The Bibliography of Post-War Documentary Literature: Processing war and defeat in post-World War II Japan

Research Article| September 01 2012 Book Review: Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s by Isolde Standish | Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return by Miryam B. Sas | Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji by Steven Ridgely Isolde Standish, Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Continuum, 2011. $110.00 cloth; $29.95 paper. 216 pages.Miryam B. Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return. Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Monographs, 2011. $39.95 cloth. 300 pages.Steven Ridgely, Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. $67.50 cloth; $22.50 paper. 264 pages. Ryan Cook Ryan Cook RYAN COOK is a Ph.D. candidate in Film Studies and Japanese Literature at Yale University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2012) 66 (1): 73–76. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.73 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ryan Cook; Book Review: Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s by Isolde Standish | Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return by Miryam B. Sas | Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji by Steven Ridgely. Film Quarterly 1 September 2012; 66 (1): 73–76. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.73 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan: The Revival of a Defeated Society Simon Avenell (bio) Civic Engagement in Postwar Japan: The Revival of a Defeated Society. By Rieko Kage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011. xv, 195 pages. $85.00, cloth; $37.50, E-book. Civil society and volunteering have been topics of intense interest for scholars of Japan for well over a decade now, especially following the massive outpouring of volunteers after the Kobe Earthquake in 1995. The triple disaster in Tohoku in March 2011 has brought civic activism and volunteering into the spotlight again but, unlike 1995, civic groups are now better funded, enjoy wider social legitimacy, and display sophisticated organizational capabilities and more interconnectedness. Indeed, much of the activism we see in Tohoku today can be traced to the experiential and institutional legacies of Kobe. In her superb study on civic engagement in postwar Japan, Rieko Kage offers a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich analysis of [End Page 488] the ways past developments—especially institutional and organizational legacies—shape civil societies. Rather than natural disaster, however, Kage focuses on the aftermath of Japan’s greatest contemporary human-made disaster: defeat in World War II. She argues that “wartime mobilization lays the groundwork for postwar civic engagement by instilling civic skills in the citizens which they can transfer to new contexts if the postwar political regime permits it” (p. 1). Furthermore, she suggests that “prewar structures of participation” influence the opportunities for civic engagement after wars “by shaping the costs of association-building and information-gathering” (p. 1). Put simply, in regions or countries where wartime mobilization and prewar associational activities have been high, we would expect the growth of postwar civic engagement to be fastest. The book uses Japan’s early postwar years (before the first phase of high-speed economic growth from the mid-1950s) to test this thesis and, based on my reading, does so in a highly convincing and original way. After the lucidly crafted introduction, in chapter 2 Kage presents a wealth of fresh data evidencing the rise in civic engagement in Japan from 1945 to 1955. Mining often-scant data from groups such as the YMCA, YWCA, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the Japan Alpine Club, and the Kodokan Judo Institute, Kage convincingly shows that civic engagement not only quickly returned to prewar levels but began to outpace them, regardless of whether the groups were “Western” or “indigenous” in origin (p. 37). Based on these data, Kage suggests that the hypothesis that war defeat is necessarily deleterious for postwar civic engagement “requires reconsideration” (p. 43). Chapter 3 steps back from Japan to examine war and civic engagement on a more broadly theoretical level. Here Kage briefly presents some possible alternative explanations for the postwar surge in civic engagement followed by her thesis that, through wartime mobilization, citizens come into contact with individuals, officials, and groups that they would not have encountered in a peacetime setting and interact with them to achieve various task objectives. In so doing, they may acquire important communication skills, political and social awareness, organizational savvy, the art of deliberation, and so on—in short, what scholars have termed “civic skills.” (p. 53) As I note below, this is a provocative and original perspective, especially for historians of modern Japan who are prone to understand wartime mobilization primarily as a bane for civil society. Kage uses chapters 4 and 5 to quantitatively test her theory of wartime mobilization and prewar organizational legacies on civic engagement. Those of a less numerical disposition might be tempted to leap over these chapters, [End Page 489] but I would advise otherwise. I was absolutely fascinated by Kage’s operationalization of variables to test her theory, not to mention her articulate description of the methodologies utilized. After examining the Japanese case in chapter 4, Kage expands her analysis cross-nationally in chapter 5 to test the effects of wartime mobilization (or lack thereof) on some 13 nations. In support of her thesis, she finds that, from a generational perspective, “individuals in the war-affected cohorts appear to participate at higher rates than those in their immediately preceding cohorts, regardless of whether the country...

