Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast: Tōhoku as Postwar Thought, 1945–2011 by Nathan Hopson (review)

Social science research generally comes in two varieties. One is tightly focused within the boundaries of the disciplines that it seeks to engage with and provides for strictly subject-relevant outcomes that are best understood and appreciated by specialists. The other is more multidisciplinary, more widely relevant, and more responsive to the differing expectations of a wide range of readers. Nathan Hopson has provided a rich and exhaustive piece of research that represents the former well, but will perhaps leave some disappointed if they come to the book expecting the latter. This is the dilemma faced in trying to peg Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast: Tōhoku as Postwar Thought, 1945–2011: on the one hand, it is a commendable work of detailed historiography, yet on the other, it is less than clear in establishing connections with broader arguments that seek to understand Tōhoku at present or to organize scholarly approaches to future research of the region.

The book, which consists of five main chapters in addition to an introduction, epilogue, appendix, and extensive notes, is a subjective history of the postwar discursive construction of Tōhoku. The author states that his aim in the book is to focus on “what the idea(s) of Tōhoku from 1945 to 2011 can tell us about Japan, about historical ressentiment, about discourses of race, about regionalism and nationalism, or about the Northeast [Tōhoku] itself” (pp. 4–5). Hopson works toward this aim with an in-depth and informed reading of a handful of Japanese historians who have dedicated their scholarly efforts to understanding the region, often doing so within a frame of activist revisionism. These are historians who took a critical view of Japanese history as it had been laid out and who saw their research as a departure from the accepted doctrines of this history. Indeed, Hopson notes that for the postwar period up to 2011, “Tōhoku was a kind of floating or empty signifier in Japanese discourses of national reinvention, . . . a symbol ready to be filled with new meanings at every turn” (p. 1). The book details the motivation for and emergence of postwar Tōhoku studies, its transition to a new phase beginning in the 1980s, and its abrupt end in March 2011 as a consequence of the devastation and trauma of 3/11, thereby providing an extensive and in-depth historiographical case study.

Hopson sees the postwar history of Tōhoku studies as divided into two periods: the first from the end of the war up to 1980, which centered on the southern Iwate town of Hiraizumi and articulated Tōhoku (and its people) as the ennobled savage, and the second in the rise of nostalgia that characterized the post-1980 to 2011 period; the scholarship of the latter period has come to be known as “Tōhokugaku,” which Hopson renders as “Tohokuology.” For the early postwar history of the area, he relies primarily on the work of Takahashi Tomio and Umehara Takeshi; regarding post-1980s Tōhoku studies, he critiques the work of Akasaka Norio. For views on Japanese intellectual history and responses to Tōhokugaku, he looks to Oguma Eiji and Okada Tomohiro, and concerning the post-3/11 period (touched upon in the epilogue), he quotes Yamauchi Akemi. Hopson’s study joins earlier notable research in a similar vein by Kawanishi Hidemichi, whose book Tōhoku: Tsukurareta ikyō (Chūōkoron Shinsha, 2001) was recently translated into English under the title Tōhoku: Japan’s Constructed Outland (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

The first four chapters of the book examine the push to make Tōhoku meaningful within the historical arc of Japan’s history, undertaken through the archaeological study of Hiraizumi’s ancestors. This began in March 1950, when this scientific approach was brought to the study of Chūsonji temple, located in Hiraizumi—a site of historical significance in a period...