Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after the Second World War

by Laura Hein, Christopher Gerteis (Editor)

Overview

In late 1945 local Japanese turned their energies toward creating new behaviors and institutions that would give young people better skills to combat repression at home and coercion abroad. They rapidly transformed their political culture-policies, institutions, and public opinion-to create a more equitable, democratic and peaceful society.

Post-Fascist Japan explores this phenomenon, focusing on a group of highly educated Japanese based in the city of Kamakura, where the new political culture was particularly visible. The book argues that these leftist elites, many of whom had been seen as 'the enemy' during the war, saw the problem as one of fascism, an ideology that had succeeded because it had addressed real problems. They turned their efforts to overtly political-legal systems but also to ostensibly non-political and community institutions such as universities, art museums, local tourism, and environmental policies, aiming not only for reconciliation over the past but also to reduce the anxieties that had drawn so many towards fascism.

By focusing on people who had an outsized influence on Japan's political culture, Hein's study is local, national, and transnational. She grounds her discussion using specific personalities, showing their ideas about 'post-fascism', how they implemented them and how they interacted with the American occupiers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350126503
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/19/2019
Series:	SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Laura Hein is Professor of History at Northwestern University, USA. She is the author of Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in 20th Century Japan (2004) and co-editor of Imagination Without Borders: Visual Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility (2010).

Christopher Gerteis is an historian of Modern and Contemporary Japan at SOAS University of London, UK and The University of Tokyo, Japan. His first book, Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (2009), is an interdisciplinary study of the forgotten history of wage-earning Japanese women who during the 1950s militantly contested the socialist labor movement's revival of many prewar notions of normative gender roles. His second book, Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (forthcoming), examines the forces that shaped the political consciousness of Japanese youth who engaged in political violence during the 1960s and 1970s. It unpacks how notions of class and gender shaped the discourses produced by, and for, young men and women of the 'Sixties Generation'. Dr Gerteis is co-editor of the Bloomsbury book Japan since 1945: from Postwar to Post-Bubble (2012) and is Founding Series Editor of the Bloomsbury series SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary. He also served as Chief Editor of the interdisciplinary academic journal Japan Forum from 2014 through 2019.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Post-Fascist Political Culture
2. Kamakura: The Place
3. The Kamakura Akademia and Humanities Education
4. Telling Stories in the Museum: The Kamakura Museum of Modern Art
5. Urban Administration: Social Science and Democracy
6. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

What Hein provides for us is a nuanced intellectual history of a part of Japan that had and still has a clear sense of its own identity. By presenting national-level trends in the context of local politics, she makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of recent history outside the Tokyo “bubble,” even if only down the road and easily within commuting distance. We need to hear more about Japan at the local level.” —Journal of Japanese Studies

“In this elegantly written study, Hein (Northwestern Univ.) looks at how, after the defeat of Japan in August 1945, Japanese intellectuals and political leaders in the city of Kamakura focused their energies on creating political, cultural, and educational institutions and behavior pathways that would counter the appeal that Fascism had in pre-war Japan and lead to a more democratic, egalitarian, and peaceful society … The lead-off chapter, “Kamakura: The Place,” is a model of urban history and deserves a wide audience … Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.” —CHOICE

“Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this fascinating study explores what it means to reconstruct an entirely new postwar civic culture out of the ruins of Japan's imperial adventurism—this time, notably based in the storied seaside town of Kamakura, outside of the now-tainted political and cultural capital of Tokyo. Hein captures the heady emotions of an era where self-reflection and institution-building by formerly leftwing Japanese intellectuals supposedly led to increasing levels of humanistic freedom to atone and make amends for a wartime fascist political culture.” —Annika A. Culver, Associate Professor of East Asian History, Florida State University, USA

“In the wake of Japan's defeat in the Pacific War, a wide ranging network of intellectuals based in and around the town of Kamakura shared hopes for new democratic society, and attempted to put those hopes into practice. In rediscovering the wartime experiences and postwar ideals and actions of this network, Post-Fascist Japan casts vital new light on the history of Japan's postwar democratization. This fascinating book is not only essential reading for all those with an interest in Japan's intellectual history, but also conveys a powerful message about dilemmas of war memory and democracy in Japan today.” —Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Professor of Japanese History, The Australian National University, Australia

From the Publisher