Postwar Japan as History

Postwar Japan as History PDF Author: Andrew Gordon
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520074750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Get Book

Book Description
As they examine three related themes of postwar history, the authors describe an ongoing historical process marked by unexpected changes, such as Japan's extraordinary economic growth, and unanticipated continuities, such as the endurance of conservative rule. --From publisher's description.

Postwar Japan as History

Postwar Japan as History PDF Author: Andrew Gordon
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520074750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Get Book

Book Description
As they examine three related themes of postwar history, the authors describe an ongoing historical process marked by unexpected changes, such as Japan's extraordinary economic growth, and unanticipated continuities, such as the endurance of conservative rule. --From publisher's description.

Economic Policy in Postwar Japan

Economic Policy in Postwar Japan PDF Author: Kozo Yamamura
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520312031
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book

Book Description
Since the end of the Pacific War, Japan has, broadly speaking, pursued two economic policies: a "democratization" policy laid down by the Allied Powers, and subsequently a "de-democratization" policy formulated and vigorously pursued by the independent government. Yamamura here addresses himself to two central questions: What were the objectives and results of each policy? And why and how did the earlier one give way to the later? Yamamura never loses sight of his main theme--the transformation of the economic "democratization" policy of the Occupation period into the growth policy pursued by the Japanese government thereafter. He is concerned not so much to provide a comprehensive study of Japanese economic policy as to examine selected facets of it--for example, taxation policies, anti- and pro-monopoly legislation, the position of the Zaibatsu, and the social costs of economic concentration. He deals with topics that are hotly debated in Japan and elsewhere, but his tone is never polemical, and his judgments are cool and scholarly. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

Japan's Postwar History

Japan's Postwar History PDF Author: Gary D. Allinson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801489129
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book

Book Description
The second edition of the book that provides a unique integrated analysis of Japan's social, political, and economic history from 1932 until the present day.

Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan

Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan PDF Author: Justin Jesty
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501715062
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Get Book

Book Description
Highlighting the transformational nature of the early postwar, Jesty deftly contrasts it with the relative stasis, consolidation, and homogenization of the 1960s.

Bodies of Memory

Bodies of Memory PDF Author: Yoshikuni Igarashi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400842980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book

Book Description
Japan and the United States became close political allies so quickly after the end of World War II, that it seemed as though the two countries had easily forgotten the war they had fought. Here Yoshikuni Igarashi offers a provocative look at how Japanese postwar society struggled to understand its war loss and the resulting national trauma, even as forces within the society sought to suppress these memories. Igarashi argues that Japan's nationhood survived the war's destruction in part through a popular culture that expressed memories of loss and devastation more readily than political discourse ever could. He shows how the desire to represent the past motivated Japan's cultural productions in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period. Japanese war experiences were often described through narrative devices that downplayed the war's disruptive effects on Japan's history. Rather than treat these narratives as obstacles to historical inquiry, Igarashi reads them along with counter-narratives that attempted to register the original impact of the war. He traces the tensions between remembering and forgetting by focusing on the body as the central site for Japan's production of the past. This approach leads to fascinating discussions of such diverse topics as the use of the atomic bomb, hygiene policies under the U.S. occupation, the monstrous body of Godzilla, the first Western professional wrestling matches in Japan, the transformation of Tokyo and the athletic body for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the writer Yukio Mishima's dramatic suicide, while providing a fresh critical perspective on the war legacy of Japan.

The Growth Idea

The Growth Idea PDF Author: Scott O'Bryan
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824837568
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book

