[PDF] Nationalism In Post War Japan eBook

Author : Yoshiko Nozaki
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 14,58 MB
Release : 2008-06-23
Category : History
ISBN : 1134195907

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The controversy over official state-approved history textbooks in Japan, which omit or play down many episodes of Japan’s occupation of neighbouring countries during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945), and which have been challenged by critics who favour more critical, peace and justice perspectives, goes to the heart of Japan’s sense of itself as a nation. The degree to which Japan is willing to confront its past is not just about history, but also about how Japan defines itself at present, and going forward. This book examines the history textbook controversy in Japan. It sets the controversy in the context of debates about memory, and education, and in relation to evolving politics both within Japan, and in Japan’s relations with its neighbours and former colonies and countries it invaded. It discusses in particular the struggles of Ienaga Saburo, who has made crucial contributions, including through three epic lawsuits, in challenging the official government position. Winner of the American Educational Research Association 2009 Outstanding Book Award in the Curriculum Studies category.

Author : J. Victor Koschmann
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 46,77 MB
Release : 1996-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226451213

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After World War II, Japanese intellectuals believed that world history was moving inexorably toward bourgeois democracy and then socialism. But who would be the agents—the active "subjects"—of that revolution in Japan? Intensely debated at the time, this question of active subjectivity influenced popular ideas about nationalism and social change that still affect Japanese political culture today. In a major contribution to modern Japanese intellectual history, J. Victor Koschmann analyzes the debate over subjectivity. He traces the arguments of intellectuals from various disciplines and political viewpoints, and finds that despite their stress on individual autonomy, they all came to define subjectivity in terms of deterministic historical structures, thus ultimately deferring the possibility of radical change in Japan. Establishing a basis for historical dialogue about democratic revolution, this book will interest anyone concerned with issues of nationalism, postcolonialism, and the formation of identities.

Author : Martyn David Smith
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 15,24 MB
Release : 2018-04-05
Category : History
ISBN : 1350030791

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Mass Media, Consumerism and National Identity in Postwar Japan addresses Japan's evolving nationalism and national identity in relation to its newly rising consumerism during the two decades from 1952 to 1972, through a study of the transformation of the print media and the market for weekly and monthly magazines. Martyn Smith argues that the transformation of the print media in the 1950s and 1960s expanded the possibilities for social, individual and national identities in Japan. From the late 1950s, the growth in the market for weekly magazines was fuelled by the huge potential for advertising revenue, the rapid development of the Japanese economy, and the necessity for the growth of a consumer society. This resulted in the merging of national identity with individual subjectivity – which this book describes as 'national subjectivity' – as the Japanese media promoted individual consumption to aid the recovery of the Japanese nation as a whole. Examining housewife magazines such as Fujin Koron, Fujin no Tomo and Fujin Gaho, as well as news magazines such as Mainichi Graph and Asahi Graph, and publications aimed at young people – Shukan Heibon and Heibon Punch – Smith shows how the relationship of nationalism to everyday life is best understood by taking into account the changing nature of consumption in the period. By presenting an alternative to the traditional 'top-down' narrative of state-driven economic nationalism, this book therefore makes a unique contribution to the study of postwar Japanese history and Japanese nationalism.

Author : Yoshikuni Igarashi
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 10,18 MB
Release : 2012-01-09
Category : History
ISBN : 1400842980

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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.

Author : Simon Avenell
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 11,88 MB
Release : 2023-12-04
Category : History
ISBN : 1684176638

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War, defeat, and the collapse of empire in 1945 touched every aspect of postwar Japanese society, profoundly shaping how the Japanese would reconstruct national identity and reengage with the peoples of Asia. While “America” offered a vision of re-genesis after cataclysmic ruin, “Asia” exposed the traumata of perpetration and the torment of ethnic responsibility. Obscured in the shadows of a resurgent postwar Japan lurked a postimperial specter whose haunting presence both complicated and confounded the spiritual rehabilitation of the nation. Asia and Postwar Japan examines Japanese deimperialization from 1945 until the early twenty-first century. It focuses on the thought and activism of progressive activists and intellectuals as they struggled to overcome rigid preconceptions about “Asia,” as they grappled with the implications of postimperial responsibility, and as they forged new regional solidarities and Asian imaginaries. Simon Avenell reveals the critical importance of Asia in postwar Japanese thought, activism, and politics—Asia as a symbolic geography, Asia as a space for grassroots engagement, and ultimately, Asia as an aporia of identity and the source of a new politics of hope.

