identity was. 

However, two other crises in the same year shook Japan even more. In January of 1995 a massive earthquake that killed over 6,000 people and left 300,000 homes in ruins hit the city of Kobe. And then, on 20 March, the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo launched the infamous sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo

underground, killing 12 people and injuring more than 5,000.

The people of Japan were stunned by the sequence of events, and the inefficient responses of the government further undermined public confidence in the establishment. Murakami Haruki attempted to give reason to the madness in two short books about the events. In After the Quake, he provides a cluster of short stories that discuss possible causes of the earthquake: was it a natural disaster in the ‘end times’ to punish Japan for the frivolities of the 1980s? Was it caused by moral decay – by the jealousy of a married women whose husband was cheating on her? Or was it caused by the awakening of a giant worm under the city that had been feeding on greed and hate for several decades?

Identity crisis

Although most famous for his ‘income-doubling plan’ and for being called a ‘transistor salesman’ by Charles de Gaulle, Ikeda was certainly one of the most important prime ministers in the history of postwar Japan. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was the achievement of a ‘politics of patience

and reconciliation’ that unified the Japanese people behind the project of economic growth. Under Ikeda, the question of Japan’s military role was side-lined and society occupied itself with getting rich peacefully.

However, as became apparent in the 1980s, man cannot survive on affluence only, and after the drama of the 1950s, with the sun-tribe a decade older, the question of Japan’s national identity was once more on the agenda. At this time, the nation’s mood was well reflected in the work of the famous novelist Kawabata Yasunari, who was awarded the Bunka kunsho (medal of culture) from the emperor in 1961 and then the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968 (making him the first Japanese writer to receive it).

Kawabata’s often beautiful novels have been described as elegies to a lost Japan. Critics often point to Snow Country and Thousand Cranes as his masterpieces. They contain traditional aesthetics and serve as romantic re-imagings of Japan as a specific type of traditional beauty that is endangered, or at least sullied, by the modern world. Indeed, Kawabata appears to have thought of himself as a conduit through which traditional Japanese culture could be preserved and transmitted to the postwar

generations. Furthermore, Kawabata’s work was easily palatable for an international audience, since it represented Japan in an exotic and unthreatening way that appealed to Western audiences.

The 1950s and 1960s saw many of his novels translated into English, and ironically his international fame was part of the reason for his domestic fame. The contrast with Ishihara’s work in the 1950s could not be more stark.

An indication of the way in which attitudes had changed towards a Japanese identity that rested upon martial valour and violence is the case of Kawabata’s contemporary and friend, the writer Mishima Yukio. Mishima had shot to fame in the 1950s after a series of astonishing and complex novels, such as Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Forbidden Colours, and Confessions of a Mask.

He dealt with daring themes, such as homosexuality and the relationship between sex and violence. As the 1950s drew on, Mishima became increasingly interested in his body and the martial arts; he took up body-building, kendo, and boxing, and started to present himself in the manner of a movie star. In

hindsight, various biographers have wondered whether this was the onset of some form of masochistic, narcissistic disorder.

Like Kawabata, Mishima also believed that his life and work should somehow represent Japan. However, whilst the two great novelists shared a delicate sense of beauty, their visions of Japan were radically different. For Mishima, the Ampo was a real turning point. Rather than representing the end of a problematic and violent decade that risked undermining Japanese democracy – which was the realization that encouraged many readers to turn to Kawabata – Mishima was mostly concerned with the way that Japanese society had recoiled from Kishi’s vision of Japan as a land of martial valour. Immediately following the crisis, Mishima published a little volume called Patriotism, in which he set out what he thought it should mean to love Japan. 

His next works, The Sword and Sun and Steel, were devoted to explorations of the aesthetics of violence, and he announced that the goal of his life was to acquire the characteristics of a true

Japanese warrior – bunburyodo (the way of the warrior and the scholar combined). At about the same time, his book Patriotism was made into a film, produced and starred in by Mishima himself.

So great was his fame that when he requested special permission to train with the Jieitai (the Self Defence Forces) from his friend Prime Minister Sato, he was granted it. At the same time, the

literary establishment started to distance itself from his views.

In interviews he spoke about the tragedy that the emperor had been forced to renounce his divinity after the war, and asserted that the wartime kokutai (national polity) had been the authentic Japan – the Americans had emasculated the country and ruined its spirit. He argued that the postwar period had left the Japanese confused about their values, and that this was the perfect time to revive the traditional Japanese ideal of bushido (the way of the warrior). Finally, in 1967 he founded a secret, paramilitary

society called the Tatenokai (the Shield Society). Prime Minister Sato even gave Mishima some funds to help run the group, and future prime minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, then defence agency chief, granted the Tatenokai free access to all Jieitai facilities in Japan in 1970.

Meanwhile, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations pulsed around Japan’s cities, overflowing into peace rallies, and running parallel to student activism. In the spring of 1969, many university campuses were closed down because of student protests about Vietnam, about Ampo, and about tuition fees. On the campus of Tokyo University, the protests were violent and a number of professors were literally held hostage and interrogated in lecture halls, including the eminent political scientist Maruyama Masao.

Excited by the activism, Mishima visited the students in Tokyo, but was disappointed by their motives.

On 25 November 1970, Mishima and a group of Tatenokai infiltrated a military base in Tokyo and took General Mashita Kanetoshi hostage, while Mishima himself stood out on the balcony to speak to the assembled troops. He told the Jieitai that the real Japan had been killed by talk of liberty and democracy, that the emperor had been humiliated by the Americans, and that they – the military – held the future of Japan in their hands. As an example of the weakness and ignorance of the politicians, he stated that the Jieitai should have been sent in against the student demonstrators at Tokyo University in the previous year (instead of the riot police). 

His dramatic speech received no response from the troops, who could barely hear him. Then he returned to the general’s office, where he committed seppuku in the traditional way and killed himself, apparently because he could not live in a Japan that had been so polluted and compromised by Western modernity. It must be said that Mishima was an extreme case, and that neither his actions nor his views elicited much support in Japan.

Indeed, the overall reaction appears to have been one of incomprehension. Prime Minister Sato, Mishima’s friend and benefactor, was reputed to have responded that he assumed that Mishima had gone insane. And Mishima remains a controversial figure to this day. However, the existence of a cultural space between Kawabata (who also committed suicide a couple of years later) and Mishima serves to indicate the dimensions of Japan’s identity crisis throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Both called for a return to traditional Japanese values amidst rapid economic development and the creation of a consumer society, but they could not agree on what those values might be.