In this article, I examine how defeat in war has shaped intellectual discourse in postwar Japan, particularly intellectual debates on war guilt. Known as ‘war responsibility debates’ in Japanese, the disconnection that is imposed on national identity by defeat has led to a number of different responses from Japanese opinion leaders and scholars. Implicit in these responses is a desire to restore fundamental continuity, either by revising the appraisal of war, or by making guilt the unifying element in a transwar national identity. Defeat is the crux of the issue around which intellectuals have had to navigate in their quest for a continuous history for postwar Japan. This article considers the contributions made to this debate by Maruyama Masao, a pioneering thinker on political thought in postwar Japan; by the scholars in the Science of Thought Research Group in their study of political apostasy (tenkō) and the more recent advent of revisionist historians in the ‘Liberal School of History’ group. I conclude that this ongoing debate should itself be regarded as a positive phenomenon, as it continues to presume a basic link between the war and accountability that is fundamental to the integrity of Japan's postwar democracy.

Previously, I have discussed the changes within the life cycle, or turning-points in life and their interrelationships and changes from the Tenpo era to the present. In another paper, the attention is focussed on the last phase of the life cycle, specifically upon the custom of abandonment of the elderly as reflected in various traditions and works of classical literature. Numerous sources exist, however reliable sources are limited ; thus the studies were limited from the Tenpo era to the present. During the research, I discovered the massive work "on Retirement" by Professor Muneshige Hozumi of the Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo which examines numerous works of ancient Western, Chinese and Japanese literature. This work is the result of diligent effort and examines the handling of the elderly from a legal viewpoint. According to Professor Hozumi, Indian Holy Scriptures state, "Human life is divided into a student period, a "head of the family" period and a retirement period". This classification agrees with my model of the life cycle in some respects. The first edition of this book was published 95 years ago and already belongs to the historical literature. In order to provide a reference for the continued study of the senescence period of the life cycle, I have confirmed portions of the references cited in Professor Hozumi book at the National Diet Library, University of Tokyo General Library, University of Tokyo Faculty of Economics Library and Faculty of Culture Library. Using the materials obtained from this book as a foundation (references at the end), an overall treatise on the handling of the elderly was written using the custom of cannibalism which probably originated from victimization of the elderly as well as the custom of abandoning of the elderly with final supplement by my own opinion. The range of studies on the life cycle is extensive beyond the limit of any one science. What I have unearthed is only a shallow outline. Discovery of a basal structure of cultural and social life persisting through a long time span may be a contribution to the study of human ecology.

Journal Article Big Business in Japanese Politics, Economic Policy in Postwar Japan: Growth versus Economic Democracy and Economic Growth in Japan and the USSR Get access Big Business in Japanese Politics. By Chitoshi Yanaga. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. 1968. 371 pp. Bibliog. Index. (Yale Studies in Political Science, 22.) $8.75. 79s.Economic Policy in Postwar Japan: Growth versus Economic Democracy. By Kozo Yamamura. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press for the Center for Japanese and Korean Studies, University of California. 1968. 226 pp. Bibliog. Index. $6.95. 66s. 6d.Economic Growth in Japan and the USSR. By Angus Maddison: London: Allen & Unwin. 1969. 174 pp. Bibliog. Index. 35s. Paperback: 18s. Seymour Broadbridge Seymour Broadbridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 1970, Pages 208–210, https://doi.org/10.2307/2614308 Published: 01 January 1970