Book Description
Our narratives of postwar Japan have long been cast in terms almost synonymous with the story of rapid economic growth. Scott O’Bryan reinterprets this seemingly familiar history through an innovative exploration, not of the anatomy of growth itself, but of the history of growth as a set of discourses by which Japanese "growth performance" as "economic miracle" came to be articulated. The premise of his work is simple: To our understandings of the material changes that took place in Japan during the second half of the twentieth century we must also add perspectives that account for growth as a new idea around the world, one that emerged alongside rapid economic expansion in postwar Japan and underwrote the modes by which it was imagined, forecast, pursued, and regulated. In an accessible, lively style, O’Bryan traces the history of growth as an object of social scientific knowledge and as a new analytical paradigm that came to govern the terms by which Japanese understood their national purposes and imagined a newly materialist vision of social and individual prosperity. Several intersecting obsessions worked together after the war to create an agenda of social reform through rapid macroeconomic increase. Epistemological developments within social science provided the conceptual instruments by which technocrats gave birth to a shared lexicon of growth. Meanwhile, reformers combined prewar Marxist critiques with new modes of macroeconomic understanding to mobilize long-standing fears of overpopulation and "backwardness" and argue for a growthist vision of national reformation. O’Bryan also presents surprising accounts of the key role played by the ideal of full employment in national conceptions of recovery and of a new valorization of consumption in the postwar world that was taking shape. Both of these, he argues, formed critical components in a constellation of ideas that even in the context of relative poverty and uncertainty coalesced into a powerful vision of a materially prosperous future. Even as Japan became the premier icon of the growthist ideal, neither the faith in rapid growth as a prescription for national reform nor the ascendancy of social scientific epistemologies that provided its technical support was unique to Japanese experience. The Growth Idea thus helps to historicize a concept of never-ending growth that continues to undergird our most basic beliefs about the success of nations and the operations of the global economy. It is a particularly timely contribution given current imperatives to reconceive ideas of purpose and prosperity in an age of resource depletion and global warming.

Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan

Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan PDF Author: Patricia L. Maclachlan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231123464
Category : Consumer protection
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book

Book Description
This book examines Japan's postwar consumer protection movement, which, organized largely by housewives, led to the passage of basic consumer protection legislation in 1968. Macmillan points to the importance of activity at the local level, the role of minority parties, the limited utility of the courts, and the place of lawyers and academics in providing access to power.

Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar Japan

Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar Japan PDF Author: Margarita Estevez-Abe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139471929
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book

Book Description
This book explains how postwar Japan managed to achieve a highly egalitarian form of capitalism despite meager social spending. Estevez-Abe develops an institutional, rational-choice model to solve this puzzle. She shows how Japan's electoral system generated incentives that led political actors to protect various groups that lost out in market competition. She explains how Japan's postwar welfare state relied upon various alternatives to orthodox social spending programs. The initial postwar success of Japan's political economy has given way to periods of crisis and reform. This book follows this story up to the present day. Estevez-Abe shows how the current electoral system renders obsolete the old form of social protection. She argues that institutionally Japan now resembles Britain and predicts that Japan's welfare system will also come to resemble Britain's. Japan thus faces a more market-oriented society and less equality.

Temporal Identities and Security Policy in Postwar Japan

Temporal Identities and Security Policy in Postwar Japan PDF Author: Ulv Hanssen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429823819
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book

Book Description
Through a discourse analysis of Japanese parliamentary debates, this book explores how different understandings of Japan’s history have led to sharply divergent security policies in the postwar period, whilst providing an explanation for the much-debated security policy changes under Abe Shinzō. Analyzing the ways identities can be constructed through ‘temporal othering,’ as well as ‘spatial othering,’ this book examines the rise of a new form of identity in Japan since the end of the Cold War, one that is differentiated not from prewar and wartime Japan, but from postwar Japan. The champions of this identity, it argues, see the postwar past as a shameful period, characterized by self-imposed military restrictions, and thus the relentless chipping away of these limitations in recent years is indicative of how dominant this identity has become. Exploring how these military restrictions have shifted from being a symbol of pride to a symbol of shame, this book demonstrates the concrete ways in which the past can both enable and constrain policy. Temporal Identities and Security Policy in Postwar Japan will be invaluable to students and scholars of Japanese politics and foreign policy, as well as international relations more generally.

Waste

Waste PDF Author: Eiko Maruko Siniawer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501725858
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Get Book

Book Description
In Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste—in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources—from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment, and revealing people’s ever-changing concerns and hopes. Over the course of the long postwar, Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive, an impediment to progress, a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption, incontrovertible proof of societal excess, the embodiment of resources squandered, and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative, a moral good, an instrument for advancement, a path to self-satisfaction, an environmental commitment, an expression of identity, and more. From the late 1950s onward, a defining element of Japan’s postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being, a good life, or a life well lived. Waste is an elegant history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday.