1 - Rethinking Imperial Legacies and the Cold War in Allied Occupied Japan

Summary

What did decolonization and the Cold War look like in US(Allied)-occupied Japan? Previously, historians have understood that decolonization had no significant impact on Japan because the Japanese empire lost its colonies instantly as a result of defeat in World War II. Historians have also explained the beginning of the Cold War and its impact on Japan in terms of the reverse course, a critical shift in US foreign policy toward occupied Japan during 1947 and 1948. This chapter challenges these conventional understandings and provides new insights into the history of early postwar Japan.

Introduction

Historical accounts on the formation of postwar Japan have often assumed a common temporal divide between wartime and postwar and have taken the form of an “island history.” In the conventional narrative, Emperor Hirohito's speech announcing Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945, marks the “postwar” as a “new beginning.” The postwar is portrayed as both disconnected and inverted from the bleak wartime past, and this idea of discontinuity has dominated the narrative framework for decades. While some early works published by USbased Japan historians in the 1980s looked at the long historical trajectory of 20th-century Japan, a critical challenge to the temporal divide and the idea of discontinuity was posed in the 1990s by a group of international scholars who studied the “total war system.” Their edited volume, Total War and “Modernization,” has illuminated the radical social transformations created by the war and the lasting, formative impact these transformations had on postwar society. Similarly, historians Andrew Gordon and Nakamura Masanori use a “transwar” analysis to understand the recurring dynamic of social change straddling the wartime and postwar periods. Some Japanese scholars have also shed new light on the wartime origins of postwar democratic reforms under US Occupation. The new scholarship understands postwar Japan as the product of a long process continuous with past transformations, rather than as a completely “reborn” entity.

Despite recent methodological innovations about the temporal framework, much work on the formation of postwar Japan still operates within the same spatial framework of “island history” centered on a national unit of analysis, mostly on mainland Japan.