When volume 2 of Victor Lieberman's magnum opus first came out a couple of years ago, several colleagues specializing in Southeast Asian Studies called it to my attention and suggested that I read it. They told me that it made use of my ideas (which rather surprised me, since I am in East Asian Studies) and said that I would like it. I certainly found the title intriguing, but never had a chance to read it until being asked to join this roundtable. Now that I have read the book, I find it tremendously invigorating and thought-provoking, so I am all the more grateful for the opportunity afforded by my participation in this roundtable to become acquainted with Lieberman's masterwork.

In preparing my presidential address for publication, I debated between different options. On the one hand, I could do what I assume is most typically done—that is, take the oral presentation and re-present the material as a research-based journal article. On the other hand, I considered the extraordinary year of challenges, disruptions, traumas, fears, and insights that had preceded this presidential address. Nothing from that year could be considered normal, from a personal or professional point of view; therefore, another option would be to engage in a writing structure reflecting our departure from the normal. For the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), the year of abnormality began with the canceled 2020 Annual Conference in Boston as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, continued with online teaching and meetings, and culminated in a virtual Annual Conference in 2021.

Perhaps the first thing to note about a forum on the subject of 1919 in Asia is how awkwardly the spatial frame of “Asia” maps onto the international history of that moment. To be sure, the postwar international conjuncture, which I have elsewhere called the “Wilsonian Moment,” had a revolutionary impact across Asia, perhaps more so than in any other world region outside of Europe. As the three preceding essays in this forum note, that year was a waypoint, and sometimes a launching pad, for a rush of novel or renewed revolutionary discourses, connections, and mobilizations in China, India, and Korea, as it was in other parts of Asia and of the world. These were all propelled by the accumulated material and ideological transformations of the years of war, transformation that imbued the moment with revolutionary potential and gave contemporaries a sense that the international order, its power structures and its norms of legitimacy, were uniquely malleable, amenable to concerted action. Indeed, 1919 was a moment in which the very idea of “Asia”—its spaces, the identities they attached to, and the solidarities that ran across and beyond it—was reimagined in ways that at once stitched it together and rent it apart.

What has been happening to “Economic Democracy” in Japan within the past twenty years since the end of World War II? Has die emphasis upon rapid economic growth countered the measures intended by the Allied Occupation to ensure economic democracy?

The democratic economy the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers envisioned for Japan in the years 1946-1948 was to be free of highly concentrated economic power, either in the hands of Zaibatsu or of giant corporations, was to have an Anti-Monopoly Act to promote “the democratic and wholesome development of the national economy as well as to assure the interest of the general consumer,” and was to have a “just and equal” tax law to “democratize the Japanese economy.” A thorough-going land reform and legal bona fide trade union movement also was declared to be a necessary part of economic democracy. It was, in the words of the Zaibatsu Mission, to build “a strong middle class which can influence the course of policy.”