This chapter complicates all notions of the “postwar” through four lines of argument. The first is to contest the 15 August war-end myth by demonstrating how, for many individual Japanese, the Asia-Pacific War continued well beyond the symbolic war end. The second is to contest the notion of the post-1945 period as one without Japanese involvement in war. The third is to see post-1945 as a period of (incomplete) “deimperialization” rather than “postwar.” The final line of argument contests the postwar as a meaningful unitary period given the various other subperiods throughout the last 75+ years.

Introduction

In Japan, the “war end” (shūsen, alternatively haisen, “defeat”) is officially considered to be noon on August 15, 1945, when the emperor's radio broadcast informed the Japanese people of defeat. Three quarters of a century later in 2021, the Japanese media was still using the term “sengo 76” (postwar 76) during the period of August commemorations centered on a cluster of key anniversaries: Hiroshima (August 6th), Nagasaki (August 9th), and “war end” (August 15th). Despite many claims about the end of the postwar, the framework remains in Japanese public and media discourse, fundamentally because the war remains a current affairs issue in East Asia. Meanings and interpretations of “that war / those wars” (ano sensō) remain contested within Japanese society, and domestic debates spill over into the international and diplomatic arenas with particular implications for Sino-Japanese and Korean-Japanese relations.

There have been multiple official attempts to bring an end to the postwar, such as the 1956 government declaration that on economic grounds it was “no longer the postwar” (mohaya sengo de wa nai). The 2015 statement on the war by Prime Minister Abe Shinzō (discussed below) may also be understood as one such attempt. Nevertheless, the persistence of the history issue (rekishi mondai) symbolizes Japan's inability to escape the postwar. Also referred to as the history wars (rekishi sensō), the history issue is a culture war regarding historical consciousness (rekishi ninshiki) that divides people along moral, political and ideological grounds. In one sense, therefore, Japan will have escaped its postwar when the history issue retreats from the political, popular and media arenas into the specialist arena of scholarly debate.