The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 12 | Issue 8 | Number 3 | Article ID 4080 | Feb 23, 2014

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Beyond the Bubble, Beyond Fukushima: Reconsidering theHistory of Postwar Japan バブルのかなた、福島のかなたとは　戦後日本史再考

Christopher Gerteis, Timothy S. George

Abstract: Christopher Gerteis and Timothy S.George make a case for revisiting Japan’spostwar history in the second decade of thetwenty-first century. They argue that Japan’sproblematic responses to the triple disasters ofMarch 2011 warrant re-evaluating thepersistent myths of failure and successassociated with Japan’s “postwar” and “post-bubble” eras.

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Japan’s spectacular economic growth after1945 made it an exemplar of modern capitalismfor business leaders in the Americas, Europe,and especially Pacific Asia, particularly at theheight of its economic dominance in the 1980s.Japan was frequently held up as a model for thedevelopment of East and Southeast Asia.Malaysia was among the first to adopt a “LookEast” policy, explicitly rejecting the “westernmodel” in favor of one attributed to Japan. In

1979, the American sociologist Ezra Vogelpublished Japan as Number One, with thesubtitle Lessons for America. Soon, executivesfrom the United States were visiting theirformer pupil and strategic junior partner tolearn the secrets of its success, while Japanesehubris was reflected in the bits of gold foil onecould order sprinkled on sushi at exclusiverestaurants. Japan was seen - and saw itself - asthe successful pioneer and model in solving theproblems of late-industrial capitalism, fromurban crowding to labor-management relationsto pollution.

However, the collapse of mammoth real estateand stock market bubbles by 1991 launched thenation on two decades of economic stagnationpunctuated by episodes of fitful growth,deflation and soul searching. The hubris thatdrove the 1980s - that “we had all the answers”- had collapsed. The confidence, and thecertainty about national goals, slipped away inthe 1990s. The bubble burst, the Cold Warended, the population aged, rural areashemorrhaged population and struggled to stayalive, and China’s era of spectacularly rapideconomic growth continued even longer thanhad Japan’s. Japan struggled to find a directionin what suddenly seemed to be a new andunfami l iar vers ion of moderni ty , orpostmodernity. There was much talk about the“Galapagos-ization” of Japan, a turning inward,a giving up of grand dreams and an acceptancethat Japan’s global role and importance mightshrink to the point where the nation would beignored rather than copied by the rest of theworld. It was no surprise that one response was

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to remember - or imagine - a time when thingshad been different.

Store devastated by the March 11, 2011tsunami, Rikuzentakata, ©Timothy S.George

And then, after 11 March 2011, the state’sineffectual response to the triple-crises ofearthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster innortheastern Japan heightened popular debateover whether the nation was doomed to a slowdecline or might yet be able to recover its vigorand discover a new path and new purposes.The flurry of international attention, includinga level of media coverage on Japan not seensince the early 1990s, again brought globalinterest to bear on Japan’s economic and socialwoes. Yet the content of that analysis too oftensuggested that Japan’s successes are relevantbut its failures are unique. While financialreports seemed to regularly declare Japan “outof recession,” media discussions in and outsideJapan after March of 2011 remained hauntedby the failure to bounce back from thedevastation inflicted by one of the strongestearthquakes in recorded human history. Theruins of disaster provided further fodder fordismissing Japan as irrelevant on theinternational political stage. Reports of Japan’sdemise since 1990 remain wildly overstated, to

the point that it has been quite fashionable topublicly wonder whether Japan really mattersanymore.2

Firehouse devastated by the March 11,2011 tsunami, Rikuzentakata, ©Timothy S.George

This seems absurd for a country that enjoys thehighest standard of living in East Asia,sustained by the third-largest economy in theworld. Of course Japan matters for manyreasons. It was the first non-Western nation tohave a constitution and to industrialize. Japanavoided being colonized and became a colonialpower itself. It plunged into a devastating warthat killed tens of millions in East andSoutheast Asia and the Pacific and ended withJapan as the first and only nation to suffer thehorrors of nuclear warfare. In defeat, Japanarose from the ashes of war to become an evengreater industrial power while simultaneouslyestablishing itself as a vibrant, pacifist, andcontentious democracy. Its modern historycontinues to inspire leaders in the developingworld even as many citizens of those countriesonce occupied by Imperial Japan remonstrateagainst resurgent denials of Japanese wrong-doing.