Reviewed by: Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return Ann Sherif (bio) Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return. By Miryam Sas. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2011. xvii, 275 pages. $39.95. In this engaging book, Miryam Sas guides the reader through the complex world of the experimental arts in Japan of the 1960s and after. In contrast to Sas’s emphasis on literary texts in her first book, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford University Press, 1999), this [End Page 207] volume focuses on experimental theater, performance, butō, video, and film. The author offers compelling, close readings of experimental art through the lens of its age and in the spirit of artists such as Terayama Shūji, Betsuyaku Minoru, Hijikata Tatsumi, Moriyama Daidō, Hosoe Eikoh, Jōnouchi Motoharu, and Lee U-Fan. Sas classifies the art she studies as experimental rather than avant-garde. Particularly when applied to post–World War II art, the term avant-garde has come to be used to refer to virtually any cultural form that is not strictly mass-market entertainment. Historical studies of the avant-garde, furthermore, often critique the claims to radicalism or vanguard status of the postwar “neo-avant garde” as both compromised by its proximity to commercialism and overly complacent in liberal democratic contexts. Critics compare the postwar “avant-garde” to the epoch-making innovations of the historical avant-garde (Dada, surrealism, futurism) in an age of world war and revolution in the early twentieth century, a global movement that shook the art establishment with its radical challenge of the very notion of art, proposal of a new relationship between art and everyday life, and dismantling of many sacred concepts and institutions of high art. In contrast, the term experimental art has been more comfortably associated with art after World War II, often situated in the very institutional contexts and mechanical media that the prewar avant-garde sought to challenge. Much of the art that Sas studies exemplifies the postwar spirit of “irreverence and defiance” inspired by Sakaguchi Ango’s foundational 1946 essay “Darakuron.” Postwar experimental art, Sas highlights, continues the historical avant-garde emphasis on breaking down the hierarchy of genres and working in a variety of media and genres. The experimental art of Terayama, Betsuyaku, and others is highly conceptual while deeply engaged with the philosophical currents and the ethical dilemmas of the day. For this reason, Sas highlights the artists’ critical writings, which are integral to understanding their work. Evidence for their conceptual approaches is also found in what books they were reading (popular at the time or mentioned by the artist), their interactions with other artists and thinkers, and, to a lesser extent, the historical contexts of their art. Sas structures Experimental Arts around three key concepts: engagement (angajuman), encounter (deai), and return/origins. These ideas resonate strongly with the political and artistic milieux of post-1950s experimental art. These are not random tropes manifested in experimental art but instead ideas that developed and became influential in philosophical and ideological discourses of the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the importance of understanding such highly conceptual modes of creativity in relation to philosophical and ethical debates grounded in specific historical and political dilemmas is one of the key points of Sas’s book. [End Page 208] In contrast to the popular meanings of angajuman as “marching in the streets,” “political protest” (p. xiv), Sas examines in detail the profound presence in experimental art of the idea of engagement, as theorized by Jean-Paul Sartre as a process that entailed acknowledging responsibility for the political consequences of one’s art and the importance for artists and intellectuals to speak out and act on urgent issues of the age. Sas regards engagement as bridging “theoretical, aesthetic, and political questions” (p. xiv). Engagement here is a complex notion, which means not only political critique but also transformation of consciousness and vision. Terayama Shūji, for example, uses his art to invite his audience to “a specific kind of vision . . . giving ourselves over to the gaze of others” (p. 61). Sartre, in his renowned What...

Much work in political science today in some way or another involves the analysis of competition between interest groups, whether they are landlords and peasants, employers and workers, creditors and debtors, or producers and consumers. But how do we know what these groups want? Should we derive their interests from theory or discover their preferences through field research?1 These basic questions strike at the heart of current debates in comparative politics.2 In practice, many analysts derive group interests by logical assumption, often building on standard economic theory. In doing so, they implicitly or explicitly adopt a thick view of rationality. That is, they give rationality a specific substance: the maximization of economic welfare.3 Not surprisingly, those who work in political economy are particularly drawn to this approach.4 Proponents contend that by making certain assumptions about preferences they allow themselves to devise more parsimonious, powerful, replicable, and testable models. In any case, the interests of many groups, particularly those defined by their place within the economy, are virtually self-evident.5 After all, how many employers do not want lower wages, and how many workers do not want higher wages? How many producers do not want higher prices, and how many consumers do not want lower prices? Curiously, Japanese consumer groups have repeatedly advocated policy positions at odds with their basic material interest in lower prices, higher financial returns, greater choice, and a more efficient economic system. Japan offers a cautionary tale for those who assume that they know what interest groups want or that economistic assumptions about interest group preferences apply equally well in different national contexts.6 While I do not suggest that political scientists should never make simplifying assumptions about interest group preferences, I contend that even the safest assumptions may turn out to be false and that false assumptions tend to produce faulty political analysis in practice. In the case of Japanese consumers, seemingly innocuous assumptions about consumer preferences have not only led political analysts to mischaracterize Japanese consumers' role in politics, but also to misinterpret Japan's postwar political economy more generally. Economists, political scientists, U.S. negotiators, and Japanese consumer groups overwhelmingly agree that Japan's postwar economic system has favored producers over consumers.7 The financial system shifted resources from consumers to produc-

