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Past and Present in Japanese Historiography: Four Versions of Presentism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 June 2022
Abstract
For many intellectual historians, presentism is viewed as a cardinal sin—linked to unreflective anachronism and the inappropriate projection of present-day values onto a very different past context. However, by embracing the ways in which the present inevitably shapes our modes of inquiry, our historical interests, and even the moral underpinnings of our analysis, we can find in the present tools that can make our history better, and help make sense of historical debates and controversies. This essay gives an account of Japanese historiography organized around four versions of presentism. The first is political presentism, an analytic lens that emerged in the “objectivity debate” over what constituted politicized scholarship and reflected the political antagonisms of the Cold War in Asia. Consciously or unconsciously, political convictions shape our scholarship. The second version is the presentism of social context. Each decade that followed the Asia–Pacific War possessed its particular zeitgeist, and histories written during those moments were products of their time. The third form of presentism is the connection between past and present via analogy or likeness: using a past event or person to understand the present and vice versa. To analogize past and present means finding a correspondence that makes the past feel familiar and less “other.” The fourth version of presentism is the project of contemporary history: the past in the present, the past leading to the present, the present as the starting point for historical inquiry.
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- Forum: History and the Present
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 For a provocative volume of essays on the challenges of producing an Asian-centric Japan studies see Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto, eds., Rethinking Japanese Studies: Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region (London, 2018); as well as Amy Borovoy's thoughtful review in Journal of Japanese Studies 45/2 (2019), 372–7.
2 My perspective is shaped by the programs and institutions I was schooled in and the people I worked with: the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I studied as an undergraduate with John Dower; Columbia University for graduate school, where I studied with Carol Gluck; the first part of my career at New York University where I taught alongside Harry Harootunian; and finally the University of Wisconsin–Madison where I currently teach together with Sarah Thal.
3 The pursuit of “who lost China” turned up a vast Communist conspiracy among journalists and scholars who covered the Chinese revolution in the 1930s and 1940s. For these associations, organizations like the Institute for Pacific Relations lost funding; virtually all China experts were purged from the ranks of the civil service; journalists like Edgar Snow and Theodore White found it difficult to publish.
4 John W. Dower, “E. H. Norman, Japan and the Uses of History,” in E. H. Norman, Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman (New York, 1975), 3–102, esp. 31–45.
5 University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, “History of CJS,” at https://ii.umich.edu/cjs/history-of-cjs.html (accessed 5 Dec. 2021); University of California, Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies, “History of IEAS,” at https://ieas.berkeley.edu/ieas-home/about-ieas/history-ieas (accessed 5 Dec. 2021).
6 Dower, “E. H. Norman, Japan and the Uses of History,” 54–5. For more on the Hakone conference and its impact see Conrad, Sebastian, “‘The Colonial Ties are Liquidated’: Modernization Theory, Post-war Japan and the Global Cold War”, Past and Present 216/1 (2012), 181–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Victor Koschmann, “Modernization and Democratic Values: The ‘Japanese Model’ in the 1960s”, in David C. Engerman, ed., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst, 2003); and Stefan Tanaka, “Objectivism and the Eradication of Critique in Japanese History,” in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, eds. Learning Places: the Afterlives of Area Studies (Durham, NC, 2002).
7 “Read the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars Founding Statement” (March 1969), at https://criticalasianstudies.org/about (accessed 5 Dec. 2021).
8 Recent critiques of area studies have not done much to revise Dower's analysis, a point made by Andrew Gordon's book review, “Rethinking Area Studies, Once More,” Journal of Japanese Studies 30/2 (2004), 417–29. The six volumes in the Princeton University Press series are Marius B. Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization (Princeton, 1965); William E. Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan (Princeton, 1965); Ronald P. Dore, ed., Aspects of Social Change in Modern Japan (Princeton, 1971); Robert E. Ward, ed., Political Development in Modern Japan (Princeton, 1968); Donald Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton, 1971); and James Morley, ed., Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan (Princeton, 1972).
9 Ezra Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (Cambridge, MA, 1979); Theodore H. White, “The Danger from Japan”, New York Times Magazine, 28 July 1985 Section 6, 19; Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels and Outcasts: The Underside to Modern Japan (New York, 1982).
10 For an analysis of the literature on Japanese exceptionalism or Nihonjinron see Harumi Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron (Melbourne, 2001).
11 E.g. the critique of Japanese history's association with area studies in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, “Japan in the World,” introduction to special issue of boundary 2 18/3 (1991), 1–7; and H. D. Harootunian, “Tracking the Dinosaur: Area Studies in a Time of ‘Globalism’,” in Harootunian, History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York, 2002). During the 1980s and 1990s, Harootunian and his colleague Tetsuo Najita trained a generation of students at the University of Chicago. Through his productive association with Duke University Press and its stable of journals, Harootunian engaged in collaborations with theorists across the humanities. Known for their engagement with Continental and Marxist theory, the “Chicago school” produced a philosophically inflected intellectual history that reshaped the ecosystem of Japanese humanities. For an analysis of Japanese historiography written from the vantage point of the late 1990s see Carol Gluck, “House of Mirrors: American History-Writing on Japan,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, 1999), 434–54: reorientation to Western historiographic trends, at 443–4.
