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We normally react to manifestations of aging and different degrees of cleanliness and organization by cleaning, organizing, restoring, or discarding. These familiar reactions are rather complex, presupposing various conceptual considerations, including functionality, context, and personal relationship to the object. The appreciation of aged, messy, or defective appearance was encouraged by the British picturesque movement with its cult of ruins, Japanese wabi aesthetics underlie the tea ceremony, and rebellion against modernist aesthetics reveals a tension between our desire for control over life and the wisdom of submitting to its transient and other uncontrollable aspects. It also creates another tension: to decontextualize those qualities ordinarily depreciated to illuminate their positive aesthetic potential, while analyzing our common reactions to them in the ordinary context. Finally, the discussion highlights the danger of utilizing the power of the aesthetic through aestheticizing the social status quo and transience of life by taking examples from Japanese history.

This chapter starts by discussing the end of the Showa era. It describes the idea of Showa, and the emperor and the war. The emperor's funeral and the bubble economy are also explained. There is certainly no direct connection between the end of the Showa era in 1989 and the bubble economy that took the form of an ‘abnormal’ rise in share- and land prices in the period 1987–90. Yet these two incidents can be presented as the two sides of the same coin. The collapse of the LDP hegemony is illustrated. Japan and the Japanese found themselves in disarray, faced with the stark realities underlying their inflated image of themselves. Japan was remade by the Americans after 1945 and established as a junior partner on security matters after 1951. The transformation of post-war Japan has not altered the quality of man. In general, the identity-crisis itself is rooted deep in Japanese history.

This chapter traces the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in the United States from 1971 to 1989. During this period American media rediscovered the Nanjing Massacre, but the number of journalists and other writers who participated in this revival of interest was still quite small.

This introductory chapter discusses the common misconceptions surrounding Japanese wartime behavior during and after World War II. More specifically, it questions the distinction between the Japanese state—thought to be responsible for the nation's role in the Second World War—and that of the Japanese people, who are often treated as passive victims within the historical narrative. Such a view obscures the underlying complexity surrounding the Japanese wartime behavior and instead creates an image of a nation backwards in its thinking as it is swept into a Westernized power struggle. But rather than observe Japan's history from the actions of the leaders of the state, this book focuses on the “common people” of Japanese society, and how the complex socio-cultural interactions taking place as a whole have come to shape a “bottom-up” characterization that presents Japan as both victim and victimizer.

Beginning in the 1870s, shortly after the Meiji Restoration, foreign teachers were brought to Japan to train the first generation of architects and engineers. The foreign (mostly British) architects taught Japanese to build in brick and stone, and the engineers demonstrated how to string telegraph wires, lay railroads, and span rivers with iron truss bridges. Then, on October 28, 1891, one of the most powerful earthquakes in modern Japanese history, centered on the Nōbi Plain just north of Nagoya, rocked the main island of Honshu from Tokyo to Osaka. Large iron bridges and the walls of brick factories and post offices came crashing down, while Japanese temples, pagodas, and architectural monuments such as Nagoya Castle seemingly escaped unharmed. In the aftermath of the great earthquake, Japanese architects and engineers were forced to question foreign knowledge, and the foreign teachers began even to question themselves.

This chapter illustrates how published and transcribed primary sources can be used to sustain, question, or strengthen some of the themes and approaches adopted by non-Japanese scholars working on modern Japanese history. The illustrations come from, but are not limited to, documents related to Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922), a prominent figure in Japan's post-Restoration political history. However, the obverse is equally important for the non-Japanese scholar working on primary sources, given that the analyses of non-Japanese scholars are notably useful for the insights they provide in interpreting the unpublished primary documents. The chapter also includes papers of other key Meiji-Taishō political leaders and remarks on the relevance of Japan's post-Restoration political history for understanding political modernization.

Since the late 19^th century, more than 13,000 volumes of shashi (company history publications) have been published in Japan and, despite the current economic climate; approximately two hundred companies publish new shashi every year. Shashi were traditionally made within the company by employees often without formal training in history or archiving. From the late 1960s onward, however, Japanese business history specialists, some of whom studied at major US graduate schools, started contributing to recording corporate history in Japanese companies. Academic business historians came to enjoy privileged access to corporate archives, which fostered the development of business history as a scientific discipline, and companies could publish credibility-enhancing corporate histories.This article focuses on the Toyota Motor Corporation, which celebrated its 75th company anniversary in 2012. Toyota has long made use of its heritage, publishing numerous shashi and other works, and marked its 75th anniversary by launching an extensive historical website.