The paper deals with the question of relation between the individual and collec­tive memory. It is shown that the approaches to research of individual and col­lective memory usually differ: individual memory is seen as an object of re­search of natural sciences and epistemology, while collective memory is studied by political science, sociology, history and other social sciences and humanities. It is substantiated that phenomena of collective memory are described via con­cepts that belong to individual memory – amnesia, oblivion, memory “trauma” etc., that in this case can be regarded as metaphors. The unbreakable link of col­lective memory and collective knowledge is shown. It is demonstrated that one of the most important mechanisms of connection between individual and collec­tive memory is empathy that helps to “live through” the memory of the Other that is expressed in language or other sign means. It is shown that one of the in­terlinking concepts in the research of individual and collective memory is the concept of narrative – both the autobiographical narrative as a personal life story of an individual, and the narrative as the history of the group – of the people, of nation etc. The productiveness of common research of individual and collective memory on the same methodological basis is substantiated.

‘Who is she?’ Inside/outside literary communities

Five Mountain culture, a unique Sino-Japanese exchange, shaped Japan's development via Zen monks. These monks in China and Japan infused Zen's allure into Japan, initially captivating aristocrats and later the masses. As Five Mountain culture spread, it met the ruling party's needs, blending Chinese culture with local roots to form a distinct Japanese culture. Zen monks, especially Zekkai Chuushin, who studied in China, played pivotal roles. Zekkai Chuushin's Zen mastery, appreciation of Chinese customs, and study of Ming Dynasty calligraphy and poetry influenced the spread of Chinese culture. His masterpiece, "Jiao Jian Gao," epitomizes Chinese poetry in Five Mountain, encompassing nostalgia for China, yearning for homeland, and critiques of Japanese politics. Zekkai Chuushin's works reflect a deep exchange between Chinese and Japanese Zen literature, illustrating China's profound impact on Japanese Zen during the Muromachi period. This study explores how Japanese Zen monks, especially Zekkai Chuushin, drew inspiration from Chinese poetry. Through analysis of his poems, the authors examine the influence and adaptation of Chinese poetry in Japanese Zen literature. The comparative analysis highlights similarities and differences with native Chinese poets, shedding light on Japan's reception of Chinese culture in the Five Mountain period. Zekkai Chuushin creatively embraced Chinese poetry, leaving a profound mark on Japanese literature, skillfully merging tradition with originality and enriching Japanese literary culture while preserving Chinese poetic heritage, showcasing Japan's connection to Chinese culture through the Han language.