The economic boom

The early postwar period witnessed incredible change in Japanese society, perhaps paralleled in scale only by the transformations of the early Meiji period. Indeed, the question of Japan’s identity in the new world order that was emerging from the wreckage of World War II was just as real and vital as the question had been when Japan had entered the modern world in the 19th century.

And a number of the issues were the same: Japan found itself impoverished and at the mercy of the Great Powers of the West, now the superpower of the USA; it found its traditions devastated and a new way of life being urged upon it, with the promise of great riches and power. The parallels were not lost on everyone. For some, the end of the wartime regime and the advent of a pacifistic and democratic constitution represented an opportunity to break with the past and to forge a new Japan.

For the majority, struggling to come to terms with what had happened, what had been lost, and what might be gained, there was a complex web of imperatives for continuity with the past and change in the present. For the first time in Japanese history, choices about the future seemed to lie in the hands of the masses themselves. The 1950s and 1960s were culturally and politically volatile decades, even as they were economically miraculous. In a characteristically pragmatic move, the majority of the people threw themselves into industry to rebuild their nation, whatever it would turn out to be. In the early 1950s, the

Japanese government sought to kick-start the process with its first ‘rationalization’ drive, targeted at the core industries of steel, iron, and coal mining. The metals industry, fed by nearly ¥750 billion, exploded. The amazing growth, which made the ruined postwar Japanese steel industry into the second most profitable in the world before 1959 (behind the USA), was fed not only by the tremendous demand from US forces in Korea but also by the steady influx of new technologies from Europe and the USA.

Because Japan did not have to invest in research and development (since ready-made technology could be bought in from outside), growth was rapid.

The growth in the metals industry had a knock-on effect in other industries, such as shipbuilding and (later) automobiles. In terms of shipping, Japan already had a tradition (it was the world’s third largest manufacturer in 1935) but its resources had been ruined by the war. Again, partly in response to the demand triggered by the Korean War and partly due to the influx of new technology, Japan was able to rapidly form a new shipbuilding capability. By 1960, Japan was the world’s largest shipbuilding

nation. By 1975, nearly 50% of the world’s new ships were made in Japan.

Many of the giant Japanese car manufacturers started life in this Korean War boom: Nissan, Toyota, and Isuzu all produced vehicles for the US forces, following US designs, but engineered in Japan. Not only did this lead to tremendous growth in the automobile industry, but it also provided Japanese manufacturers with free technology transfer – which would become crucial in the high-growth 1960s. Domestic demand for cars did not really take off until the early 1960s, since per capita income remained

low: in 1956, Japan produced only 100,000 vehicles for domestic consumption; by 1963, the figure was 1 million; and in the late 1960s, it was closer to 4 million. By 1967, Japan was the world’s

second largest car manufacturer.

It was not only the heavy industries that benefited from the economic boom – increasing national wealth had a knock-on effect in other sectors – this was the birth of consumer Japan. Companies like Hitachi and Matsushita Electric started manufacturing washing machines, televisions, and refrigerators – and production of each increased by at least eight times during the late 1950s. Whilst only 1% of homes had televisions in 1956, by 1960 the figure was more than 50%. If anything, growth in the 1960s was even greater. Prime Minister Ikeda’s famous ‘income-doubling plan’, which was set into motion in 1960, was designed to double Japan’s national wealth in 10 years. In fact, this unprecedentedly ambitious plan underestimated the expansion of the Japanese economy – the GNP tripled between 1960 and 1971, representing an average yearly growth rate of 12.1%. By the end

of the 1960s, Japan no longer had a balance of payments deficit, which had been acting as a periodic drag on growth up until that point.

However, those who like to talk about an ‘economic miracle’ should remember that all industrial economies experienced rapid growth during the period from 1950 to 1970. Growth in itself was not unique, although the speed (more than 10% per year) certainly was. Most commentators attribute this ‘miracle’ to a constellation of very mundane factors: the yen-dollar exchange rate was fixed at 360:1 by the Dodge Line, and it was held artificially at this level until 1971, hence the yen became increasing undervalued, thus stimulating exports; like the rest of the Western world, Japan benefited from a newly liberal trade regime under Bretton Woods and GATT; unlike the rest of the Western world, Japan did not have to spend much of its budget on its military, since it remained sheltered under the US–Japan Security Treaty; as a latecomer amongst the advanced economies, in a liberal trade regime, Japan could buy in new technologies rather than spend time and money on developing them; rapid population growth was accompanied by a tremendous expansion of the education system. Perhaps the most hotly debated ‘unique’ element in Japanese growth was the role of the bureaucracy and economic management. There is a strong case to be made that the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and other ministries (especially the Ministry of Finance, MoF) played a leading role in Japan’s

rapid growth through a formal and informal gyosei shido (administrative guidance). However, a simple factor that should not be forgotten was the hard work, industry, and entrepreneurship of the Japanese people themselves. The quip that the ‘Japanese work too hard’ has a solid basis in reality: the average Japanese salaryman worked such long hours that they amounted to the equivalent of a full 12 weeks more per year than his European counterparts. In return for this dedication, the large companies offered their employees ‘lifetime employment’.

By the 1960s, access to the expanded education system was unprecedentedly meritocratic. Gone were the days when access to the elite public universities (the former ‘imperial’ universities) was determined by social class or financial means; for the first time in its history (and perhaps in the history of the world), the social distribution of entries into the best universities almost exactly matched the demographics of the country as a whole. This was a great testament to the uniform quality and wide

availability of primary and secondary schools around the nation. A side-effect of this success was that competition for places at the best universities, particularly Tokyo University itself, was (and remains) incredibly severe. Pre-university students would work even longer hours than their hard-working ‘sarariman’ fathers, and many (who could afford it) would attend special gijuku (cram schools) to maximize their chances of qualifying for their favoured school. Despite the meritocratic nature of admission to universities (or perhaps because of it), getting in to the right university is of immense importance for a student’s career prospects. A graduate of the law faculty at Tokyo University is

counted amongst the most elite fraction of her peers, and she has the choice of the top jobs in the government or big business. This ‘examination hell’ has made the suicide rate in Japanese schools amongst the highest in the world, and the expensive gijuku system has reinscribed the privilege of those with higher incomes.

Economic success also came at the expense of great environmental damage and pollution. The forests of Japan were pushed back into the mountains as the cities expanded to fill the scarce flat ground near the coasts (about 80% of Japan is too mountainous for development). The growth of heavy industry produced vast amounts of poorly regulated chemical waste that poisoned rivers and land. As early as the 1950s, people were complaining of mercury poisoning, which came to be known as Minamata

disease after the area effected, and cadmium poisoning, which came to be known as itai-itai-byo (literally, ‘it really hurts disease’) after the symptoms. But it was not until the early 1970s that

plaintiffs won any recognition or compensation for their suffering, or that proper environmental regulations were implemented. Thereafter, as its economy stabilized and rode out the oil shocks of the 1970s, Japan gradually became one of the world leaders in environmental protection.

