H199 Postwar Japan: Some Points of Departure
So, what are we up to in this class?
First, who am I and why H199? I taught at Willamette for 35 years before retiring in 2018. I've been back teaching both before COVID in 2019 and again this year, 2023-2024.
Originally, this class was offered as a Hist 131 but since I retired, all Hist 131s became Writing Centered. Fine, but I just taught a W course last semester and I don't think the protocols for W classes are as well-suited to this Postwar Japan class as they are to my Japanese Literature class--even though we will be doing plenty of writing! But much of it is short responses to films and essays so we don't have the luxury of time for multiple drafts, paper conferences, Writing Center visits, etc. So, I opted out of teaching it as a H131-W and went with the alternative of a H199 Special Topics instead.
My training is as a Historian of Modern Japan and a lot of my research has been in the field of Japanese women's autobiographies and memoirs, so this class is a perfect fit for my skills and interests. Plus, it will allow us to take a "deep dive" into some unique and fascinating primary materials relating to women and their participation in social and political movements.
Coincidentally, a recent observation by Historian and Professor of American History at Boston College, Heather Cox-Richardson, got my attention. She is talking about the differences between Journalists and Historians:
Journalists are trained to find breaking stories and to explain them clearly so that their audience is better informed about what is happening in the world. What they do is vitally important to a democracy, and it is hard work….
Historians do something different than journalists. We study how and why societies change. We are trained to see larger patterns in the facts we find in documents, speeches, letters, and photographs…and in the work of journalists.
Some historians believe that mass movements change society, and so they focus on such movements; others believe that great figures change society, and they focus on biographies. Still others focus on economic change. And so on.
In my case, I am fascinated by the way ideas change society, and I am especially interested in the gap between what people believe and what is actually happening in the real world. That interest means that I always want to know how people think and especially how their worldview informs the way they act.
This seems very germane to this course because we are considering how Japanese people in the early Postwar Years were thinking about things like social movements, political engagement, and how society changes. As we shall see, many of the women whose memoirs and autobiographies we will study wrote not only about how they may have decided to become activists and take part in political Movements or Demonstrations, but also how they believed that their experiences--both as activists and then as writers--sparked a change in their Subjectivity, or in their "Consciousness." In other words, how it changed the way they perceived the world and their place in it. And these considerations are not just speculative: these women writers described explicitly how they felt their inner processes undergoing significsnt change as they worked their way through whatever life challenges they were encountering at the time.
When you think about it, that's really pretty important stuff for the historian, right?
Let's have a look at the Student Learning Outcomes, or what Willamette University has stated that History Courses should accomplish:
The goals of a History Course are to foster:
A working knowledge of several different historical eras and locales
The ability to make interpretive sense out of a large body of historical data
The ability to articulate a clear and original historical interpretation in both written and oral form
The ability to identify multiple positions within a historiographical debate and assess the strengths and weaknesses of those positions
The ability to usefully apply their historical understanding to themselves and the time in which they live
Since we will be looking at Japan and its close relationship with the US as well as it's Asian neighbors, Objective Number 1 will be taken care of quite naturally. We will also be looking at a lot of historical data, both primary and secondary sources, so Objective Number 2 will be likewise be easily fulfilled. We will constantly be engaging in historical intepretation, so No. 3 will clearly be met as well! And 4 and 5 look pretty relevant and easily incorporated also. If we cannot look at the historical experiences of other people, in other times and places, and see at least part of ourselves and our struggles as a society and polity in their circumstances and their struggles, then perhaps we are not looking hard enough.
The information below overlaps significantly with what is on the Syllabus but below I have a bit more commentary on the books for this course, which might best be discussed after you read The first two chapters of Kingston for our Jan. 30 session.
I. There are two principal books I assign in this class. The first is Jeff Kingston's Japan in Transformation 1945-1920 (3rd edition, 2022). He has very short, tightly focused chapters, a detailed and nuanced Chrononlogy, and he appends a lot of useful Documents in Part Four of the book to which we will refer on several occasions. These kinds of Documents are especially useful for historians because they often represent Primary Materials on which historians place much value.