Nevertheless, dismissals of Japan’s relevance

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have deflected attention from the ways thatJapan’s real problems today are shared withothers. Both Japan’s successes and failureshold common cause with those of the late-stagecapitalist economics of the Americas, Europeand Pacific Asia. Japan’s achievements -positive and negative - since the end of thenineteenth century remain highly relevant forpolicy makers, business leaders, and citizenryacross the globe. In some respects Japan in thetwenty-first century is once again leading theway, this time as the first nation in Pacific Asiato struggle with the consequences of decliningindustrial significance, and as the fastest-agingsociety in the world. Japan must finance thewelfare of a population that is anticipated by2020 to be comprised of more septuagenariansthan teenagers. And perhaps most significantly,the Japanese continue to redefine their moderncollective identity and their country’s place inthe world, as they have been doing for over 150years.

These developments make it all the moreimportant that the nation forge better relationswith its Asia-Pacific neighbors - a task itsleaders do not seem to be taking seriouslyenough. Several of Japan’s other problems,such as the extent to which the Japanese statewil l fol low through on its mandate toreconstruct the quake-devastated Northeast,are also undoubtedly critical. Indeed, there isreason to doubt that the Japanese governmentwill adequately respond given its persistentincapacity to call to heel the accident-pronenuclear industry and the diplomatic hornet’snest stirred up each time a governmentminister decries the veracity of Chinese andKorean memories of the Second World War.3

It seems clear that those engaged in explainingJapan’s geopolitical role need to move beyondthe simplistic messages of “copy this” and“beware of that.” It is time to once morerethink how we explain Japan to the widerworld. Our recent edited volume, Japan since1945: From Postwar to Post -bubble

( B l o o m s b u r y 2 0 1 3 )(http://www.amazon.com/japan-since-1945-postw a r - p o s t -bubble/dp/1441101187/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=utf8&qid=1377951382&sr=1-1), grew out oftwo gatherings of scholars of postwar Japan.Unlike many pundits over the past two decades,the participants in the 2009 conference“Revisiting Postwar Japan” at Sophia Universityin Tokyo, and a workshop at the University ofLondon’s School of Oriental and AfricanStudies in 2010, did not take for granted thevalue of studying Japan since 1945. In thatvolume, we focused on four issues: civic life,the legacies of war and military occupation, theemergence of a postindustrial economy, andthe interaction of public memory with thesocial, political, and economic trajectories fromthe postwar to the post-bubble era. Our goalwas to paint a more robust portrait of Japan’scontemporary history by examining the social,cultural, and political underpinnings of Japan’spostwar and postindustrial trajectories. Morebroadly, our ongoing collective goal is to crossthe intellectual boundaries where historyleaves off and other disciplines begin, in orderto put to rest popular dismissals of Japan’srelevance in the twenty-first century world.

Election posters, Tsumago, ©Timothy S.George

Civic Imaginations

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As the term “postwar” suggests, the formativenarrative and material framework for Japantoday is still World War II. Japan’s war inPacific Asia from 1931 to 1945 caused the mostwidespread bloodshed the region had everknown, with a total cost in lives that may havereached as many as 20 million people dead.4

The domestic experiences of war for manyordinary Japanese was of death and severehardship, culminating with the incendiarybombings of Tokyo and Osaka and nuclearbombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In thewake of Japan’s surrender in August 1945, theinternational war crimes tribunals tried,convicted, and hanged only a handful of thepolitical and military leaders most responsiblefor the war, leaving many issues of warresponsibility unresolved. Yet the people andgovernment of postwar Japan were remarkablefor their ability to convert the experiences ofthe wartime era into productive, long-livedalliances with many of Japan’s former enemies.This was one way that Japan became a modelfor the world’s late industrializers.

Positioning themselves in the dual role ofproconsul and tutor, the mostly Americanofficials of the Allied Occupation of Japan(1945–1952) translated their social andpol i t ica l v is ion o f democracy into aconstitutional monarchy for Japan thatembraced the rights of free speech, formalgender equality and a “minimum standard ofcultured living.” Yet, while the AlliedOccupation is often characterized as a liberal“New Deal” for Japan, reactionary strainswithin the American political system, inparticular the rise of anti-Communism and theonset of the Cold War, also had tremendousrepercussions for Japan. They strengthened thehands of its more conservative politicians andleft the nation no choice but to join theAmerican side in a polarized world.