Economic miracles and the making of a postmodern society 2

Very quickly, MacArthur’s plans turned from demilitarization and democratization to re-militarization and economic stabilization.
The USA now wanted Japan to become its Pacific ally in the global fight against communism. Hence, SCAP instigated a ‘Red Purge’ that removed 13,000 people from politics and business on the basis
that they were ‘impeding the goals of the occupation’, which had been the same justification used during the purge of the political right. In some cases, the reverse purge literally resulted in the
reinstatement of the original wartime occupant of a post. At the same time, MacArthur abandoned his campaign against the zaibatsu, which was taking much longer than expected and was seriously damaging the economy. And finally SCAP pushed the Japanese government into establishing its own paramilitary
National Police Reserve in 1950, which would eventually form the basis of a more substantial military force: in 1952, it became the National Safety Agency, and then in 1954 the Self-Defence Forces were established, which remains the name of Japan’s army, navy, and air force to this day. The question of whether these military forces abrogated (and continue to contravene) Article 9 of the 1947 constitution remains hotly debated today.

The final issue for the occupation forces was the overall health of the Japanese economy. Between 1945 and 1949, inflation had been rampant and out of control, seriously undermining economic and political stability, and raising fears in Washington that the people of Japan would be pushed into the arms of communism.

Above all, the capitalist block should build its defence against the communists with a wall of prosperity: a ‘crescent of affluence’ would contain communist expansion in Asia. The proposed solution was to call in the Detroit banker and auto-executive, Joseph Dodge, to reorganize the economy and attempt to get Japan back on its feet. The so-called ‘Dodge Line’ was basically an austerity plan, which dramatically cut public spending (abolishing state subsidies and loans, and sacking over 100,000 public

employees), decentralized control of foreign currency, and fixed a very favourable exchange rate between the yen and the dollar (360:1) to promote exports. The exchange rate, which increasingly

undervalued the yen, was fixed until the 1970s.

Whilst the Dodge Line succeeded in bringing inflation under control, there was every sign that it was going to kill Japan completely. Then, in 1950, Prime Minister Yoshida received a ‘gift from the gods’: the Korean War. The ‘blessed rain from heaven’ came in the form of 2 billion dollars’ worth of war

procurements (which amounted to 60% of Japan’s exports over the next three years); exports tripled, production rose by over 70%, and Japan’s GNP grew at 12% per annum. Rather than the Dodge Line, it was the Korean War boom that laid the foundations for Japan’s remarkable (even miraculous)

economic growth over the next 20 years. At the start of the war, Japan’s GNP stood at only 11 billion dollars. By the mid-1950s, it had grown by 250%. By the early 1970s, at over 300 billion, it was

the third largest economy in the world (behind the USA and USSR).

Indeed, Japan’s sudden and profound economic growth, combined with the establishment of its 1947 constitution and the beginnings of a military force, meant that the occupation was drawn to a close much earlier than anyone expected. In September 1951, in San Francisco, representatives of 48 nations signed the official peace treaty with Japan, bringing an end to the occupation in April of 1952, just seven years after it had begun. In order to facilitate the rapidity of this move, the USA made separate defence agreements with other key allies in the Asia-Pacific, and also provided for the possibility that Japan’s Asian neighbours would be able to negotiate reparation agreements on their own terms afterwards. For Washington, it was important to end the expensive occupation of Japan as quickly as possible, and to establish Japan as a key ally in the hot Cold War in Asia. To this end, only a couple of hours later, Japan and the USA also signed the US–Japan Security Treaty, which continues to tie the USA to the defence of Japan to this day. 

For various reasons, the San Francisco Peace Treaty was controversial. A number of nations, including Britain, complained that it was not sufficiently harsh on Japan, and that it should at least have provided for reparation payments to the victims of Japanese imperialism. For the USSR and its European

partners, the provision to leave US troops in Japan after the occupation was particularly offensive, and they refused to sign the agreement. And finally, neither China nor Taiwan were even invited to the conference, since it was not yet clear which one would be recognized as ‘the one China’. In Japan itself, there were mixed feelings about the terms of the peace. On the one hand, the Japanese were pleased and relieved to be regaining their sovereignty, but it appeared to be only a partial sovereignty, since the USA would retain military bases in Japan and would also keep control over the islands of Okinawa for the foreseeable future (in the end, until 1972). In addition, the US–Japan Security Treaty looked like a double-edged sword, providing a militarily vulnerable Japan with a level of protection, but at the same time implicating Japan in US foreign policy and potentially dragging Japan into other US

conflicts. The complexities of this settlement would haunt Japanese foreign policy for many decades.

Economic miracles and the making of a postmodern society

A new start: the US occupation


In his first ever radio broadcast to the people of Japan, on 15 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito called on them to ‘endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable’. The invincible and sacred Empire of Japan had been defeated; despite all the sacrifices, toil, and suffering, Japan had finally lost. In a surprisingly high-pitched voice, using archaic Japanese that many could not understand, the emperor apologized for the fact that the ‘war had developed in a manner not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’. He expressed his regrets to the Japanese themselves, but also (still clinging to the rhetoric of the coprosperity sphere) to Japan’s allies in East Asia. In an intriguing twist that would occupy historians and commentators for decades thereafter, Hirohito called on Japan to endure the changes that would inevitably follow, so that Japan could ‘keep pace with the progress of the world’, as though the impending reforms were instrumental measures to guarantee the survival of the ‘innate glory of the imperial state’. In much the same way that Meiji revolutionaries had called for wakon yosai (Japanese spirit and Western technology) as a strategy to both modernize Japan and to preserve its essence, so Hirohito seemed to suggest that a version of this strategy should be employed in the postwar period as well.

The reality of the occupation managed to meet the expectations of everyone. There was a level of humiliation for the Japanese.
In fact, one of the first moves by the Japanese government was to organize ‘comfort stations’ (that is, brothels) to service American GIs. The American occupiers were quick to take advantage of
this generous provision, although they finally banned state-sponsored stations in January 1946 as a violation of women’s human rights (prostitution remained legal). There was a level of starvation and suffering, as the Japanese simply ran out of food and supplies, and the domestic economy slumped into collapse as though the tension had just been let out of it. The contrast with the well-fed Americans was stark, and a gloomy atmosphere of depression set into some of the major urban centres. But at the same time, the occupation brought opportunities for entrepreneurs – not just for pimps and prostitutes, but for
translators and for businessmen of all kinds. And finally, it became immediately apparent that the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP), US General Douglas MacArthur, had grand plans for the reconstruction of Japan; there would be new opportunities for everyone.

