Barak Kushner and Andrew Levidis (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9789888528288
- eISBN:
- 9789882206571
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528288.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from ...
More
The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.Less
The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.
Andrew Levidis
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9789888528288
- eISBN:
- 9789882206571
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528288.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
The creation of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in November 1955 remains one of the most significant moments in modern Japanese political history. The political stability inaugurated in 1955, ...
More
The creation of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in November 1955 remains one of the most significant moments in modern Japanese political history. The political stability inaugurated in 1955, followed by more than seventy years of unbroken conservative government, have inured us to the striking persistence and durability of conservative ideas, institutions, and men across the political divide of 1945. This chapter examines Kishi Nobusuke’s role in the reconstruction of political order in 1955 and the vehicle of conservative hegemony – the Liberal Democratic party. In so doing it recasts the so-called 1955 system in the longue durée of Japanese political history. As post-imperial elites sought to restore familiar forms of government, their efforts intertwined with the memory of political upheaval between world wars. Layered into conservative efforts to reconceptualize their politics and organize postwar society in the 1950s were the ingrained traditions of 1930s and 1940s– anti-communism, national cohesion, mass mobilization, national harmony - which proved surprisingly translatable to notions of democracy, modernization, and Cold War state-building.Less
The creation of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in November 1955 remains one of the most significant moments in modern Japanese political history. The political stability inaugurated in 1955, followed by more than seventy years of unbroken conservative government, have inured us to the striking persistence and durability of conservative ideas, institutions, and men across the political divide of 1945. This chapter examines Kishi Nobusuke’s role in the reconstruction of political order in 1955 and the vehicle of conservative hegemony – the Liberal Democratic party. In so doing it recasts the so-called 1955 system in the longue durée of Japanese political history. As post-imperial elites sought to restore familiar forms of government, their efforts intertwined with the memory of political upheaval between world wars. Layered into conservative efforts to reconceptualize their politics and organize postwar society in the 1950s were the ingrained traditions of 1930s and 1940s– anti-communism, national cohesion, mass mobilization, national harmony - which proved surprisingly translatable to notions of democracy, modernization, and Cold War state-building.