Statues of Bakumatsu heroes TakasugiShinsaku and Yoshida Shōin, Yamaguchi,©Timothy S. George

One persistent belief about Japan is that itlacked a historical tradition of an engagedcitizenry. This is of course a myth – generatedby and believed in by many Japanese as well asothers. However, the Meiji, Taishō, and eventhe early Shōwa eras (1868–1912, 1912–1926,and 1926–1931) witnessed considerable right-and left-wing political activity, some of it quiteradical. The postwar years saw an even greaterlevel of civic engagement. Indeed, the postwarera was a clear example of fractious democraticcapitalism, even though the huge citizens’movements of the era are rarely recalled today.As a result, the postwar era is largelyremembered within the narrow, sometimesstultifying context of the “economic miracle”narrative. For some, this blind spot has theironic – and at times convenient – consequenceof obscuring the way that Japan can be a usefulmodel for societies that hope to enjoy botheconomic growth and political pluralism.However, others see it as obscuring the waycitizens’ movements were coopted before theycould fundamentally transform the nation’spolitical economy.

Japan’s two constitut ions - the Meij iconstitution of 1890, and the currentconstitution in effect since May 3, 1947 - were

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both literally handed to the Japanese peoplefrom above, the former from the Meiji emperorand the latter from their postwar occupiers.The Allied Occupation, the legacies of the warand the new constitution constituted aninfrastructure that the everyday citizens coulddo little to change. What they could control,however, was how they responded to them, andthe meanings they assigned to these responses.In doing so, they were writing new chapters inthe story of Japan’s continuing redefinition ofits modern domestic and international identity.

The 1950s were indeed witness to great socialand economic turmoil. from the efforts by thecitizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end thenuclear arms race to the unionization strugglesled by coal miners demanding basic safetyequipment and fair wages. – This picture ofJapanese life stands in stark contrast to themiddle-class family lives portrayed widely intelevision and motion picture melodramastoday. Yet the 1950s nevertheless saw theemergence of conservative one-party rule,despite the upsurge in civic organizations andmass movements underpinned by constitutionalprotections for individual rights and masspolitics.

By 1960, the political dissatisfactions ofmillions of Japanese had sparked a nationalmovement to rescind the postwar militarytreaties with the United States. Thesedissatisfactions grew by the end of the decadeinto vast national movements calling for theend of Japanese support for the Vietnam Warand the reversion of Okinawa from American toJapanese sovereignty. The protests targetedAmerican government policies as much asthose of the Japanese government. Notcoincidentally, the United States pouredresources into protecting the Japanesegovernment from democratic demands to expelthe U.S. bases and end Japan’s logisticalsupport for the war in Vietnam. Then, afterthese national social movements of the 1960swere squelched by extra-parliamentary and

occasionally extrajudicial action, manypolitically active Japanese people refocusedtheir civic engagement onto more localconcerns, such as industrial pollution inMinamata, social welfare policies andresistance to state encroachment upon therights of farmers in Narita. They were able toforce the Japanese government to makesignificant policy changes in these areas inorder to hold on to political power.

These social movements from the late 1950s tothe early 1970s defined the new outerboundaries of democracy in Japan, shaped notby cit izen apathy but by increasinglyimpermeable institutional barriers. Citizenswere deeply involved in national politicalmovements for the first 15 years of the postwarera, but hit several roadblocks between 1960and 1970 that demarcated what hascustomarily been characterized as a decline inparticipatory democracy and the consolidationof one-party rule. Although leftist politicalmovements exerted considerable influence onthe shape of Japanese society, the center-rightleveraged its access to corporate patronagenetworks and American Cold War preferences,determined to emerge as the more powerfulforce. The formation of the Liberal DemocraticParty (LDP) in 1955 marked the beginning ofan era of conservative politics that remainedthe norm apart from short breaks in LDP rulein 1993-94 and 2009-12. These conservativerulers continued the pattern going back toMeiji of responding to domestic challenges justin time and just enough to remain in power.