Although the occupation of Japan was technically a multilateral enterprise under the supervision of the Far Eastern Advisory Commission (which included representation from Australia, Britain, Canada, China, France, India, the Philippines, and the Netherlands), in practice it was an American show from the start. The USSR pushed for some involvement in the Allied Council on Japan, but MacArthur had already made substantial reforms in Japan before that body had its first meeting in February 1946.

Washington was adamant that the new Japan would remain within its sphere of influence in the postwar international order. 

Despite MacArthur’s significant freedom to manoeuvre, he chose a tactic of indirect rule in order to maximize his effectiveness.

In particular, realizing the symbolic value of the office, he decided immediately that the emperor should be protected and preserved. 

Indeed, sharing an insight that had been a commonplace throughout Japanese history, he feared that the abolition of the emperor might make the Japanese people ungovernable. Furthermore, for purely

practical and linguistic reasons, MacArthur had to rely on a staff of Japanese interpreters and translators in order to get work done.

Hence, SCAP employed a corps of bilingual political technicians to intervene between its government headquarters (GHQ) and the Japanese government itself, which was also retained. The result was

that the Japanese authorities maintained the feeling (and to some degree the reality) of continuity and of being involved in the decisionmaking process, which helped MacArthur to push through his

reforms, but which also left segments of the wartime and pre-war Japanese bureaucracy in place.

MacArthur’s plans for reform were ambitious. Based on the assumption that wartime Japan had suffered from over-centralization, militarism, and fascism, he set out his plans according to two interlinked ‘solutions to the Japan problem’: demilitarization and democratization.

The simplest of these was the first: MacArthur immediately dissolved all of Japan’s military forces, both within Japan and beyond, which meant repatriating nearly 7 million people. He disbanded the Special Higher Police (the so-called ‘thought police’) that had monitored political criminals and intellectual

dissidents during the war, and then he started his own purge of the politically offensive (removing 200,000 people from their posts in government, the bureaucracy, and business). Seeking to

address the problem of the emperor cult, even if not the issue of the person of the emperor himself, SCAP then disestablished the state Shinto religion and forced the emperor to publicly renounce his divinity.

The showcase of the demilitarization campaign came in the form of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (aka the Tokyo Trials), which were held between May 1946 and November 1948. These trials, which were designed to be the equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials in Germany, have been the subject of great controversy, and accusations of ‘victor’s justice’ have been common; it is certainly the case that many more prisoners were executed in Tokyo than in Nuremberg, and some senior officers were executed for the unprecedented crime of ‘conspiracy to wage war’ rather than for war crimes themselves. The headline case was that of Tojo Hideki himself, who was found guilty of

war crimes and conspiracy to wage war, and was hanged. 

However, perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of these trials was the fact that MacArthur kept the emperor off the stand. For a number of postwar Japanese intellectuals, such as the political theorist Maruyama Masao, the failure to make the emperor face up to his responsibility was detrimental to MacArthur’s second great ambition, the democratization of Japan, since it set a dangerous precedent that undermined the notion of political subjectivity that is essential for democratic consciousness.

Perceiving an apparent connection between militarism and monopoly economics, MacArthur’s push for democracy began with measures to decentralize the economy. He affected a series of land reforms that forced landowners to sell all but a single plot of their holdings, thus enabling workers to own the land

that they farmed. But the showpiece of economic democratization was the plan to dissolve the zaibatsu conglomerates, which MacArthur associated with Japanese imperialism. SCAP was convinced that these conglomerates had orchestrated the war economies of Japan’s colonies. In the end, however, the dissolution of the zaibatsu was incompletely implemented. In many cases, the family holding companies were dissolved, but the networks quickly reformed around the banks that replaced them. The resulting units, which shared some characteristics with the zaibatsu, came to be known as keiretsu. The most famous names in Japanese business – Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Fuji, Sumitomo, Nissan – all continued into the postwar period.

The ideology of an anti-imperial empire

In November of 1943, the leaders of the subjugated nations (or ‘member states’) were invited to Tokyo to participate in the first and only Greater East Asia Conference, at which the delegates were invited to discuss how best to organize the co-prosperity sphere for the mutual benefit of all the members. Pan-Asianism, which had been bubbling through Japanese public opinion since the Meiji period, became the rhetoric of the Japanese empire. In reality, Tokyo was finding it increasingly difficult to sustain its
expansive empire, and it realized (too late) that it needed to cultivate the good will of its colonies. It also realized (again too late) that some of the other peoples of Asia were also fed up with Western
imperialism, and that they might voluntarily join a movement that genuinely sought to throw the West out of Asia: Asia for the Asians.
By this time, however, any pretence that Japan’s empire was in any way anti-imperialist was horribly and offensively ridiculous.
Within Japan itself, the rhetoric of the co-prosperity sphere was hotly debated. In 1933, Konoe had established a ‘brain trust’, the Showa kenkyukai, which was charged with drawing up plans for

a New Order in East Asia. The members included the Kyoto School philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, whose essay ‘Shin Nihon no shiso genri’ (‘The Intellectual Principles of the New Japan’, 1939) helped

to establish the parameters of a vision of Japan and East Asia that had passed through modernity and challenged the imperialism of the West. In an attempt to ‘clarify the national polity’ with regard to these questions, the Ministry of Education published the notorious Kokutai no hongi (Fundamental

Principles of our National Polity) in 1937. Between 1941 and 1942, four other members of the Kyoto School, including Nishitani Keiji, Kosaka Masaaki, Suzuki Shigetaka, and Koyama Iwao, held a series of public symposia themed on ‘The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan’, ‘The Ethics and Historicity of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’, and finally ‘The Philosophy of All-Out War’. Intellectuals from other schools of thought also joined in the discussion in the famous ‘Overcoming Modernity’ symposium of July 1942. Even the father of modern Japanese philosophy, Nishida Kitaro, ˆ

 joined the debate when he wrote a short essay (apparently designed to be read by Tojo himself )

entitled ‘Principles for a New World Order’. 

The issues at stake in these debates were serious: how could Japan overcome the cultural hegemony of modernity qua Westernization and somehow pass through this borrowed modernity into an authentic modernity of its own; how could (and should) Japan help other nations in Asia to do the same thing; and finally how could Japan build a regional order that encompassed other nations in Asia without that order being an empire? The resolutions to these issues reached by the various voices remain contested to this day, and the debate about how/whether to overcome modernity itself has resurfaced in the

postwar period in terms of Japan’s desire to retain its identity in an increasingly Americanized world.

