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Changing Historiographical Perspectives on Early Shōwa Politics: “The Second Approach”*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Gordon Mark Berger
Gordon Mark Berger
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Extract

The failure of nations to win wars they fight has a profound effect on the way their prewar history is studied and evaluated. After the traumas of a two-decade military involvement in Southeast Asia, American revisionist historians have recently unleashed a barrage of critical assessments of modern American history and its chroniclers. The revisionists' artillery has been aimed particularly at earlier historians who characterized contemporary American history in positive terms, or presumed the existence of noble and moral principles at the core of “what America has stood for.” The revisionists contend that the “objectivity” of their predecessors has been anything but objective or disinterested, and paradoxically, many have also sought to affirm the legitimacy of “subjective history.”

Type
Recent Japan in Historical Revisionism
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , February 1975 , pp. 473 - 484
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1975

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References

1 The main exception was a lengthy study of fapanese foreign policy, which did not provide a horough examination of domestic political change. See gakkai, Nihon kokusai seiji (Taiheiyō sensō gen'in kenkyūbu) eds., Taiheiyō sensō e no michi, I vols., (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1963).Google Scholar

2 Matsuzawa, Tetsunari, “Akademizumu shigaku no sai-tōjō,” Nikon dokusho shinbun. May 21, 1973.Google Scholar

3 Non-scholars have shown greater sympathy in some cases. See Hayashi, Fusao, Dai-Tōa sensō kōtei ron, 2 vols., (Tokyo: Banchō shobō, 1964–65).Google Scholar

4 Yabe, Teiji, Konoe Fumimaro, 2 vols., (Tokyo: Kobundō, 1952).Google Scholar

5 See Gordon, M. Berger, “The Search for a New Political Order: Konoe Fumimaro, the Political Parties, and Japanese Politics During the Early Shōwa Era,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1972, passim.Google Scholar

6 For details, see ibid, chs. VI-VIII.