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Supporters of the antiwar clause in Japan’sconstitution at the Global Article 9Conference, 2008, Tokyo, ©Timothy S.George”

The opening chapters of Japan since 1945explore the meaning of Japan’s postwardemocracy at the local level. This sectionfeatures essays exploring how Japan’s postwardemocracy translated into - or was defined by -local practice by examining the shape of civicengagement that developed in various localcommunities, although all were also influencedby the national politics that flowed from thecapital city. By reconstructing narratives ofcivic life in Kamakura, a historically significantsatellite of Tokyo, and several townships deepin Japan’s rural periphery, Laura Hein, TimothyGeorge, and Martin Dusinberre each examinefrom different angles the structures of civilsociety and of regional identity that emergedwithin the postwar constitutional order.Running against a tide of literature that depictspostwar Japan as a nation driven by aninterventionist state in league with verticallyintegrated corporate systems, the essays in thissection reconstruct a more nuanced portrait ofcivic life in postwar Japan than those focusedsolely on the national center. George andDusinberre also explore the boundaries of thenostalgic longing for “traditional” village Japanthat accompanied the rise of the “furusato”(native place) movement in the 1990s.

Legacies of War and Occupation

If anything has been proven by the endlessdebates about when or whether the “postwar”has ended, it is that Japan has never escapedthe long shadow of its Asia-Pacific War. The“postwar” was declared over many times,including when the Allied Occupation ended in1952, again when the nation’s GNP regained itsprewar peak in 1955, when Japan’s economypassed that of West Germany in 1968 tobecome the third largest in the world afterthose of the USA and the USSR, the twosuperpowers of the day, once again in the1980s when Japan was the world’s largestcreditor and foreign aid donor and home to theworld’s ten largest banks, and in 1989 whenthe Shōwa emperor died after 63 years on thethrone. Some still believe the end of thepostwar has not yet arrived.

Maritime Self Defense Force Warships atMinamata, ©Timothy S. George

Yet, there remained ever-present remindersthat the war was not buried in the past.Okinawa was occupied and administered by theUnited States until 1972, and large portions ofit remain under U.S. military control. Beginningin the 1980s and continuing since then, formervictims of Japan’s invasion of the Asiancontinent reacted in anger when textbooks inJapan called that invasion an “advance” and

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Japanese politicians denied that there had beena Rape of Nanjing. Such discontent againappeared when Asia’s former “comfortwomen,” forced into sexual slavery by theJapanese government during the war, spoke outin the 1990s to demand compensation andapology. Throughout the postwar and into thetwenty-first century, many Koreans andChinese, along with their governments,repeatedly insisted that Japan had never fullyapologized for its actions.

Even the scenes of devastation left by theearthquake and tsunami in 2011 brought tomind for many Japanese strong publicmemories of the hard times that followed in thewake of surrender in 1945, as did the currentemperor’s decision to address the Japanesepeople in the immediate aftermath of theMarch 2011 disasters, as his father had donefor the first time on August 15, 1945, 66 yearsearlier. The decision by the InternationalMilitary Tribunal for the Far East of 1946–1948(the “Tokyo War Crimes Trial”) to blame asmall number of top leaders - not including theemperor - for the war had discouraged mostJapanese from considering their individualresponsibility for the nation’s actions. Manycame to think of the war as a tragedy that hadhappened to them, brought on by those above.Even more so for later generations, the shadowof the war was something bequeathed to themby others and with which they simply had tolive.

Even conventional periodizations of Japanesehistory, which tend to focus on decisive breaksin 1868, 1945, and 1952, can obscure as muchas they illuminate. David Obermiller shows howOkinawa experienced a much longer and verydifferent sort of occupation than the one thatended for the rest of the nation (except theOgasawara Islands) in 1952, and how attentionto Okinawa complicates questions of nationaland regional identity. The ethnographicemphasis in American views of and policiestoward Okinawa had a decidedly colonial

flavor. So too did American attempts to shapethe ways Okinawans defined themselves andremembered their past, affecting local,mainland Japanese, and global views of theregion. Similarly, Katarzyna Cwiertka describesthe continuity in food shortages anddistribution systems across the great divide ofdefeat in August 1945. By focusing on patternsof food distribution and consumption, sheshows that actual practices did not alwayschange in the wake of changes in rulers, laws,and policies. In the early years after the warcitizens and occupiers alike found wartimeinstitutions useful, albeit for new goals. Thenew Labor Law granted workers the basicrights denied them by the wartime state, eventhough it was a re-crafted version of laws andregulations drafted by mid-level bureaucratsduring the war. Institutions for collectivelysettling workplace grievances developed by thewartime state enabled the rapid emergence ofa militant and strike-ready labor movement.Furthermore, neighborhood associations usedto mobilize women for Civil Defense during thewar became grassroots mechanisms forcampaigns by women seeking to influencenational and local political issues.