In fact, by the time that it organized the Great East Asia Conference, Japan was already losing the war. After defeat at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, at which Japan lost vital aircraft carriers, the tide had turned against it. By July 1944, when US forces captured Saipan, Japan was finally in range of Allied

bombers and the war was basically lost. Tojo resigned from office in the same month, and in February 1945 Prince Konoe petitioned the emperor to surrender in order to alleviate the terrible suffering of his people: the conditions of ‘total war’ had reduced much of Japan to extreme poverty and even starvation; air-raids and fire-bombings made the major cities almost uninhabitable.

It is not clear whether Hirohito himself refused this petition, or whether it was refused for him by senior military officers who still believed in the possibility of a tennozan (a divine victory).

Whichever the case, the Japanese continued to fight with increasing ferocity and desperation: the so-called kamizake (divine wind) suicide squadrons (officially these were ‘special attack units’ or okubetsu kogeki tai) bombarded Allied shipping; during the terrible Battle of Okinawa, thousands of Japanese civilians fought the American invaders with sticks, rocks and bare fists, retreating back into the mountains until there was nowhere left to go, and then killed themselves to prevent capture. When

Okinawa finally fell, a quarter of a million Japanese had died, including 150,000 civilians.

It is in the context of this kind of fanaticism that historians attempt to judge the necessity of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, the dedication of the Japanese civilians and military led the US government to commission an anthropologist to attempt to explain why they were so devoted

and what it might take to achieve final victory. The result, Ruth Benedict’s famous monograph, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (which was published in the form of a book in 1946), represents the start of Modern Japan Studies and its relationship with the US government in particular.

After threatening Japan’s ‘prompt and utter destruction’ in the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July, the USA bombed Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, the USSR invaded Japan’s Northern Territories on

8 August, and then the USA bombed Nagasaki on 9 August. 

Japan’s situation was hopeless. But even then the chiefs of staff and the army minister refused to surrender unless the Allies would guarantee the survival of the emperor. The USA would only reply

that they would leave the future of Japan in the hands of the Japanese people themselves, which did not reassure the Japanese elites who had always been so suspicious of the masses. Finally, Emperor Hirohito himself intervened on 14 August to break the deadlocked council, and he surrendered, making a radio broadcast to his shattered nation the next day. On 2 September, on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the document of surrender was signed.

Given the terrible damage and suffering inflicted by them, the use of the atomic bombs against two Japanese cities, especially the second, are still the focus of controversy today.

A particular question has been whether they were actually necessary, or whether Japan had already lost the war. It had no resources and no allies, its navy had been destroyed, it was vulnerable to air attacks on its cities, against her were assembled the powers of the USA, Britain, the USSR, and an emerging

China. Could their use have been avoided? Various theories have been suggested, including that the USA dropped the bombs as part of a scientific experiment to see what effect they would have on a populated urban area, or that the bombs were designed primarily to intimidate the USSR, with a eye on

the postwar settlement and the Cold War. However, when asked about the decision to drop the bombs, US Secretary of War Henry Stimson answered simply: ‘it is seldom sound for the stronger combatant to moderate his blows whenever his opponent shows signs of weakening ’.

In his famous radio speech to the people of Japan, Emperor Hirohito singled out the A-bombs as part of the reason for his decision to surrender. He emphasized the moral and spiritual strength of the Japanese nation (and of the East Asian peoples), but stated bluntly that superior modern technology had tilted

the balance in the war: Japan was overcome by modernity after all. Hirohito’s words warned that the use of this kind of technology risked bringing about the end of civilization itself. His meaning is contested, but the spirit of his speech suggests that the Japanese should not allow the power of material technology to destroy their spirit or to eradicate their ‘Japaneseness’; if modern technology is allowed to rule over everything, what is to become of the spirit that makes us human?

Postwar Japan should return its spiritual wealth even in the face of saturation by modern technology.

Early Showa and war in the Pacific

Following the collapse of the New York Stock Market in 1929, economic depression swept the globe. Japan took the yen off the gold standard in 1931 and watched its value slump by 50% against the dollar. Unemployment rose dramatically, quickly reaching over 20%. In the urban centres, where the modern life of Taisho had seemed so exciting, the darker underside of the modern condition became readily apparent. Intellectuals started to write about the crisis of capitalism and the angst of modern life. Despite being illegal after the 1925 Peace Preservation Law, the communist movement simmered in the universities. The emblems of urban chic – the moga waitresses and shop attendants – gradually became

seen as euphemisms for prostitutes in the popular imagination. Modernity began to look like an infection that threatened the soul and even the wellbeing of Japan, rather than a material boon. The

people of Japan, already struggling in the late 1920s, turned their frustrations against the political parties, accusing them of being the ‘running dogs of capitalism’. Clandestine political movements

began to agitate.

The early 1930s saw political violence rise to an all-time high, and a number of commentators have referred to it as the period of ‘government by assassination’. The first victim was Prime Minister

Hamaguchi Osachi, who was shot in Tokyo Station by a member of an ultranationalist group in 1930, following his failure to secure a more equal naval treaty with the British and Americans at the London Naval Conference earlier that year. In the following year, government authorities discovered and thwarted two separate plots for a coup d’etat.

 In 1932, the next prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, was assassinated by a clandestine group of

naval officers after he failed to support actions by the Imperial Kwantung Army in Manchuria. This series of events at the start of the 1930s effectively ended parliamentary rule and marked

the move towards greater military control of governance. Whilst large sections of the population reacted with horror to these developments, the military could count on significant support particularly in rural areas. The promise of imperial greatness, of a return to the glories of Meiji, provided an enticing

distraction from the problems of the time. 

Meanwhile, the military itself had also grown factional and restive. In particular, the Kwantung Army, which had been created in 1906 to protect Japan’s interests in Manchuria, began to agitate for action. The commander in the field, Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, had a millenarian vision of the coming of the ‘final war’ in which the nations of the world would be punished for the moral corruptions of modernity. His solution was to propose that Japan should take over Manchuria and use it as a social laboratory to

test new and better forms of organization; he wanted to forge a new post-capitalist society based on non-selfish principles. His motivation was largely Buddhist rather than Communist. To this end, without orders from Tokyo, the Kwantung Army orchestrated an attack on the Manchurian railway, which they were supposed to be guarding. They exploded a section near Mukden and proceeded to blame the attack on local Chinese forces, using this as a pretext to launch an offensive and the formal occupation of Manchuria. In Tokyo, this fait accompli was greeted with shock by then Prime Minister Inukai, who refused to condone the annexation of Manchuria as a colony. After his assassination,

the puppet state of Manchukuo was formed in March 1932. 

