Search Results

This chapter traces the development of Japanese death penalty policy in order to arrive at a historically informed understanding of how contemporary policy-makers came to believe that at least one execution should occur each year, and in order to discern why conflict persists around the issue of executions. The first half of the chapter describes and explains key capital punishment developments during four periods of Japanese history: the de facto abolition of the death penalty in premodern Japan; the dramatic decline of executions during the Meiji restoration of the late 19th century; the retention of capital punishment during the American-led occupation of Japan after the Pacific war; and the steady decrease in executions in the first four decades following the occupation. The chapter's fifth section shows that change is ongoing by examining the causes and consequences of the resurgence of capital punishment since the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks of 1995. The two concluding sections identify lessons from Japanese history and explore alternative futures of the death penalty in Asia's most developed nation.

This chapter begins with a brief historicization of salarymen from the late 1800s to the early 1990s. It focuses on the formation of the socioeconomic category of the New Middle Class and the cultural production of the new middle-class orientation within Japan's economic and industrial structure. It also traces the historical trajectory through which the modern configuration of welfare, work, and family emerged in prewar Japan and then took new shape in postwar Japan through the fractious struggle of workers and management. The chapter examines how the particular construction of the new middle class as a lived experience has been articulated through the socioeconomic category of the new middle class. It situates the contemporary discourse of neoliberal economic reforms within the historical development of Japanese corporate governance and Japanese capitalism.

This chapter examines the concerted efforts by former wartime planners to resuscitate and redeem the ideal of planning in postwar Japan. It begins with a discussion of planning dilemmas faced by individuals in and around the bureaucracy as they began to set their sights on the postwar economy. It then considers the principles of planning laid out by the Special Survey Committee that self-consciously recast planning in terms of a new democratic and scientific humanism, and specifically as science “without compulsion.” It also discusses the efforts of Inaba Hidezō to mobilize the ideal of humanistic technocracy to articulate a new vision of planning deemed more appropriate to a “new,” open Japan.

This chapter examines the significant changes that were at work within the discipline of economics around the world during the mid-twentieth century and how these new lines of theoretical and methodological inquiry affected Japanese social-scientific thought. More specifically, it considers the rise of a host of statistical epistemologies that formed the basis of the accounting conventions out of which was produced the statistic of Gross National Product (GNP). The chapter first provides an overview of the empirical revolution in twentieth-century economic knowledge, with particular emphasis on the macroeconomic measures of national income and GNP as the linchpins in the complex of statistics reshaping the discipline of economics after World War II. It then discusses the factors that propelled national accounting into the policy arenas of Japan and other industrial powers, along with the creation of a task force headed by Stuart A. Rice to guide reform of Japan’s statistical system. It also describes the emergence of macroeconomic statistics such as national income accounting as governing analytical tools within the new statistical infrastructure in postwar Japan.

This chapter examines the ways in which public economists leveraged the postwar ideal of full employment to argue that a macroeconomic focus on rapid domestic growth could finally overcome structural inequality and what they believed to be Japan’s age-old population problem. The perceived dilemma of “surplus population” had long vexed national leaders and ideologues during the modern period. In postwar Japan, public economists sought to address this “population problem” using assumptions and concepts taken from the new economics by calling for a more expansive goal of rapid “economic growth.” This chapter first considers the idea that a national mobilization for macroeconomic growth could serve as an internal postwar solution to the perennial national problems of population, unemployment, and “backwardness.” It then discusses the suggestion that new kinds of private consumption might also have their place in the Japanese economy of growth, based on a vision of progress in which consumers would play a new role in ensuring national economic welfare.

This book explores the formative years of growth as an idea that redefined national conceptions of purpose and prosperity in postwar Japan. It considers the ways in which growth as theory and practice emerged in the specific context of Japanese capitalism alongside rapid economic expansion itself during the first decade and a half after World War II. It links the preoccupation with high growth of the postwar years in Japan to the twentieth-century rise of growth both as an object of social scientific knowledge and as an analytical paradigm that came to govern political-economic practices in nations around the world. The discusses the ways in which changes in social science contributed to Japanese forms of postwar growthism; the political harnessing of the growthist ideal to articulate a domestic vision of national postwar purpose; and efforts made by growth publicists to expand Japanese notions about what level of material and social prosperity the nation might be able to achieve in a reshaped postwar world.

The war in the Asia-Pacific ended on August 15, 1945, with Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers. This chapter examines the quick return of baseball to Japan after its defeat, including the return of the games' attendant institutions such as national tournaments, national governing bodies, and baseball journalism. During the seven years of the Allied occupation, Japanese professional baseball evolved into a successful commercial enterprise in a format resembling the U.S. major leagues. Following the end of Allied occupation in April 1952, baseball became a national icon of peace, democracy, and freedom and established itself as the most loved mass spectator sport in postwar Japan.

