Laura Hein

Cultures of war

This roundtable discussion of John Dowers Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq brings together the views of five scholars from a variety of academic disciplines: Sheila Miyoshi Jager (Oberlin), Monica Kim (Chicago), Ravi Arvind Palat (Binghamton), Emily Rosenberg (UC–Irvine), and Ussama Makdisi (Rice). In the December 2011 issue of Critical Asian Studies the participants will interact with one another in part 2 of the roundtable.

In Search of Peace and Democracy: Japanese Economic Debate in Political Context

MOST DISCUSSIONS OF ECONOMIC GROWTH AND ECONOMIC POLICY in postwar Japan focus on the economy as an isolated sector, neglecting its place in Japanese history as a whole. Partly this is because discussion of the economy usually moves quickly to technical problems. Partly it is due to the common assumption that high-speed economic growth emerged out of an attempt to create high-speed economic growth for its own sake-thus making redundant any sustained inquiry into its origins (as opposed to its mechanisms). We now have a fairly clear understanding of the technical means by which Japan became rich: rapid growth was achieved through high savings used for technology-led investment, based both on market forces channeled into planned directions and a flexible response to unplanned opportunities, such as American assistance to Japanese economic development. What is murkier is the social and political context for economic growth. Many scholars simply assume that a general consensus developed in postwar Japan to pursue high-speed growth. Others argue that economic growth was produced by a smaller group of enlightened bureaucrats and businessmen who defined economic growth as their patriotic duty and then achieved it through intelligence and hard work. The historical validity of this consensus for economic growth-whether general or confined to the ruling elite-still needs exploration. As in the immediate postwar years, any such consensus was, at best, partial and contested (Hein 1990). Not only the strategies but also the goals and concepts of economic development were deeply controversial in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Moreover, the contours of that debate were shaped far less by a desire for growth itself than by the political struggles of that era. In other words, economic growth was not a separable goal in early postwar Japan. This alone should not be surprising-economic thought is deeply

The Cultural Career of the Japanese Economy: developmental and cultural nationalisms in historical perspective

Abstract This essay explores the connection between the economy and cultural identity in Japanese nationalism and the intellectual discourses that have historically defined it. Nationalism in the pre-war period was closely associated with the anxiety that Japanese modernity was deformed. After World War II Japan was part of the global trend towards developmental nationalism, including a transformation of its economy into both a wealthy and a highly egalitarian one. In the 1970s and 1980s ethnic nationalism re-emerged, this time arguing that economic success was the product of Japanese cultural uniqueness rather than of the developmental nationalist policies of the previous quarter-century. The economic downturn of the 1990s thus challenged Japan both economically and culturally, and reawakened anxieties about Japanese deformity. At first, this crisis led to a critical re-evaluation of national culture, manifested as serious attempts to both resolve tensions with Asia dating from World War II and to dismantle domestic social hierarchies. By the mid-1990s, however, this moment had passed and government and business leaders adopted fully fledged neoliberal policies, reversing the long postwar trend towards income equality, also expressing a more strident and militarist cultural nationalism.

Revisiting America's Occupation of Japan

This essay surveys and evaluates the last decade of English-language scholarship on the Occupation of Japan, locating it within American history, Japanese history, post-colonial studies, and the new international history, noting how new work in each field affects our interpretations.

Statistics for Democracy: Economics As Politics in Occupied Japan

What is the best way to institutionalize democracy? This question was by no means an academic exercise in late 1945 in Japan. The economist Ōuchi Hyōe and his four most prominent students to survive the war, Arisawa Hiromi,Wakimura Yoshitarō, Takahashi Masao, andMinobe Ryōkichi, all were certain that the right answer was to establish reliable statistics. This essay explores the reasons why. All fivemenwere economics professors active from the 1920s to the 1980s. The connection between teachers and students is more intense and longlasting in Japan than in the United States, but even for Japan this was an unusually tight-knit group. They became friends in graduate school, collaborated on books and essays throughout their lives, socialized with each other for decades, andmet each other often on various government advisory commissions. When Minobe became governor of Tokyo in 1967, the others served as an informal “brain trust” for him for the next twelve years. They

Reckoning with War in the Museum: Hijikata Teiichi at the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art