12 On the modern girl: Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC, 2003); for a volume that canvases the sites of modern culture: Elise K. Tipton and John Clark, eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu, 2000); on philosophical modernism: H. D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, 2000); on empire: Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Japanese Imperialism (Berkeley, 1998).
13 For example, Marius Jansen, Sakamoto Ryōma and the Meiji Restoration (Princeton, 1961); Albert M. Craig, Choshu and the Meiji Restoration (Cambridge, MA, 1961); W. G. Beasley, The Meiji Restoration (Stanford, 1972).
14 These phrases from book titles of the era: John W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954 (Cambridge, MA, 1979); Edward Friedman and Mark Selden, eds., America's Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian–American Relations (New York, 1971).
15 E.g. Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, 1985); Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853–1955 (Cambridge, MA, 1985), Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley, 1987); Andrew Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Berkeley, 1988).
16 See note 12 above.
17 For some examples of recent scholarship that examines the failures of state projects and the social spaces that evaded the power of the imperial state: David R. Ambaras, Japan's Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge, 2018), Robert Stolz, Bad Water: Nature, Pollution and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950 (Durham, NC, 2014), Benjamin Uchiyama, Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945 (Cambridge, 2019), Michael Wert, Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA, 2013). On multicultural Japan and the reset with Asia: David Blake Willis and Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Transcultural Japan: At the Borderlands of Race, Gender and Identity (London, 2008); Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, NC, 2002); Leo T. S. Ching, Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia (Durham, NC, 2019).
18 I write about this in Ch. 3 of Japan's Total Empire: “War Fever: Imperial Jingoism and the Mass Media.”
19 Louise Young, “Ideologies of Difference and the Turn to Atrocity: Japan's War on China,” in Roger Chickering, Stig Förster, and Bernd Greiner, eds., A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 (Cambridge, 2004), 333–53.
20 On the crisis in the humanities: University of Wisconsin Center for East Asian Studies, Symposium on Japan and the Humanities Crisis, 5 Dec. 2015, at https://eastasia.wisc.edu/events-archive (accessed 8 Dec. 2021). On the Death of Japan Studies panel at the 2019 Association of Asian Studies meetings in Denver, Colorado, and subsequent Association of Asian Studies-sponsored debates on the state of the field, see the planned Embracing the Rebirth of Japan Studies, Association of Asian Studies annual conference, 22–4 March 2022, at www.asianstudies.org/embracing-the-rebirth-of-japanese-studies; and a write-up of a 2020 AAS panel: Paula Curtis, “Virtual Roundtable: The ‘Rebirth of Japan Studies’,” at http://prcurtis.com/events/AAS2020 (both accessed 5 Dec. 2021).
21 Vogel, Japan as Number One; Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First among Equals (New York, 1991).
22 The project of economic restorationism emerged most clearly with the slickly branded program of “Abenomics” under the administration of Abe Shinzō (2006–7, 2012–20): Government of Japan, “Abenomics: For Future Growth, for Future Generations, and for a Future Japan That Is Robust” (May 2017), at www.japan.go.jp/abenomics/_userdata/abenomics/pdf/170508_abenomics.pdf (accessed 5 Dec. 2021).
23 David H. Slater has done excellent research on issues of social class and contemporary politics: “Social Class and Social Identity in Postwar Japan,” in Victoria Bestor, Theodore C. Bestor, and Akiko Yamagata, eds., Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society (London, 2011), 103–15.
24 For a good introduction to Kobayashi see Sakamoto, Rumi, “‘Will You Go to War? Or Will You Stop Being Japanese?’ Nationalism and History in Kobayashi Yoshinori Sensoron,” Asia–Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 6/1 (2008), 1–16Google Scholar.
25 Founded in 2002, the online, open access journal Asia–Pacific Journal: Japan Focus has provided a forum for scholarship on Japan that is strongly anchored in the present and reflects the trends in postwar historiography. See https://apjjf.org/About (accessed 8 Dec. 2021).
26 On Hirohito's reinvention: John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 1999), 277–345.
27 Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century's End (New York, 1991), 177–266.
28 Sheila Miyoshi Jagar and Rana Mitter, “War, Memory and the Post-Cold War,” in Miyoshi Jagar and Mitter, eds., Ruptured Histories: War, Memory and the Post-Cold War in Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 1–14.
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30 Arthur Schlesinger Jr, “On the Writing of Contemporary History,” The Atlantic, March 1967, at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1967/03/on-the-writing-of-contemporary-history/305731 (accessed 20 Dec. 2021).