In the postwar period, Japanese were no longersubjects but citizens with a much greater spacefor political activism. Even marginalized groupscould, in theory, choose between attempting towin seats at the tables of power to makepolicies, or simply attempting to winrecognition and compensation from “thoseabove” (okami) in other ways. The nursesdescribed by Sally Hastings chose the formerpath, organizing and electing representativesto the National Diet. She shows us thecomplicated interconnectedness of work,gender and occupational politics, whichinvolved not just female nurses rebalancingtheir power vis-à-vis male doctors andpoliticians, but also contestations betweennurses and midwives over notions of femaleprofessionalization. Tetsuya Fujiwara showshow the largest group of disabled veterans

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chose to demand formal recognition of theirsocial and economic status as patriots whosacrificed more than the majority, but in doingso also had to contend with some of their own,the “white gown” beggars – disabled,demobilized men begging for alms along thestreets of Japan’s bombed-out cities – whothreatened to undermine attempts by theirbetter-situated disabled brothers to avoid socialand economic marginalization.

State Policy for a Late-Capitalist Society

In his title for a controversial book, journalistand oft-quoted “Japan expert” Karel vanWolferen characterized the essence of Japan’srise to global prominence as The Enigma ofJapanese Power. He was referring to economicrather than military power. Writing at theheight of Japan’s economic success in 1989,van Wolferen attempted to explain how Japancame to be the second largest economy in theworld. This postwar “economic miracle” isindeed an important subject for historical studyand the Japanese “success story” has been bothenvied and resented throughout the world.Japan’s rapid rise to global economicprominence was by far the most famous of allits postwar accomplishments, yet manyscholars and pundits have, since the bursting ofthe economic bubble in the early 1990s, simplydistanced themselves from their own earlierpraise for Japan’s accomplishments and aimedharsh criticism at the state’s failure to effecteconomic recovery since then. They fail toexplain why things changed or whether theproblems today are the result of actions takenearlier. There is, of course, an important backstory to this narrative, one that was neglectedduring the decades of economic growth.

Pundits and scholars often assert that nationaleconomic policy was the secret of Japan’spostwar economic success, particularly PrimeMinister Ikeda Hayato’s 1960 income-doublingpolicy. Less often did they emphasize theextent to which that policy was a cooptive

response to the strong showing by labor in thesocial protest movements of the 1950s.Unprecedented economic growth enabledmanagers to refrain from mass layoffs evenwhen individual firms were losing money. Theircompanies demanded an ever greatercommitment of cheerful labor from workers inreturn, in a grand bargain that rested on full(male) employment. Indeed, Japan’sunemployment rate remained well below 3percent until the late 1980s.

The rapid economic growth from the 1950s tothe early 1970s dramatically increased thestandard of living of most Japanese households.By the end of the 1960s, the three Cs - car,“cooler” (air conditioner), and color television -were the longed-for icons of Japan’s newmaterial wealth. By the mid-1970s, most blue-and white-collar families had, or would soonhave, cars, color TVs, and air conditioners. Andby then, the majority of Japanese consideredthemselves to be middle class. By the height ofthe economic boom of the 1980s, middle-classaffluence took on a level of mass opulenceunparalleled in modern history. But even at theheight of the bubble years of the 1980s, it wasbecoming clear that Japanese affluence wasbuilt on unsustainable social, economic, andenvironmental models. Nor did everyonedelight in the frenetic pace at which manyJapanese sought to consume the trappings ofextravagances theretofore unaffordable, ofwhich Gucci and Luis Vuitton handbags wereemblematic.