This chapter examines changes within economic knowledge that supported an increasing macroeconomic focus on growth in postwar Japan, with particular emphasis on the ideals of new economics and prosperity economy. Japanese analysts and reformers articulated a future vision of reconstruction in terms of humanistic technocracy based on the longer history of modern Japanese development. In this retrospective analysis of the road to war, emphasis was placed on the structural defects of the political economy, drawing heavily on Marxist debates dating from the 1920s on the so-called crisis of development of Japanese capitalism. This chapter first considers the rhetoric of full employment that accompanied the rising status of John Maynard Keynes’s ideas before discussing the “revolutionary” rise of Keynesianism within so-called kinkei, or modern economics, thought in postwar Japan. It also explores the connection between the ideal of planning and a range of welfare goals as they came to be articulated in diagnoses of Japanese capitalism after the war.

This chapter places the absence of women in high positions in Japanese companies in the context of Japan's coordinated capitalism by looking at state–business–labor relations, corporate governance, the family-and-welfare regime, and Japanese laws and courts. Focusing on the economic decline and intensified global competition in the 1990s, the chapter discusses how Japan's postwar default settings in the realms of corporate governance, the labor market, the family regime, and the legal system have changed to some degree, and recasts gender inequality in light of these changes. The chapter also compares sex-discrimination court cases in Japan and in the United States, focusing on how the US legal system has played a critical role in reducing employers' discriminatory practices in America, while in Japan, the laws and courts still tend to side with the Japanese business community and state.

The last chapter begins by briefly discussing postwar developments in dramatic, documentary and animated film. Discourses of nationalist and imperialist identity might no longer be overtly manifested in these genres and media in the early postwar era, but they did not dissolve with the termination of war in 1945. One of the best examples of continuity is the image of the emperor, which survived—and indeed continues today—to serve as one of the most important constituents of nation and nationalism in postwar Japanese media and visual culture. To reinforce this point, the chapter turns to the well-known double portrait of Emperor Hirohito and General Douglas MacArthur, which should be seen as a continuation of the wartime imperial portrait photograph. (120 words)

This chapter looks at the ways in which Okinawans coped with hardships arising out of Japan's surrender post-World War II and the American military occupation. By mid-August 1945, when Japan's government leaders finally made their tragically belated decision to surrender, the occupation of Okinawa, which had started officially with the Nimitz Proclamation on April 1, was well under way. During this period, Okinawa Prefecture had lost about a third of its wartime population. Moreover, civilian communications were cut off, and many on the mainland also lost their homes in Okinawa, and even their land when the American military later seized thousands of family farms and home lots to expand existing bases and build new ones. And though evacuees from Okinawa were treated kindly in many communities where they were relocated, tensions soon arose between the evacuees and their host communities.

This chapter reviews the different meanings of the new middle class, which describe the historical and cultural configurations of postwar Japan and universalized notions of socioeconomic class used in social science. It reflects on the configurations, relations, and operationalizations of the slippage between discursive and ideological characteristics of “middleness” that have been elided under the term the new middle class in postwar Japan. It also offers new insights on the understanding of dominant ideology and dominant groups, including anthropological theorizations of power, ideology, and subjectivity in late capitalism. The chapter emphasizes on the issues of individual self-cultivation and concerns of families in practice in the midst of socioeconomic change. It explains how salarymen or any other social actors represent both the nexus and product of ongoing self-cultivation and socialization in the changing global economy.

The Introduction suggests an expansive conception of waste which can encompass anything, material or not, which can be used and disused. Illustrating how an examination of waste can reveal what people find valuable and meaningful, this capacious definition of waste and its inextricability from everyday life are traced and pursued through the history of postwar Japan.

The years immediately after World War II witnessed a rising fascination in Japan with the possibilities for personal and social transformation afforded by civilian applications of wartime technologies. Elective cosmetic surgery, which adapted the methods of reconstructive plastic surgery developed in response to battlefield injuries, became enormously popular during the 1950s. Drawing upon the extensive discussions of new beauty practices in the popular press, news weeklies, and influential women’s magazines, this essay situates the 1950s “boom” in cosmetic surgery within a longer history of concern about the Japanese body in the context of a racialized international order. By seeking to remedy the inscrutability, apathy, and stupidity or even barbarity associated most notably with single-lidded eyes and “flat” faces, doctors and patients contributed to shaping and prolonging an older imperial formation that continues to exert a powerful influence to this day.

Situating the shōjo industry firmly within the context of the publishing industry in postwar Japan, this chapter traces the history of the genre, outlining major shifts in format, industry, and content. Synthesizing much of the research in Japan on the history of manga, it places the development of shōjo in the postwar era in the context of economic and social shifts. It pays particular attention to the ways that the manga publishing industry developed in relation to the proliferation of the mass media (publishing boom, magazines, television, and new media). The second half of the chapter outlines the history of the postwar development of shōjo, focusing on thematic trends and aesthetic stylings that not only characterize the genre but have come to influence other types of manga and girls' media more generally.