Introduction

Roughly a decade has passed since the bursting of Japan's bubble economy, and despite some intermittent signs of recovery, the nation's economic downturn that began in the early 1990s continues in the present. While the prognosis for Japan's economic future remains uncertain, the prospect for simple recovery has been all but counted out. The optimistic view that the nation's economic stagnation is merely a temporary downturn in a business cycle, an adjustment of the excessive growth and the inflation of asset prices in the latter part of the 1980s, has been abandoned in the course of the decade. Instead, it is widely assumed that the revival of the economy would entail a further process of restructuring that may affect fundamental transformations of Japanese society, exacting serious tolls on it in fractious and uneven ways. During the 1990s, the waves of bankruptcy and unemployment reached post-1940s peaks, palpably eroding the vaunted lifetime employment system and cutting deeply into the core of postwar Japanese social compact and the sense of national identity.

The economic woes during the decade have greatly tarnished the reputation of postwar Japan as a nation of an unending economic expansion. The significance of the 1990s as a major historical conjuncture, however, must also be understood through the ways in which it marked the disintegration of postwar Japan in another sense. The decade appears to have signaled the long-deferred end of the postwar, which Japan has kept alive as vigorously as the state once tried to prolong the life of the former emperor Hirohito as he lay dying. This narrative of the long postwar began with the United States conspicuously conspiring with Japanese and the imperial house immediately after the war to absolve the emperor from war responsibility, which would spare him going to trial in the Tokyo Military Tribune. By preserving the emperor and dynasty, the United States literally undermined the very reforms it had implemented to eliminate prewar fascism and to put into place the foundations of a genuine social democratic structure. At the same time, the United States also served as the principal alibi for Japan's failure to achieve its postwar aspirations, however it was defined (even though the retention of the emperor more than amply fulfilled the most primary of these ambitions). The "price" allegedly paid was one in unprecedented economic affluence and military protection, if not the promised social democracy.

The ending of this partnership, certainly on the American side, in a global market controlled by the United States, with no real threats to national security apart from the rhetoric of "rogue" states and China, provides the occasion to rethink the tangled historical relationship between these two countries since the end of the war: the ties based on the singular decision to rescue the emperor and to eliminate from memory the fascist order he enabled and in whose name the nation was asked to make the supreme sacrifice. In many ways, the Japanese desire to prolong the agony of the postwar into the new century (through its continued repression/preservation of the wartime past) only signifies the desire to retain the dependent relationship Japan has lived with the United States. Furthermore, it points to the reluctance to let go of the distorted history that has retained for Japanese society both the principle and principal of political authority and thus the whole of its modern history.

For those on the right, Japan's clinging to the long postwar has been the cause of considerable shame as they observe how the Japanese have been reduced to runners and voyeurs of a superior imperialism enacted by the United States. The left, on its part, seems to have all but vanished. If the Japanese are always perplexed when foreigners, and especially Asians, constantly demand of them an account of their conduct in the war, it is because they were permitted by the U.S. military occupation to retain their prewar historical experience and...