Author : Rotem Kowner
Publisher : Brill Academic Publishers
Page : 652 pages
File Size : 39,81 MB
Release : 2015-05-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9789004292925

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"Race and Racism in Modern East Asia (Vol. 2)" examines in depth interactions between Western and local constructions of race. This insightful 23-chapter volume offers a sweeping analysis of issues of race, racism, nationalism and gender in the region that is unsurpasssed in previous scholarship.

Author : Curtis Anderson Gayle
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 17,28 MB
Release : 2003-08-29
Category : History
ISBN : 1134431589

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This book explores the historical writings of postwar Japanese Marxists - who were, and who continue to be, surprisingly numerous in the Japanese academic world. It shows how they developed in their historical writing ideas of 'radical nationalism', which accepted presupposed ideas of Japan's 'ethnic homogeneity', but which they saw as a 'revolutionary subject', creating a sphere of radical political action against the state, the American Occupation and global capital. It compares this approach in both prewar and postwar Marxist historiography, showing that in the postwar period ideas were more elaborate, and put much more emphasis on national education and social mobilization. It also shows how these early postwar discourses have made their way into contemporary ethnic nationalism and revisionism in Japan today. The book's rich and interesting analysis will appeal not just to historians of Japan, but also to those interested in nationalism and Marxism more generally.

Author : James Patrick Boyd
Publisher :
Page : 467 pages
File Size : 41,30 MB
Release : 2012
Category :
ISBN :

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This dissertation evaluates claims that nationalism is rising in post-Cold War Japan by first noting the disconnect between existent social science conceptions of nationalism and those needed to examine how nationalism might change in contemporary, peaceful, wealthy, and stable democracies such as postwar Japan. This study defines nationalism as a discourse that constructs and reconstructs points of identification and differentiation that define both a political community (i.e. "nation") and the form of its domain over a modern territorial state. It argues nationalism is best understood as reoccurring "nation-state narratives" that tell the story of how the nation's putative qualities or past experiences define the present nature of its territorial state. Change in nationalism is evaluated through content and discourse analysis of five narratives expressing the relationship between the Japanese people and their state in a sample of elite discourse drawn from the period 1952-2007. The analysis reveals that references to all five narratives peak in the immediate postwar period and again in the 1980s before declining to lows in the post-Cold War period, which also saw the highest level of contestation over these narratives in the nearly sixty years of the study. In particular, the narrative depicting Japan as an anti-militarist/pacifist nation-state as well as the narrative emphasizing Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation-state proved the most contested during this period, while the narrative affirming Japan as a democratic nation-state went uncontested. Political struggles over reforming institutions associated with the narratives were found to be the major drivers behind these changes, although characteristics of the narratives, especially the specificity of their normative claims, also shaped this process. The post-Cold War period is thus one of transition in nationalist discourse in Japan, although the scale of change is somewhat limited. For example, while the anti-militarist/pacifist narrative saw exceptions attached to many of its normative claims, its anti-nuclear components and cognitive claims remained unchallenged. Finally, Japanese nationalist discourse continued to legitimate democracy and was found to shape important electoral reforms, even as it shifted away from more insular and exclusionary forms, which may create space for more open immigration policies moving forward.

Author : Sandra Wilson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 45,81 MB
Release : 2013-04-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1135024456

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Nationalism was one of the most important forces in 20th century Japan. It pervaded almost all aspects of Japanese life, but was a complex phenomenon, frequently changing, and often meaning different things to different people. This book brings together interesting, original new work, by a range of international leading scholars who consider Japanese nationalism in a wide variety of its aspects. Overall, the book provides many new insights and much new thinking on what continues to be a crucially important factor shaping current developments in Japan.