If we look at the opening short chapters of the book, we get a clear idea of where Kingston is coming from. I appreciate what he has to say about how history works as a discourse, and how it can help us better understand the world in which we live. He quotes Cicero to the effect that "Not to know what happened before you were born is always to remain a child.”
So, a few points to consider:
A. We need to understand postwar Japan's historical experience in both a cross-national and an international context. Context is always critical and we live in a transnational, cross-national, information-centered age. We cannot escape this fact.
B. Monocausal explanations cannot do justice to the dynamism and complexity of Japan's postwar history. We need synthetic, multicausal explanations. It is never easy, but we need to keep in mind the interdependence of social, political and economic factors. Political decisions caused economic consequences that transformed society; but these transformations also created social ramifications, anxieties, and fears and concerns which shaped the way historical actors saw their world and figured out how to best act in it.
C. Static, stereotypes about Japanese society and its people jeopardize our understanding of Japan's history. Yes, economic growth and GNPism was a driving force during much of the postwar period nurturing a collective identity based on economic growth. In fact, Japanese became known as "economic animals" during the the late-1960s-1970s.
D. However, we also have history of “orientalism” that would have us focus on the strange and the exotic, a view that would focus on the image of samurai and geisha, the sumo wrestler; or we might over-rely on stereotypes about Japanese society as though it were something static, unchanging where everything is dependent on hierarchy, seniority, status, etc.
But these cliches cannot be acepted uncritically; they need to be questioned or "problematized." By themselves, they are not enough. They have been around since the early postwar years – almost 80 years! –so we need to move beyond simplistic notions and take Japan as it is; take Japan on its own terms as a dynamic, innovative society facing challenges many other countries won't face for years to come.
II. The second book for this class is my own book, Changing Lives, which draws upon the memoirs of Japanese women, women who lived through these years, were situated in them, defined themselves and generated whatever agency they could muster in this particular historical context. I read and studied these texts because to me, they open up the possibility of better understanding this context in which important moments and events occurred, in which choices were made, and we get to see them through the eyes of people who actually lived them.
Kingston points out that students of history can learn much from examining and comparing the consequences of choices and policies made by people and how these are affected by institutional arrangements, and political and economic conditions. That is what we do.
If we believe that Human Agency is important, and that we have to understand that people act, that they make decisions in certain historical contexts, then it will benefit us to learn all we can about these contexts. To understand the choices they make, we should learn as much as we can about the context in which these historical actors lived and experienced their history.
Kingston is absolutely correct when he points out that the period covered, 1945-2020, is one of tumultuous change that has transformed the way Japanese view the world and act in it.
Think about this. It is that connection between how we stand in the world, how we think about our situation, and how we choose to act that is so important. Is there anything more meaningful that we can do than study and learn from these moments no matter when and where they occur?
Kingston also appreciates how Japan's ideological transformation during the 1945-2020 has been driven and reinforced by a mix of factors:
--institutional change,
--rapid economic development,
--political ferment and
--the dynamic tension between prevailing norms and shifting realities. In other words, value change and reorientation of the paradigm
Kingston says: The complex interweave of historical forces and factors does not lend itself to easy assessments. Students of history need to train their senses to analyze not only what happened, but also to grasp what did not happen and why….
He quotes Graham Swift to the effect that history ‘is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge’. In the end, historical actors in any given moment, do not see or know everything. They have to do the best they can with the knowledge and experience that they possess. But that whole process is important and one from which we can learn a great deal.
I believe that much can be learned from the stories of these women--not just about these women's lives but about the times in which they lived. Memoirs are excellent primary materials that can show us not only what happened but how historical actors reflected on what was going on and how they arrived their own understanding of the moment there were in, and how they came to think, feel, and act as they did. And they tell us their stories in their own words!
What they have to say may not be the end of the story, but it is certainly an important beginning. I love the stories in my book and I hope you do too. For the most part, they are not larger-than-life actors or major political figures. They are just ordinary people like you and me who tried to figure things out for themselves. They are people I came to know through reading their stories and studying their lives and I came to admire them a great deal.