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A homeless camp in the shadow of Tokyo’scity hall, ©Timothy S. George

The economic bubble burst in 1991. Housingpr ices p lummeted and suic ide ratesskyrocketed. Along with the increasingly bleakeconomic outlook came cultural and socialissues that included the re-emergence ofteenage prost i tut ion (enjo kōsai , orcompensated dating), along with increasingrates of unemployment and homelessness, all ofwhich had been ubiquitous in prewar andOccupation-era Japan. Japan’s long nineties,also known as the lost decade, stretched wellinto the twenty-first century. In 2002, theofficial national unemployment rate exceeded 5percent for the first time since the early 1950s.When disaggregated, the data revealed a moretroubling concern: the average unemploymentrate for persons aged 15-24 was double that forthe overall population. All through the decade

preceding the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake,aggregate wages continued to decline, the ratioof part-time temporary to full-time regularworkers rose, and the prospects for youngadults remained grim, because the employmentsystem favored those who already had jobs.

Many Japanese wondered if the system thathad brought so much success was breakingdown, or perhaps was no longer appropriate fora post-Cold War, post-high growth era in whichJapan no longer had clear models from which tolearn. Were the system and the bureaucrats,politicians, and business leaders who ran itincapable of adapting to a changed world?Young people, in particular, feared that thesystem and the social bargains that hadenabled it were now closing off rather thancreating opportunities for them. Critics blamedthe state for having failed to develop eitherviable welfare strategies for the agingpopulation or adequate employment for thenation’s youth, but at the same time, numerouspundits and politicians insisted that it was thefilial duty of these “lazy” young people tobuckle down and work harder.

Three of our authors focus directly on the waysthat state policy initiatives toward industry,fisheries, and finance effected considerablechanges to the relationship between thepostwar state and producers, not always for thebetter. Essays by Lonny Carlile, Bruce Aronsonand Satsuki Takahashi reconstruct policyinitiatives of the postwar and post-bubble erasto examine how the state has addressed someof Japan’s most pressing policy problems.Carlile and Aronson focus specifically onpolicies centered in Tokyo that, with varyingdegrees of success, attempted to address theinterconnected milieu of pressing urbaneconomic and social problems. Looking to ruralJapan, Takahashi paints a portrait of fisheriespolicies that illustrates quite plainly thepersistence of Japan’s historical rural/urbandivide. All three essays suggest that theprecedents of bubble-era policies continue to

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shape the relationship between state andsociety in the wake of the 2011 TōhokuEarthquake.

Looking Out, Looking Back

The high speed growth years were culturallytransformative, although the ghost of the warwas never fully banished, especially whenJapanese interacted with people beyond theirnational boundaries. Christine Yano’s essaytakes us back to a time when the sky was thelimit, when most people believed that the worldwas about to become Japan’s oyster. Showingthe way into the joys of global travel, leisure,and cosmopol i tanism were Japanesestewardesses for Pan Am, who traveled abroadeven before the relaxation of currencyrestrictions in 1964 allowed other Japanese tofollow. America became a different sort ofmodel, offering glamorous employment andfreedom for young women and lessons in theconsumption of leisure travel and media for ageneration who had not known the war, or whoseemed to have forgotten it. ChristopherGerteis’ chapter reminds us, however, that thepast was not always so easily left behind. TheNYK shipping line’s redefinition of itself at themoment when Japan left the twentieth centuryand entered the twenty-first included new“corporate social responsibility” practices thatinvolved reframing public presentation of itspast. Its attempt to focus only on the supposedglitter, cosmopolitanism, and good relationswith Asia up through the interwar years, and,even more improbably, to paint itself as apassive victim of the Pacific War, only served todemonstrate the difficulty of escaping theshadow of the war.

Subaru 360 manufactured from 1958 to1971, ©Timothy S. George

Hiraku Shimoda’s analysis of the Project Xtelevision series argues that even domesticallythere were dangers inherent in the nostalgiafor the golden age of Japan’s “greatestgeneration,” the everymen (rarely are womenforegrounded) who sacrificed and struggled tocreate the products on which growth andaffluence were built. In the “good old days” ofhigh growth, the Project X series asserts, when“death from overwork” (karōshi) was not yet alega l l y recogn ized cause o f dea th ,inventiveness, nose-to-the-grindstonedetermination, production, and consumptiongave Japan its purpose and identity.

The implicit message of the television show wasthat Japan needed to re-adopt these values, butimagined golden ages of the past can never berecovered. The sages of old, be they the Dukeof Zhou put forward as a model by Confucius,or the inventors of Cup Noodles or theWalkman celebrated by Project X, cannot showJapanese how to solve the unprecedentedproblems of our late capitalist era. Even afterthe many crises that swept Japan in the wake ofthe Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, some stillseemed to think that it would be possible toturn back the clock or simply stay the course.Most disturbingly such true believers includednot only the nuclear power industry, but also

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members of both the Liberal Democratic Partyand the Democratic Party of Japan.