This ‘Manchuria Incident’ marked the start of the so-called Fifteen Years’ War between China and Japan. In the depressed environment of Japan at the time, a majority of the Japanese people received news of the Kwantung Army’s victories and the expansion of the empire with jubilation.

The international community, in the form of the League of Nations, in which Japan had played a leading role, took measures to condemn the occupation. It refused to recognize Manchukuo as an independent state, and its Lytton Report called for Japan to withdraw its forces from Manchuria in February 1933. But this was too little too late. In Japan, the condemnation of the League merely confirmed the duplicity of the Western powers, and particularly the British who dominated the council.

Japan simply withdrew from the League, claiming that it would now ‘follow its own path in Asia’, implicitly accusing the League of being a regional rather than a universal organization (a charge that was not without justification). A result was that many Japanese felt vindicated in their beliefs that the Western powers were fundamentally racist against Japan and Asia more widely; Japan became increasingly isolated from the international community and hence increasingly reliant on its own military power.

In an attempt to constrain the military, the last surviving genro, Saionji Kinmochi, recommended Prince Konoe Fumimaro as the next prime minister. However, even the eminent Konoe could not constrain the army’s ambitions. Within a few weeks of his taking office, on 7 July 1937 the Imperial Army exchanged fire with Chinese soldiers at the Marco Polo Bridge, south of Beijing. It is not clear who fired first, but many historians argue that the Japanese Army manufactured this skirmish as a pretext

for escalation. Whatever the truth of this, it is certainly true that the Imperial Army was ambitious for further action in China. 

In the end, Konoe himself was an advocate of Japanese expansionism. Rather than trying to restrain the army in China, he authorized the escalation of the conflict, and the army immediately launched a massive offensive. By mid-December, Japanese forces had pushed south from Beijing as far as Shanghai and Nanjing. The conduct of the Imperial Army in Nanjing was horrifying and mystifying. Japanese troops herded together tens of thousands of civilians and surrendered soldiers and murdered

them; they raped and killed perhaps 20,000 women of all ages.

The total number of casualties is still contested to this day, with numbers ranging from tens of thousands to 300,000 deaths. The terrible violence continued for nearly two months. The question of why the Imperial Army behaved in this appalling way, and why the High Command permitted the atrocities to continue for nearly two months has still not received a satisfactory answer.

A small number of right-wing revisionists in contemporary Japan argue that the Nanjing Massacre never happened; they claim that it was invented by the victorious Allied Powers after the end of

the war as a means to further punish and victimize the Japanese. 

A famous example of this view can be found in the controversial manga of Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensoron (On War, 1998). Some high school history textbooks in Japan refer to the events in neutral

terms as the Nanjing Incident (Nankin jiken) rather than as the Nanjing Massacre (Ninkin daigyakusatsu), triggering protests of atrocity-denial in China. This ‘textbook controversy’, which also

involves the under-representation of so-called ‘comfort women’ (sexual slaves of the Imperial Army) still rages to this day. 

Historians such as Inega Saburo filed lawsuits against the Ministry of Education for trying to censor their frank disclosure of Japanese wartime atrocities. Ienaga’s fight was highly publicized around the world: Noam Chomsky nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (1999, 2002).

Taisho democracy

Emperor Taisho ruled for a brief period between 1912 and 1926, when the Showa emperor, who would reign until his death in 1989, succeeded him. For many historians, the Taisho period appears
like a small window of calm in the middle of a century of war and struggle for Japan. Intellectuals and activists such as Yoshino Sakuzo advocated a kind of democracy called minponshugi (rule for the people), which he argued was compatible with Japan’s constitutional monarchy. At the same time, constitutional lawyers such as Minobe Tatsukichi argued that the emperor might best be considered an ‘organ’ in the overall structure of the state, rather than as coterminous with the nation as a whole. Meanwhile, internationalists like Nitobe Inazo placed their faith in the emergence of a new world order that would recognize diversity and multicultural membership; Nitobe himself was an undersecretary-
general of the League of Nations from 1920 and a founding director of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (the forerunner of UNESCO).
Against this background, a new middle class was emerging in the rapidly growing urban centres. This was the birth of the so-called salaryman (sarariman) – the ubiquitous, white-collared worker.
But this period also saw a new class of white-collared women working as ‘office ladies’ or as attendants in shops. In general, women in these jobs were very poorly paid, but they featured in popular culture as icons of modern life: flashy and fashionable, immersed in the consumerism of products and fads, and often represented as morally liberal, selling kisses as well as Western clothes to their customers. These were the moga or modan gaaru (modern girls). The new middle class (which contrasted with the ‘old middle class’ of former samurai families) was represented as liberal and free, moving regularly between different jobs at different companies and enjoying the trappings of modern life.

This new way of life cohabited with a new culture, and the Taisho period saw the Japanese enthusiastically embrace many American pastimes: baseball and jazz being the most pervasive.

But there were also developments in Japan’s own artistic ferment, with arguably modern Japan’s greatest authors, such as Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Tanizaki Juni’ichiro, writing darkly beautiful short stories and novels that contemplated questions of individual and cultural identity in Japan’s rapidly changing society. At the same time, there was a flourishing of avant-garde poetry and art. The advent of the ‘one yen’ book, the further development of national and local newspapers, and the establishment of rental stores for novels, magazines, and manga (graphic fiction) brought these materials to an ever wider and increasingly educated public.

Of course, this middle class image of Taisho Japan was not the whole story. The working class factory workers that so characterized the Meiji period found their conditions largely unchanged. Again, it was young women who bore the brunt of this, with men toiling under similarly harsh conditions in heavier

industry. However, the Taisho period also saw the working classes becoming increasingly conscious of their plight and their power: workers began to organize into unions and ‘friendly societies’, even the burakumin began to participate in social activism in the form of the Suiheisha (Levellers’ Association).

Local disputes and strikes increased in number throughout the 1920s, as activists started to embrace liberal and even communist ideas.

The image of the Taisho period as a war-free haven is at least partially premised upon the economic boom that Japan experienced during the years of the Great War in Europe.

During the war years, Japanese industrial output increased by a factor of five as it sought to supply European and domestic demand, and its exports surged (especially textiles).

