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

"Tohoku" designates a region in northeastern Honshu that encompasses four of Japan's largest prefectures. The triple disaster of March 11, 2011, made "Tohoku" into an internationally recognized and symbolic term overnight. The word now evoked suffering, charity, precarity, resilience, and disasters natural and man-made. Even those who—like the author of this review—were only superficially aware of Tohoku's history before 2011 knew that these symbolic connotations resonated with older stereotypes about the region as backward and underdeveloped. In Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast, Nathan Hopson challenges this static picture by revealing a more complicated and conflictual history of Tohoku as a region repeatedly invested with hopes for national redemption after World War II. He argues that 3/11 swept away some of the symbolism Tohoku had accumulated across this period (Tohoku as unspoiled by modernity) while bringing older, submerged associations back to the surface (Tohoku as internal colony). The many-layered image of Tohoku that emerges out of Hopson's compelling account testifies to the power of approaching the long span of Japanese history through the shifting optics of the country's postwar era.

The subtitle of the monograph, Tōhoku as Postwar Thought, indicates its primary difference from other English-language studies of regional and local history. A large body of scholarship exists on the history of subnational and subimperial units in Japan—from urban neighborhoods and villages to cities, colonies, feudal domains, and modern prefectures. Recent work, such as Hiraku Shimoda's 2014 study of Aizu beyond its post-1868 incorporation in Fukushima Prefecture,¹ is careful to historicize regional identity and regionalism as, in crucial respects, products of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rather than as holdovers from earlier eras. Contemporary scholarship maintains its distance from polarized views of regions as either sites of resistance toward or artificial instruments of the modern nation-state.

Such recent work represents an advance in our understanding of the complex historical relations among nationalism, regionalism, and empire. At the same time, it is impossible to fully explore how and why the political and intellectual stakes involved in regional studies have shifted over time within the confines of historiographic discussions appended to the introduction of an article or book. This speaks directly to the original contribution of Hopson's monograph. His choice to treat Tohoku as postwar thought gives him the room necessary to contextualize and draw out the broad implications of earlier approaches to the region across different academic disciplines and media. Given Tohoku's cultural and geographic diversity, the region and the inhabitants and polities that existed within its modern-day boundaries are amenable to Hopson's treatment of them as "empty signifiers, filled with the dreams and agendas of their users" (p. 177). Yet as a consequence of this approach, Hopson's work is arguably in closer dialogue with critical studies of historiography, archaeology, ethnography, and folklore by Curtis Gayle, Mark Hudson, and Marilyn Ivy than with recent works of regional history.

Hopson's critical genealogy of interdisciplinary "Tohoku studies" (Tōhokugaku) centers upon three thinkers—Takahashi Tomio, Umehara Takeshi, and Akasaka Norio. Among these three, pride of place is clearly reserved for the historian Takahashi Tomio, who Hopson argues did much to make Tohoku central to postwar discussions of national identity. He explores Takahashi's intellectual trajectory from the 1950s to the 1970s across chapters 2 and 3, and he continues to invoke Takahashi's work in later chapters to mark the distance traveled from his vision of the region as a kind of fluid and resistant frontier zone to its absorption within an essentialist vision of Japanese culture centered on the prehistoric Jōmon era.

The author foregrounds two historical preconditions behind Takahashi's equation of Tohoku with resistance. He finds one of these in the prewar scholarship of Kita Sadakichi, who reinscribed the essentialized racial difference of the...