Other Japanese people responded to thedisaster by striking out in new directions.Among them was the richest man in Japan, SonMasayoshi, the Korean-Japanese entrepreneurand CEO of the SoftBank mobile phonecompany, who pushed for a massive solarpower network to replace Japan’s dependenceon nuclear power. Another was MikitaniHiroshi, CEO of the internet company Rakuten,w h o a d v o c a t e d a t h o r o u g h g o i n ginternationalization of Japanese corporateculture. Whether these or other ideas couldbring back Japan’s optimism, and again make ita global model, remained to be seen.

Contextualizing the Study of Postwar Japan

Japan’s more than two decades of economictroubles look very much like an early exampleof the sort of economic predicament in whichalmost all the advanced economies of NorthAmerica and Europe found themselves lessthan a decade into the twenty-first century,suggesting that there is much to be learnedfrom the mistakes of the first postindustrialsociety. Moreover, despite everything, Japanstill features one of the highest standards ofliving in the world, reminding us that itprovides positive examples in crucial ways.5 Inshort, far more than is acknowledged, Japan’ssituation resembles that of most highlyindustrialized nations of Europe and theAmericas in both good and bad ways. Some ofthe most important social, economic, andpolitical problems they share are high youthunemployment, aging populations, industrialdecline, financial crises, environmentaldegradation, and even natural disasters. Theworry by so many about whether or not Japanmatters seems motivated by a fear that thestandard of living enjoyed by most Japanesesince the 1960s is about to disappear. It wascreated by turning Japan into the world’sindustrial base but this state of affairs is now

over. The Japanese experience of de-industrialization, shared with other countrieswith high standards of living, is taken by manyto indicate that the inevitable result is the endof affluence for all of us. Japan is now anexemplar of how postindustrial societies cope.

Tsunami awareness in Kamakura,©Timothy S. George

Alas, Japan has not coped well with its recentcrisis. The handling of the disasters of March2011 was deeply shocking specifically becauseit was bungled so badly despite the fact thatJapan has one of the world’s best-educatedpopulations and is a functional democracy, andboth the national government and privatecompanies can mobilize vast economicresources. Yet none of these significantstrengths either prevented the disaster or ledto an adequate response. While Japan’sresponse to March 2011 perhaps topped that ofthe American government in the wake ofHurricane Katrina, it seemed reasonable toexpect that a nation built upon a web ofearthquake faults would have been betterprepared for the disasters that befell theFukushima nuclear power plant and beyond.Fukushima destroyed the image of Japan astechnologically capable when it needs to be,both at home and abroad.

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The recent Tokyo gubernatorial election raisesdoubts about the meaningfulness of politicalchange in the wake of the Fukushima nucleardisaster. In February 2014 pro-nuclearcand ida te Masuzoe Yō i ch i won thegovernorship of Tokyo over a f ield ofcandidates, including a former prime ministerwho opposed restoring the nation’s reliance onnuc lear power . Perhaps even moredisconcerting are Masuzoe’s public views thatwomen are unsuitable for governmentleadership roles, which further underscores theextent to which he is another of the "old boys"who just doesn't get it. Yet, the Tokyo Olympicsin 2020 could still provide Japan’s politicalelites with the opportunity to demonstrate avision for the future, as did their predecessorsin 1964 when the Olympic Games were used todemonstrate to the world that Japan hadreformed, recovered, rebuilt, and rejoined theclub of industrialized nations. It remainsdoubtful, however, that the Japanese willachieve by 2020 as broad a consensus onnational goals as was perceived in 1964.

The triple disasters of March 2011 have beendescribed as a break with the past. Thecontributors to Japan since 1945 do not attemptto predict how those disasters will changeJapan or the ways its history is already beingtold. But we are certain that, whateverdirections Japanese take now - and they willmost certainly not all take the same direction -they will be building on their pasts, particularlytheir experiences, accomplishments, andfailures, as all societies always do.