This failure at Versailles was not well received back in Japan, where protests erupted in the streets. For many commentators at the time (and since), this looked like another example of Western racism, echoing the duplicity that the Japanese perceived at the time of the Triple Intervention. The feeling of injustice was severe, especially since Japan at the turn of the 1920s had become a modern, constitutional democracy with an imposing empire and a flourishing economy: it had met all of the objective criteria to join the club of modern nations, but it was still being refused entry. It seemed, finally, that being modern was not enough: modern Japan would never be considered an equal partner in international affairs for as long as it was Japanese. This was the one thing that Japan could do nothing about, and indeed it was becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of maintaining its distinctive identity. Events at Versailles added fuel to the fires of Japanese romantics and chauvinists who were striving to rediscover, reinvent, or simply protect ‘Japaneseness’ in the modern state.

Only two years later, Britain allowed the Anglo-Japanese alliance to lapse and instead proposed a five-way naval agreement involving the USA, France, and Italy. The so-called Washington Naval Treaty of 1921, one of a number of such treaties to be signed over the next decade or so, obliged the signatories to maintain a fixed ratio of naval power (measured in tonnage of capital ships and aircraft carriers). As far as Japan was concerned, the key ratio was Britain:USA:Japan, which was set at 5:5:3, meaning that Japan would always be less powerful than the two nations that thwarted its racial equality clause. But, perhaps the last straw for those in Japan who saw a systematic racism at work in the Anglo-American world was the enactment of the 1924 immigration laws in the USA, which specifically prohibited the immigration of East Asians.

Unfortunately, this perception of an unsympathetic international environment coincided with economic collapse in Japan, which followed the wartime bubble, and natural catastrophe in the form of the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which left 150,000 people dead or missing and about half a million residences in Tokyo levelled. By the end of the Taisho period, Japan was in depression, the zaibatsu conglomerates (such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Sumitomo) were beginning to take over the economy

as private banks failed, and they were cultivating ever-closer connections with the political parties and the military. This meant that wealth was being concentrated into fewer hands, and more of the urban population was struggling to maintain their way of life.

Hence, by the start of the increasingly militaristic Showa period, Japan was ripe for change once again: the democratic window appeared to be closing.

The politics of the Meiji empire

As discussed in the previous chapter, the Meiji Restoration and the revolution that followed it was essentially imperial in character. In the so-called Age of Empires, it seemed very natural to the political and military elites that their new imperial state should also have an empire of its own, like the Great Powers of the West whose empires had already spread their tendrils throughout Asia. It was with this kind of thinking in mind that Yamagata Aritomo, fresh from his trip to Europe, endeavoured to build a powerful Japanese navy, in imitation of the navy of the greatest imperial power of the day, the small island nation of Great Britain.

Although Saigo Takamori’s plans for an invasion of Korea in the early 1870s were thwarted by the genro (who cut short the Iwakura Embassy in Europe in order to prevent it), and by Yamagata

Aritomo in particular, the government’s objection to the plan was not its imperial ambition but rather the method and rationale of the venture. Indeed, in 1876 Yamagata himself argued that Korea was an essential part of Japan’s ‘zone of advantage’ and that its relative weakness (as a less modern society)

both made it vulnerable to Japan’s regional ambitions and to the ambitions of the West, which in turn constituted a vulnerability for Japan itself. It was imperative, he argued, that Korea should fall into Japan’s sphere, since it was certain to fall to someone. 

With this kind of imperial competition in mind, and conscious of Japan’s new power on the regional stage, Japan imposed the Treaty of Kanghwa on Korea in 1876. The process was almost a precise duplication of the way that Commodore Perry had imposed the Treaty of Kanagawa on Japan just twenty years earlier, and its terms were similarly exploitative. Until Korea modernized, Yamagata and others argued that it was not worthy of an equal treaty. Hence, throughout the 1880s Japan sent

emissaries to Korea to advise it on how to modernize its education system, its economy, and its political structure, just as Japan was receiving similar advice from Europe.

The situation in Korea was very complicated, not least because of the traditional competition between Japan and China for influence over the peninsula. The Treaty of Kanghwa as well as the presence of so many Japanese advisors aggravated the Chinese rulers as well as many Korean people. In Japan, opinion leaders attempted to reconcile the apparent hypocrisy of Japanese foreign policy through recourse to the rhetoric of Pan-Asianism: Japan was helping Korea to help itself, as an Asian brother helps another under threat from the West. Nonetheless, violence against the Japanese emissaries in Korea was not infrequent, until finally in 1894 there was a full-scale uprising against foreign influence. The Tonghak Rebellion, which was partially a religious movement, partially popular xenophobia, and partially anti-Japanese in sentiment, undermined stability in Korea to such an extent that the leaders called for military aid from their traditional patrons, China, in order to restore order. Greatly offended by this, and under the pretext of defending their zone of advantage, the Japanese sent troops of their own into Korea, where they came into conflict with the Chinese. The result was the first Sino-Japanese War of modern times. 

Thanks to the modernization drive instigated by Yamagata Aritomo, the Japanese army was vastly superior to that of its giant neighbour. In addition, in pursuit of a ‘British Empire for Japan’, Japan had built an impressive navy; for the first time in history it enjoyed naval parity with China, and technological superiority. The outcome of the war was a clear victory for Japan, whose privileged position in Korea was therefore confirmed. Moreover, as compensation for the war, Japan

claimed the island of Taiwan (Formosa), the small but strategically  important Liaodong peninsula on the Chinese mainland, and a huge cash indemnity from China.

During the same period, unionization and ‘friendly societies’ started to gain in popularity, and support for a fledgling socialist movement began to appear. A Social Democratic Party was founded in 1901, but was instantly banned. The movement radicalized into anarchism and communism under the leadership of activists like Kotoku Shusui and Katayama Sen, who would eventually be executed for High Treason in 1911. The orthodoxy of Japan’s nation-building project, even in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, never embraced the political left, since it threatened to challenge the one emblem that held the whole Meiji state together: the figure of the emperor himself.

Hence, the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912 was a real turning point in modern Japanese history. Meiji had overseen the unification of Japan into a single nation-state, and then the modernization of that state into one that could stand equally with those of the West as an imperial power. However, at the time of his death, Japan was already witnessing the start of a new phase of politics, as popular opinion turned against the militarization of the state and sought to forge Japan into a genuinely participatory democracy. Political parties became more coherent and more focused on issues, rather than simply clubs that parliamentarians joined. Indeed, in the year of Meiji’s death, the leader of the Seiyukai  party, Hara Kei, succeeded in forcing a stalemate with the military about its new budget. Not even the elder statesman Yamagata Aritomo could resolve the situation in favour of the military, and this ushered in a

period that has come to be known as the ‘politics of compromise’.

Hara would go on to become Japan’s first commoner, party-based prime minister in 1918.