This chapter provides an overview of the actions and ideology that characterized Imperial-Way Buddhism from the Meiji Restoration up to 1945. During these years, Japanese religious history is divided into five periods. The first (1868–1872) featured the advocacy of the “unity of rites and rule” (saisei itchi) and the separation of Shinto and Buddhism. In the second period (1872–1877), the Ministry of Religion and the Great Teaching Promulgation Campaign attempted to consolidate Shinto and Buddhism. During the third period (1877–1912), government officials cemented the power of the imperial system and State Shinto. The fourth period (1912–1935) saw how the state pressured authorized religions to foster “Japanese spirit,” cultivate Imperial-Way Buddhism, and pacify colonized areas. Finally, the fifth period (1937–1945) centered on the system established by the Religious Organizations Law and the full mobilization of religions.

Smith’s chapter uses My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1949) as a case-study for an analysis of Tanaka’s embodiment of feminine subjectivity. Grounded by an examination of the postwar gender reforms and their application, he argues that Tanaka and Mizoguchi’s creative partnership is complex to define politically, often expressing conflicting ideas on gender equality which in turn reflected the moral, social and practical paradigms which underpinned gender politics in Japan. Although produced in the postwar period, the film’s plot is set in the Meiji era and the chapter bridges these crucial periods in the history of Japanese women, using Tanaka’s star image to illuminate ideological connotations within both settings. The close reading of Tanaka’s feminist character in the film complicates the critical conception of her star persona as being tied to the Japanese stereotype of yamato nadeshiko - a type of conservative, restrained, traditional femininity.

This chapter discusses how Ainu history has been balkanized within the discipline of Japanese history. The idea that the Ainu are the subjects rather than merely the objects of history gained credence in Japan in the late 1970s and by now has become a matter of common sense among scholars. Recent scholarship on Ainu history has contributed importantly to the revisionist literature on Japanese identity, but by the same token it has been limited by its tendency to reduce the Ainu's story to a critique of the hegemonic discourse of Japaneseness. Recognizing this limitation, specialists now are taking another look at the relationship between Ainu history and Japanese history in an effort to craft a narrative that endows the Ainu people with agency and subjectivity while also acknowledging the enormous influence of the Japanese state over the Ainu and their homeland during the past four centuries.

The Introduction presents a genealogy of Japanese American silence throughout modern Japanese American history and the theory of non-binary silence. It focuses on the survival strategy called gaimenteki doka (outward assimilation), especially how it has enfolded multiple dimensions of silence into non-binary silences and multiple cultures into Japanese American culture. The genealogy covers silence from sixteenth-century Japan, through immigration in early twentieth-century United States, the World War II internment camps, and to the redress movement. The theory of non-binary silence outlines how to move beyond the binary of sound and silence to conceive of multidimensional silences and argues that a perspective of non-binary silence can provide a fresh perspective on the sacred of Emile Durkheim. The chapter also introduces the relationship between silence and alternating racial shame and racial pride by contextualizing it within the author's own experiences with his elders.

This epilogue critiques the standard books on Japan's final war against the Soviet Union, saying that they fail to present a theoretical framework that synthesizes the Pacific, Asian, and European dimensions of Japan's war. These works did not delve into the complex layers of Soviet–Japanese relations during the war. Nor did they discuss that the Soviet Union was Japan's most critic ally in the war in China as well as in the war against the United. The chapter concludes that as long as Japanese today continue to believe that during and shortly after World War II they were utterly ignorant or naive bystanders of the two superpowers' growing rivalry, the transitional period from World War II to the Cold War can never become an integral part of Japanese history.

This chapter examines Japanese historical writing in the period from 1400 to 1800. Several important types of historiography emerged from the start of the Tokugawa period. One kind was typified by Hayashi Razan, who edited the official history of the Tokugawa government, the Honchō tsugan [Conspectus of Our Land] (1644–70). A second was that associated with Tokugawa Mitsukuni, who initiated the Dai Nihon shi [Great History of Japan] (1657–1906). A third type is exemplified by Arai Hakuseki, whose autobiography, Oritaku shiba no ki [Told Round a Brushwood Fire] (1716), is replete with historical insights and an acute consciousness regarding historical research. Other examples include the works of Ogyū Sorai and Motoori Norinaga, both of whom included many profound historical observations regarding Japanese tradition in their work.