Obon lanterns bearing the names oftsunami victims, Kesennuma, ©Timothy S.George

These new approaches encourage all of us totake fresh looks at how the Japanese – andoutsiders - have understood their postwarpaths. There are no simple answers to thequestion of when or whether the postwarperiod has ended, or what the decisive turningpoints since 1945 have been. But thesequestions matter because Japan’s future, builton the precedents of its past, will still havemuch to teach us, good and bad, about life inthe twenty-first century. The proof is in thepudding, or rather how we approach thepudding: by attacking difficult questions from amultiplicity of angles, this new wave of scholarsmay even contribute to the debates – still intheir infancy - about whether the disasters of11 March 2011 constituted a decisive turningpoint in postwar Japanese and global history.

C h r i s t o p h e r G e r t e i s(http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff52182.php) isSenior Lecturer in the History of ContemporaryJapan at SOAS, University of London. He isauthor of Gender Struggles: Wage-earningWomen and Male-Dominated Unions in PostwarJ a p a n(http://amzn.com/0674035690/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), (2009); co-editor of Japan since 1945:

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f r o m P o s t w a r t o P o s t - B u b b l e(http://amzn.com/1441101187/?tag=theasipacjo0b -20) , (2013) ; and ed i tor o f the '(http://www.bloomsbury.com/soasstudies)SOASStudies in Modern and Contemporary Japan(http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1472526996/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20)', a peer-reviewed scholarlymonograph series published in association withB l o o m s b u r y ( h e r e(http://www.bloomsbury.com/soasstudies)).

T i m o t h y S . G e o r g e(http://www.uri.edu/artsci/his/george.html) isProfessor and Chair of History at the Universityof Rhode Island. He recently published anessay in Japan at Nature's Edge: TheEnvironmental Context of a Global Power(http://amzn.com/0824838769/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (edited by Ian Miller, Julia Thomas, andBrett Walker, 2013). He is also the author ofMinamata: Pollution and the Struggle forD e m o c r a c y i n P o s t w a r J a p a n(http://amzn.com/0674007859/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (2001; Chinese translation published in2013), coeditor with Christopher Gerteis ofJapan since 1945: from Postwar to Post-Bubble(http://amzn.com/1441101187/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), (2013).

Recommended citation: Christopher Gerteisand Timothy S. George, "Beyond the Bubble,Beyond Fukushima: Reconsidering the Historyof Postwar Japan," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol.11, Issue 8, No. 3, February 24, 2014.

Notes

1 Updated and Adapted from “Revisiting theHistory of Postwar Japan,” in ChristopherGerteis and Timothy S. George, eds., Japansince 1945: From Postwar to Post-bubble(http://www.amazon.com/japan-since-1945-postwar-post-bubble/dp/1441101187/re) (London

and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

2 Katsuki Aoki, “Whither Japanese keiretsu? Thetransformation of vertical keiretsu in Toyota,Nissan and Honda 1991–2011,” Asia PacificBusiness Review, 19: 1, 70-84; Richard Katz,Japan, the System That Soured: The Rise andFall of the Japanese Economic Miracle.Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998; “KeepingJapan on the Map: A One-Day Conference inCelebration of the Sasakawa LectureshipProgramme and the Breadth of JapaneseStudies in the UK Today” held at BirkbeckCollege, University of London, 18 November2011.

3 Jeff Kingston, “Abe’s Nuclear Energy Policyand Japan’s Future,” The Asia-Pacific Journal,Vol. 11, Issue 34, No. 1, August 19, 2013; andCai Hong, “Over Japan's past, Abe should ditchambiguity for reconciliation,” China Daily, 18J u l y 2 0 1 3 . A v a i l a b l e h e r e(http://www.chinapost.com.tw/commentary/the-c h i n a - p o s t / s p e c i a l - t o - t h e - c h i n a -post/2013/07/18/384061/Over-Japans.htm) atChinaPost. Accessed 21 July 2013.

4 The question of the total numbers of peoplekilled during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945)is still very controversial, although estimatesrange between 15 and 20 million. For asobering discussion of this issue, see JohnDower’s epilogue “From War to Peace” in JohnW. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race andPower in the Pacific War (New York: PantheonBooks, 1986), 293–317.

5 “Turning Japanese: Debt and Politics inA m e r i c a a n d E u r o p e(http://www.economist.com/node/21524874),”The Economist, 30 July 2011. Accessed 21January 2013.