Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present (review)

It seems unlikely that Japan’s 1990s will ever come in for the kind of sentimental, nostalgic treatment that director Yamazaki Takashi recently created for Tokyo’s 1950s in his highly popular film Always—San-chōme no yūhi (Always: sunsets on Third Street). Japanese commentators seem inclined mostly to lament the decade, while politicians suggest that they have absorbed its lessons, turning it into an instructive hiccup between the miracle growth of the 1950s through the 1980s and the “beautiful country” (to use Abe Shinzō’s term) or the “tremendous Japan” (Asō Tarō’s) of the new millennium. As the authors in Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian’s new edited collection Japan after Japan indicate, the intellectual trends and social debates of 1990s Japan reflect the difficulty of grappling not only with the Heisei recession itself but also with the meaning of the “long postwar” that had preceded it. Although its thematic connections are occasionally perplexing and its stylistic choices may prevent it from reaching many of the scholars who would benefit from reading it, Japan after Japan is a vital piece of scholarship and an indispensable guide to the social debates emerging from 1990s Japan.

Yoda’s two chapters are superb. Her introduction provides an overview of some of the more visible of the myriad social and cultural debates in millennial Japan, exploring the “return to the modern” among neoconservative and left-leaning Japanese intellectuals. Yoda, whose previous book examined modern tropes in the interpretation of Heian literature, deftly traces arguments by the likes of Miyadai Shinji, Asada Akira, Fukuda Kazuya, and Karatani Kōjin, showing that in particular the last three, despite their diverse and deeply informed theoretical projects, often revert to a flawed notion of a “duality between Japan and the world (now cast as global capitalism or the United States as its embodiment)” (p. 49).

In her other chapter, “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society,” Yoda focuses partly on the mythical construction and recessionary deployment of postwar Japan as a kind of miraculous if maternalistic economic machine, generating relatively egalitarian growth, fostering harmonious labor relations, and premised on a stable and fulfilling home life for the nuclear families of the large middle class. This image was exploitable by nationalists after the collapse of the economic bubble, decrying the kind of narcissism and weakness purportedly generated by maternal structures and proposing instead a tougher, more paternalistic role for the state. While she contextualizes Japanese maternalism within transnational patterns of industrial development, Yoda neatly engages and critiques Nihonjinron-esque claims of national distinctiveness, particularly Doi Takeo’s arguments in The Anatomy of Dependence (Kodansha International, 1973) and Kawai Hayao’s reformulation of Nakane Chie’s views of Japan as a vertical society. Both chapters by Yoda astutely conclude with notions of loss: the possible disappearance of the collective drive to create a “master narrative” of national striving or cosmopolitanism (and that a “return to modernity” can presumably resuscitate), or the loss of maternalism in the face of neoliberalism, though without providing much in the way of liberation.

Although the editors do not explicitly say so, many of the chapters seem to be paired in their thematic concerns or source material. Harootunian’s chapter—as convincing and thoughtful as Yoda’s—and J. Victor Koschmann’s excellent essay both discuss Katō Norihiro’s 1995 book Haisengo ron (Since defeat; Kōdansha, 1997). Harootunian notes that Katō’s description of Japanese “self-loathing” in an America-driven break with the prewar “resuscitate[s] a hidden authenticity,” an imagined, original communitarian ethic that is as appealing to right-wing ideologues as it is amenable to exploitation by political figures with fascist ambitions. Providing a first-rate example of history as critical intervention, he discusses Imamura Shōhei’s 1971 documentary Nippon sengoshi: Madamu Onboro no seikatsu (History...