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First Published in 1987. Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945 was an unprecedented event in Japanese history. The shift from the life of hunger to the life of saturation that took place between 1945 and 1980 has brought about a great change in life style. The significance of this change will be a subject of reassessment for many years to come. This books presents an outline of such a change in the domain of mass culture, a sector of Japanese culture most indicative of the change after the defeat and the subsequent economic recovery.
"This book is a political and cultural history of the early postwar Japan aiming at exploring how the perception and cultural values of everyday life in the country changed along with the rise of the kasutori culture. Such a process was closely tied with both a refusal of the samurai culture and the interwar debate on modernity, and it resulted in a decadent way of life, exemplified by intellectuals such as Sakaguchi Ango. It depicts a short-lived radical cultural and social alternative, one that forced people to rethink their relationship to the kokutai, modernity, social roles, daily practices, and the production of knowledge. The subjectivity and daily practices in those years were more important in shaping the society and cultural identities of the Japanese than the new public ideology of the nation. This challenges some Euro-American historical notions that the new private sphere has emerged in Japan as an effect of the country's Americanization, rather than from within it. This work looks at the immediate aftermath of WWII from the perspective of Japan, but also try to rethink Westernization in the light of its global appropriation. This volume it is not only addressed to specialists of Japanese or Asian history, but it will also attract historians of the U.S., readers from political and intellectual history, cultural studies, and historiography in general"--
Japan and the United States became close political allies so quickly after the end of World War II, that it seemed as though the two countries had easily forgotten the war they had fought. Here Yoshikuni Igarashi offers a provocative look at how Japanese postwar society struggled to understand its war loss and the resulting national trauma, even as forces within the society sought to suppress these memories. Igarashi argues that Japan's nationhood survived the war's destruction in part through a popular culture that expressed memories of loss and devastation more readily than political discourse ever could. He shows how the desire to represent the past motivated Japan's cultural productions in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period. Japanese war experiences were often described through narrative devices that downplayed the war's disruptive effects on Japan's history. Rather than treat these narratives as obstacles to historical inquiry, Igarashi reads them along with counter-narratives that attempted to register the original impact of the war. He traces the tensions between remembering and forgetting by focusing on the body as the central site for Japan's production of the past. This approach leads to fascinating discussions of such diverse topics as the use of the atomic bomb, hygiene policies under the U.S. occupation, the monstrous body of Godzilla, the first Western professional wrestling matches in Japan, the transformation of Tokyo and the athletic body for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the writer Yukio Mishima's dramatic suicide, while providing a fresh critical perspective on the war legacy of Japan.
Highlighting the transformational nature of the early postwar, Jesty deftly contrasts it with the relative stasis, consolidation, and homogenization of the 1960s.
In 2002 a manga (comic book) was for the first time successfully charged with the crime of obscenity in the Japanese courts. In The Art of Censorship Kirsten Cather traces how this case represents the most recent in a long line of sensational landmark obscenity trials that have dotted the history of postwar Japan. The objects of these trials range from a highbrow literary translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and modern adaptations and reprintings of Edo-period pornographic literary “classics” by authors such as Nagai Kafu to soft core and hard core pornographic films, including a collection of still photographs and the script from Oshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses, as well as adult manga. At stake in each case was the establishment of a new hierarchy for law and culture, determining, in other words, to what extent the constitutional guarantee of free expression would extend to art, artist, and audience. The work draws on diverse sources, including trial transcripts and verdicts, literary and film theory, legal scholarship, and surrounding debates in artistic journals and the press. By combining a careful analysis of the legal cases with a detailed rendering of cultural, historical, and political contexts, Cather demonstrates how legal arguments are enmeshed in a broader web of cultural forces. She offers an original, interdisciplinary analysis that shows how art and law nurtured one another even as they clashed and demonstrates the dynamic relationship between culture and law, society and politics in postwar Japan. The Art of Censorship will appeal to those interested in literary and visual studies, censorship, and the recent field of affect studies. It will also find a broad readership among cultural historians of the postwar period and fans of the works and genres discussed.
Nonviolent state behavior in Japan, this book argues, results from the distinctive breadth with which the Japanese define security policy, making it inseparable from the quest for social stability through economic growth. While much of the literature on contemporary Japan has resisted emphasis on cultural uniqueness, Peter J. Katzenstein seeks to explain particular aspects of Japan's security policy in terms of legal and social norms that are collective, institutionalized, and sometimes the source of intense political conflict and change. Culture, thus specified, is amenable to empirical analysis, suggesting comparisons across policy domains and with other countries. Katzenstein focuses on the traditional core agencies of law enforcement and national defense. The police and the military in postwar Japan are, he finds, reluctant to deploy physical violence to enforce state security. Police agents rarely use repression against domestic opponents of the state, and the Japanese public continues to support, by large majorities, constitutional limits on overseas deployment of the military. Katzenstein traces the relationship between the United States and Japan since 1945 and then compares Japan with postwar Germany. He concludes by suggesting that while we may think of Japan's security policy as highly unusual, it is the definition of security used in the United States that is, in international terms, exceptional.
Historical surveys of postwar Japan are usually established on the grounds that the era is already over, interpreting "postwar" to be the years directly proceeding World War II. However, the contributors to this book take a unique approach to the concept of the postwar epoch and treat it as a network of historical time frames from the modern period, and connect these time capsules to the war to which they are inextricably linked. The books strength is in its very interdisciplinary approach to examining postwar Japan and as such it includes chapters centred on subjects as diverse as politics, poetry, philosophy, economics and art which serve to fill the blanks in the collective cultural memory that historical narratives leave behind. Originally published in French, this new translation offers the English speaking world important access to a major work on Japan which has been greatly enriched by the translator’s great accuracy and knowledge of English, French and Japanese language, history and culture. Japan's Postwar will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese Studies and Modern Japanese History as well as historians studying the world after 1945.
This study of Japanese political culture from c. 1940 to 2009 challenges standard periodizations of «postwar» Japan, arguing that the postwar period began, much later than previously argued, when a culture of pacifism developed. We can see evidence of this in feature films from the era and in the activities of groups involved in film promotion and criticism. Film and Political Culture in Postwar Japan asks us to take Japanese pacifism seriously and not assume that it is merely a passing phenomenon. This study of the political left questions previous assumptions about such marginalization after the Red Purges of 1950 and the sectarian infighting of the 1960s. Michael H. Gibbs provokes the reader to look beyond the standard «national» parameters of Japanese culture, to examine the role of other states in fomenting war during the 1940s-1970s and in keeping the subsequent peace. In addition, he challenges the neglect of mainstream Japanese film criticism in English-language scholarship, focusing on many filmmakers seen as important in Japanese film culture but relatively little discussed in the west. Gibbs sets the canon of Great Japanese Directors to one side and focuses on the work of Kinoshita, Yamamoto, Masumura, Kuroki, Yamada, Higashi, Negishi, Sakamoto, and Nishikawa. Scholars and students of Japanese and East Asian history, film, war and peace studies, and comparative and world history should find this volume of great interest.
Yamamoto Sanehiko's (1885-1952) achievements as a publisher, writer, and politician in the interwar period served as both a catalyst and a template for developments after the wars. While exploring the accomplishments the compelling figure, this study sheds new light on the social, cultural, and political changes that occurred in postwar Japan.