Japan’s encounter with the modern world

At first glance, the origins of modern Japan seem to coincide conveniently with the dramatic arrival of US Commodore Perry in 1853. Before his arrival, Japan looked like a feudal monarchy that had been hiding in self-imposed isolation from the world for 250 years; within 50 years of his visit Japan had literally undergone a revolution – it had a modern, industrial economy, a constitutional government, and the beginnings of a colonial empire. To many commentators, this astonishingly rapid transformation was occasioned by Japan’s shocking encounter with the superior technology and power of the Western nations. In this version of the story, Perry broke traditional Japan and forced it into the modern world. However, as we will see in this chapter, the reality is not so simple.

The arrival of Perry

After the annexation of Texas in 1845, the war with Mexico, and finally the incorporation of California into the Union in September 1850 during the so-called ‘gold rush’, the USA was expanding westwards energetically. The imperial ambitions of the USA and its desire to compete with Great Britain for lucrative trade opportunities in Asia encouraged it to look even further west across the Pacific Ocean to Japan. In this spirit, the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry with his four fabled ‘black ships’ in July 1853 seemed like a natural step in the process.

Perry was famous in naval circles for his passion for modernization, and particularly steam-powered ships; even before he had made his first, famous trip to Japan in the USS Mississippi he had already earned the epithet ‘the father of the steam-navy’. It is not without significance, therefore, that it was

the presence of four black steam-ships that intimidated the local government officials in Uraga Bay (near Edo, present-day Tokyo) to take the unprecedented step of allowing Perry to come ashore and present a letter from US President Millard Fillmore. 

Until that time, an official policy of isolationism (sakoku) meant that foreigners had been forbidden from the mainland of Japan, with only a small number of Dutch traders permitted to stay on the tiny, artificial islet of Deshima near the outlying city of Nagasaki since 1641. The letter contained a series of demands for more open trade with Japan, and Perry left Uraga with the ominous promise to return the next year with a more substantial naval force, ready to force compliance if it was not forthcoming.

In fact, the USA was a later comer: European ships had been trying to crack open Japan for at least the previous 50 years. 

Russian vessels started to show interest in the northerly island of Hokkaido as early as 1792. Already developing a serious stake in China, the British sailed to Uraga Bay in 1818 to make a half-hearted request for the opening of trade relations, but their advances were rejected. In 1825, the shogunate government, or bakufu, became so concerned about the appearance of foreign vessels that it issued the order that coastal warlords should expel foreign advances by force if necessary, and in 1837 a US

merchant ship was shelled. Indeed, for the first 50 years of the 19th century, the bakufu really believed that it could keep the Western world out. It was not until an emissary of the Dutch King William III in 1844 tried to explain to the shogun that the world had changed since the expulsion of the Europeans in

the 17th century that the bakufu really started to rethink its place in the world. Comprehensive British victories over China in the so-called Opium Wars in 1842 seemed to prove the point.

If the British could humiliate the colossus of China so effectively, how could the smaller and more peripheral nation of Japan escape a similar fate? Lest they provoke serious military retaliation from the Western powers, the bakufu quickly rescinded its order to fire on foreign vessels. It was in this context that Perry first arrived in Uraga Bay.

When Perry returned with nine ships in February 1854, he found government officials willing to sign the Treaty of Kanagawa (31 March 1854). This treaty opened the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate, and also provided for the stationing of the first US consul on mainland Japan; Townsend Harris would take up this post in Shimoda in July 1856. The Treaty of Kanagawa opened the floodgates, and the European imperial powers quickly secured similar deals: France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia all signed new treaties in the wake of Perry’s return. 

By 1858, the so-called Unequal Treaties regime was firmly in place: without a shot being fired, Japan found itself in a similar position to China after the Opium Wars (with the notable exception that the Western powers agreed to prohibit opium trade with Japan). Japan had lost control of its tariffs, had

opened its borders to trade and commerce with the West, and had even granted the privilege of extra-territoriality to the Western powers (which meant that foreign nationals were exempt from Japanese law even on Japanese soil). Rather than being justified by military defeat, however, these measures were imposed on Japan on the basis that it was not an equal member of international society – it was not a modern, industrial, constitutional polity. As we will see, this humiliation was itself a powerful force fuelling the development of a strong sense of nationalism in late 19th-century Japan, as well as a key factor driving the revolution to come. At all costs, Japan sought to end the Unequal Treaties.

It is important to note that it would be an exaggeration to argue that these humiliations damaged a coherent or pre-existing sense of national pride in Japan, since prior to the mid-19th century Japan was a relatively divided, fragmented, and non-centralized territory, knitted together by bonds of loyalty, military dependency, and religious imagery. Indeed, in many ways, the humiliation of the Unequal Treaties was fundamental in the process of creating a modern sense of national consciousness in Japan.

The significance of the modern, industrial power of Perry’s fleet in these events should not be underestimated. Indeed, the image of the ‘black ships’ quickly became iconic in Japan, representing

the menace of Western power as well as the threat of traditional Japan being overcome by the cultural and technological force of modernity. An intriguing anecdote concerning Perry’s return to Japan in 1854 illustrates this point: contemporary accounts describe the way in which the Japanese officials arranged for a sumo contest to be staged for the American officers, presumably in an attempt to intimidate the foreigners with the power and martial spirit of the Japanese. However, the US delegation is reported to have been singularly unimpressed by the spectacle, finding the performance laughable. For their part, the US delegation assembled a 100-metre circle of track and made a gift of a quarter-scale steam locomotive for the Japanese officials to ride. It is a testament to the astonishing impact of industrial technology that this toy train was far more intimidating than the primal power of sumo wrestling.

Perry had probably been aware of the effect that his black ships and his little locomotive would have. Before embarking on his mission, Perry had read much of the available literature about Tokugawa Japan, and he is even thought to have consulted with the famous Japanologist, Philipp Franz von
Siebold, who had lived in the Dutch enclave on Deshima for eight years before returning to Leiden in the Netherlands.
Nonetheless, information on the secretive and isolationist nation was scarce. Only a tiny number of Westerners had any first-hand knowledge of Japan, and even those who did (like Siebold himself )
had only limited exposure to the real social and political circumstances of the unfamiliar land. Orientalism was rife; the romance of the ‘mystical East’ coloured most accounts. Western
accounts of Japan in the early 19th century portrayed it as a feudal kingdom, untouched by the hands of industry and modernity. Most accounts also mentioned how favourably Japan compared to the other ‘barbarian peoples’ encountered by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa: the Japanese were
apparently cultured, clean, and unfailingly polite. Townsend Harris, for instance, famously described Japan as the embodiment of a golden age of simplicity and honesty.