This chapter addresses the question of whether and to what degree nationalism was the cause or the consequence of imperial collapse. We go about this task in four steps. The first three steps use quantitative data that cover most of the world since 1816. In the first step, we simply analyze the temporal relationship between the transition from empire to nation-state and the foundation of nationalist organizations. We find that in the overwhelming majority, the latter precedes the former. We then proceed to a more fine-grained analysis and ask whether these nationalist organizations were perhaps inspired by imperial retreat from other parts of the empire, such that a partial imperial breakdown would further fuel the flames of nationalism elsewhere. No such effect emerges, however. In the third step, we determine whether nationalist mobilization is a cause for the individual transitions from empire to nation-state observed in the history of today's countries and find this to be the case, even if we take a host of other factors into account (including the weakening of empire through wars). In the fourth and most important step, we go beyond these coarse quantitative analyses and shift to empires as units of analysis, asking to what degree nationalism caused imperial collapse. Discussing the demise of the Ottoman, Habsburg, French, British, Portuguese and Soviet empires, we assess the varying degrees to which nationalist movements contributed to each imperial collapse and the extent to which each transition was due to other, unrelated factors, including the voluntary retreat of empire or the breakdown of empire due to defeat in international wars. We find that in all cases of imperial collapse nationalist movements played an important, and sometimes, crucial role (for the opposing view, see Betts 1991; Burbank and Cooper 2010; Flint 1983; Sked 2001; Solnick 1998). There is little evidence – with a handful of exceptions such as the Central Asian republics and some African countries – for the idea that imperial breakdown produces nationalist movements or nation-states without a previous agitation for them.

Reviewed by: Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea by Christina Yi Travis Workman (bio) Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea. By Christina Yi. Columbia University Press, New York, 2018. xiv, 211 pages. $65.00, cloth; $64.99, E-book. A number of scholarly publications on the Japanese empire have come out in the last two decades, expanding our understanding of the history, culture, and politics of Japan's imperialist expansion in the early twentieth century. They have explored the colonial histories and literatures of Taiwan, China, Manchuria, and Korea from multiple vantage points and theoretical orientations. This is a welcome development, considering the various ways that cold war political ideologies—including, most prominently, ethnonationalism—had previously led to myopic and present-oriented narratives of the period. Works concerning "the colonial period" in Korea have brought to light the complexity of issues of national identity, gender, language, and cultural erasure under Japanese colonial rule. Contemporaneously, a number of scholars have drawn from developments in the study of the Japanese empire to expand the context for reading and interpreting the literary works of ethnic Koreans in postwar Japan (zainichi). Considering the literal meaning of the term zainichi, this is a necessary recognition of changing views of the Japanese empire, which produced the conditions of possibility for Koreans "remaining" in postwar Japan. One of the virtues of Christina Yi's Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea is that it bridges these two areas of research to present an illuminating account of "Japanese language literature" (Nihongo bungaku) in the mid-twentieth century. As the title of the book suggests, Yi's primary concern is "language ideology"—how concepts and practices of national language were employed for colonial rule and how colonial and minority subjects responded to and worked within regimes of national language. In this regard, the "colonizing" of the title has a double meaning, referring both to the way that concepts of language were integral to subject formation, and therefore colonized the bodies and consciousnesses of modern national and imperial [End Page 183] subjects, as well as to the ways that local, regional, and individual languages were objects of colonization during the processes of nation building and empire building. One important intervention of Yi's work is that she reads this subject-object duality of language and colonization not simply as an erasure of the Korean national language by Japanese national-imperial language. She rather emphasizes the power of modern language ideology to establish the parameters of the universal and the particular, the cosmopolitan and the local, and the national and the regional, categories that then structure how literary and cinematic texts engage with and attempt to overcome the problem of their linguistic medium in a colonial situation. Therefore, she not only analyzes and clarifies the colonial effects of the policies and practices of the Japanese national language (kokugo) in colonial Korea, but also shows how the idea of kokugo came to affect Korean intellectuals' imagination of the Korean national language (kug'ŏ) after liberation. She also explains how speaking and writing in a national language as a colonial or minority subject are not simply matters of subordinating one's original national identity out of self-interest. She shows the ambivalence of the desire to be a proper speaking and writing subject of national language: national language at once empowers and subordinates; it provides access and includes, while discriminating and excluding. Although she does not refer directly to Naoki Sakai's discussions of national language as a "regulative idea" (in the Kantian sense), Yi shows, through close readings and a detailed literary-historical account, how "Japanese-language literature" grapples with the normative function of "national language," and how colonial and minority subjects engage with language ideology in ways irreducible to a political calculation. Therefore, by focusing on language ideology and reorienting our attention to the tropes and practices through which Koreans imagined themselves as imperial subjects, Yi disrupts powerful cold war–era ideas about collaboration and resistance during the colonial period. At the same time, she also provides a conceptual framework through which to judge the...