How do people handle their regret at having believed that a foolish war was not just acceptable but necessary? Japan after World War II provides an instructive example. Many contrite Japanese revisited the aesthetic realm, looking for ways to interpret culture that did not convey the values of fascism, such as glorifying willing surrender to a powerful leader. They saw their task as engendering an individual aesthetic and therefore political subjectivity, so that Japanese would in the future more bravely resist state violence at home and abroad. These individuals saw culture as intrinsically political rather than as a refuge from politics. Recognizing the difficulty in countering fascist culture through ideas alone, they also created what economists today call “capacity building” institutions to help them do so, such as Japans first museum dedicated solely to modern art, the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art, established in 1951. The founders of the Kamakura Museum self-consciously set out to create a new institution that would embody a democratic aesthetic and so prevent—they hoped—Japan from repeating the disastrous experience of war. The curators argued for diverse and dynamic modernities, a concept that parried both the idea that artistically Japan was a pale copy of modern Europe and the notion of a single national culture in Japan or elsewhere. At the same time, however, the legacy of the war was visible in an entirely different and less admirable way in the museum curators’ stance toward Asian modernity beyond Japan and its evasion of Japans responsibility for the wartime devastation of China.

Modern art patronage and democratic citizenship in Japan.

Wakimura Yoshitarō, a prominent Japanese economics professor and art collector, helped establish or sustain at least eight art museums in postwar Japan. He did so to create important institutions of democratic empowerment rather than nationalist displays of power. The crucial context was defeat in World War II, which left many Japanese, including Wakimura, committed to taming capitalism. Wakimura was particularly interested in creating new practices of art appreciation that could mediate relations between potentially antagonistic groups of Japanese, and in building museums as fresh spaces to house these newly egalitarian relationships. He emphasized the value to society created when individuals developed their aesthetic and thus political judgment. His efforts help explain the proliferation of both public and private art museums in postwar Japan as well as the nature of postwar political culture.

The Art of Persuasion: Audiences and Philosophies of History

This debate had a somewhat unconventional history. I originally wrote my comments as one of two double-blind reviewers addressing a draft manuscript submitted to this journal. Subsequently, since my review raised several broad questions about political theory and history, the editor proposed publishing it alongside the essay. The journal sent my review to the author and, after considerable negotiation, the double blind was eventually removed. The journal then decided to invite further contributions from J. Victor Koschmann and Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, neither of whom, it turned out, had been reviewers of this essay’s original draft. While I can guess what they are likely to say, I have not read their comments. In any case, the consequence of this process is that both the essay, “From the ‘People’ to the ‘Citizen’: Tsurumi Shunsuke and the Roots of Civic Mythology in Postwar Japan,” and the intended audience for my own comments have been moving targets.

Introduction: The Territory of Identity and Remembrance in Okinawa

The political dimensions of Okinawan identity today are the focus of this two-part collection of essays in Critical Asian Studies 33, nos. 1 and 2 (2001). The essays in this issue (January-March) explore contemporary Okinawan claims to authority and identity through anti-base protests and peace education; essays in the April-June issue will examine new musical trends and clashes over feminism and gender analysis in Okinawa. But these are only some of the arenas in which Okinawans are reimagining and debating what it means to be Okinawan today. The dilemmas facing Okinawans — and the ways they are responding to them — are similar to struggles occurring in many other parts of the world. Okinawa’s dilemma, fundamentally, is that of a small place forced to pick its way carefully through a world full of powerful states with their own agendas and only a secondary concern for the well-being of Okinawans. Okinawa has long existed at the margins of national, regional, and global history and its inhabitants have had to accept incorporation into projects developed by powers far greater than their own. Over the last century, that primarily has meant two things: subordination into the Japanese state and, beginning in 1945, into U.S. cold war military strategy in the Pacific region. Finding a way to criticize and renegotiate Okinawa’s place within those constraints has always also meant rejecting some key Japanese and American assumptions about Okinawa and articulating a more positive local identity and an alternative history, one that could be mobilized for different visions of the future. Critical Asian Studies 33:1 (2001), 31-36

The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956 by Andrew E. Barshay (review)

the abuses of the system and the various strong-arm tactics and deception used to ensnare Korean civilians in the war effort, he adds elements to the story heretofore glossed over. Koreans also chose to work within the war effort as a means of avoiding military service or as a way to gain skills or out of simple economic opportunism. As usual, it was the poorest Koreans who ended up in the worst jobs, but Koreans with some education gained mobility by being trained to replace Japanese middle-level workers who had been drafted into the military. This study provides a counterbalance to the oft-repeated story of colonial exploitation and abuse during the war period. It focuses on the less dramatic legal and institutional structures of conscription and labor mobilization. By focusing on legal systems and structures, Palmer does ignore for the most part the experience in uniform of Korean soldiers, and I found myself wanting to know about issues mentioned but then dropped, such as deserters and labor and military draft evasion. Palmer’s work must be placed with T. Fujitani’s Race for Empire (University of California Press, 2011) as one of the two most important works on the subject in the Englishlanguage literature on the war period in Korea. It will certainly stand as the platform from which further study of the late colonial period will evolve.