Reviewed by: When Empire Comes Home: Repatriates and Reintegration in Postwar Japan Sally A. Hastings When Empire Comes Home: Repatriates and Reintegration in Postwar Japan. By Lori Watt. Harvard University Asia Center, 2009. 275275 pages. Hardcover $39.95; softcover $24.95. Lori Watt tells the story of the nearly seven million Japanese nationals who returned from the former colonies after Japan's defeat in World War II. The dominant narrative of the Japanese nation, which includes the acquisition of colonies as part of a strength- and wealth-building exercise in the nineteenth century and the loss of those colonies in the middle of the twentieth, generally omits the hardships endured by the Japanese living away from the home islands at war's end. The national experience has been defined by the bombing—both atomic and conventional—that devastated Japan's cities, events from which the former colonists were absent; those repatriated (hikiagesha) have come into the telling of that story only as an additional drain upon the food supply and the limited housing stock. Watt reminds us that the repatriates were once highly visible figures on the postwar landscape, inescapable reminders of Japan's history as an imperial power and status as a defeated nation. Watt argues that the term hikiagesha was coproduced by returnees and "regular Japanese" on the home islands. The definition changed over time, and the people so labeled were [End Page 374] as varied as the empire itself. Technically, repatriates were civilians who returned to the home islands through one of the postwar processing centers. Soldiers back from overseas, especially those who had been held in Soviet labor camps, sometimes embraced the label. In the 1960s, legal language on recompense began to cast repatriates not as impoverished individuals in need of welfare, but as citizens who deserved recognition for their service and losses. The hardships of the repatriates began when surrender transformed the colonies into non-Japanese territory and Japanese colonists "were exposed, like fish stranded on a beach after high tide" (p. 35). The Allied Occupation authorities limited the amount of money returnees could bring back to the home islands, thus depriving repatriates not only of their property but also of their former prosperity. The lack of a regional accent and ties to a particular hometown "added up to a failure to reach the bar of authentic Japaneseness" (p. 58). Repatriates, suspected of carrying disease and of participating in the black market and engaging in other criminal activities, were excluded from the category of "ordinary Japanese." Although the majority of repatriates came from Taiwan, Korea, and China south of the Great Wall, Watt has chosen—because of their centrality to popular images—to devote special attention to those from Manchuria. Once the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August 1945, Japanese settlers in Manchuria fled, facing terrifying conditions including assault, hunger, sickness, and death. Because most Japanese men had been conscripted by war's end, the first returnees from Manchuria in 1946 were women and children. Watt explores the image of the female repatriate, her virtue in question because of the dangers to which she had been exposed. She also raises provocative questions about the availability of abortions to Japanese women violated by Soviet troops before they reached safety. The quintessential male repatriates from Manchuria were the Soviet-indoctrinated ones who arrived back in Japan in the summer of 1949, singing socialist songs and ignoring waiting wives and mothers. Watt draws on official statistics and histories, memoirs, interviews, newspapers, songs, posters, cartoons, television documentaries, film, and fictional representations. She carefully explains the laws and regulations—both those of the Japanese government and those of the Allied Occupation—that created the category of repatriate. The book's first three chapters add the dimension of the dismantling of empire to our understanding of the Allied Occupation of Japan. In the remaining two substantive chapters, Watt traces the image of the repatriate in popular culture and history after the official end of the repatriation process in 1958. She devotes chapter 4 to popular songs and fiction, including in her analysis acclaimed authors such as Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Abe Kōbō, and Murakami Haruki as well as...

As a necessary prelude to examining the theory of civil society in postwar Japan, in this first chapter, I will begin by discussing how Japanese political economy viewed economic development and contemporary capitalism in the postwar era. As is well known, postwar Japan, emerging from the military defeat of World War II, realized an astonishing level of economic development and became a “great economic power.” From today’s point of view, this is obviously one of the major events in world history. But for the economists present during these historical events, what were the main issues in Japanese economic development, in which direction did they want to guide the Japanese economy, and how did they develop their own economic thought and theories? Examining these questions will illuminate the historical and theoretical background against which civil society thought was developed in the postwar era.

Introduction