This book attempts a coherent portrait of the heart of Japan's economic and political decision making. It presents the men occupying the core positions in Japan's ruling party, the central ministries, and in big business and its organizations. Elite career patterns, social origins, upbringing, university education, cognitive orientations and ways of life are reviewed, as are the interactions in the exclusive world of Japan's increasingly hereditary and bureaucratic class of power holders in conservative politics and big business.

Kakuei Tanaka was the most powerful politician in Japan for nearly two decades, and his followers have dominated Japanese politics for most of the country's recent history. This account of the life and times of Tanaka explores the public profile and private power-broking of a controversial and powerful politician, opening up in the process the intimate political history of modern Japan.

*Includes pictures *Explains the formation of a new constitution, as well as the democratization and demilitarization processes *Includes a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents The American occupation of Japan holds a singular and problematic place in the histories both of Japan and of American foreign policy. For the Japanese, the occupation marked the transition from war to peace, from authoritarianism to democracy, and from privation to plenty, making it a passage from one of the darkest chapters in Japanese history to one of the brightest. Nevertheless, the significance of that passage was fraught with ambiguities; after all, Japan did not win its new democracy through revolution from below in the form of a popular indigenous movement pressing for increased rights and a more open, inclusive politics. Instead, Japanese democracy came as a revolution from above, a system imposed wholesale and virtually without consultation by an occupying army whose Supreme Allied Commander, General Douglas MacArthur, wielded power as absolute and unchecked as any emperor. Many critics at the time and since have worried that the political system established by the occupation was thus somehow hollow, a thin veneer of participatory democracy resting uncomfortably atop a deeply conservative and hierarchical culture, symbolized above all by the continuing presence of an emperor. Others have argued that the contradictions of a radical democratic revolution from above are real but irrelevant. Presented for the first time with open space for genuine political speech and action, ordinary Japanese seized the opportunity to exercise agency over the course of their own lives, pulling Japan in directions that neither the old Japanese political elite nor the new American occupation authorities had foreseen. On the American side, the significance of the occupation is no less contentious. On the one hand, after three and a half years of some of the most bitter and bloody combat the world had ever seen, the occupation authorities might well have set out to avenge themselves upon the Japanese people for Pearl Harbor and all that had followed by instituting a harsh and punitive peace, much the way the Soviet Union did in the regions of Germany it came to occupy. That the Americans instead exerted themselves to reconstruct Japan as a peaceful, democratic, and prosperous ally is often proffered as an example of Americans' fundamental sense of justice, redemption, and fair play. At the same time, the particular course the occupation took cannot be understood outside the context of the developing global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. With Communist hegemony in the Russian Far East, in Manchuria, in northern Korea, and (after 1949) even in China, American policymakers felt the urgent need for a stable, reliable ally in northeast Asia. Thus, in the American occupation of Japan, the interests of enlightened humanitarianism and cold-blooded realpolitik were, for the most part, conveniently aligned. Indeed, it is important to consider the long shadow that the occupation of Japan has cast over the conduct of American foreign policy in the decades since World War II. On the surface, the goals of the occupation authorities may have seemed positively herculean: the transformation of a warlike, authoritarian, and economically devastated enemy into a peaceful, democratic, and prosperous ally. To the careful historian, the fact that the occupation authorities succeeded so dramatically in achieving these objectives must suggest that, for all the unquestionable drama and heroics of the period, their task was not so Quixotic as it may have appeared, and that Japanese society was, in important ways, already primed for the radical reforms the occupiers set in motion. The Postwar Occupation of Japan looks at the history from the surrender to end World War II to the independence of the modern Japanese nation.

This is the first systematic, historical inquiry into the emergence of "victim consciousness" (higaisha ishiki) as an essential component of Japanese pacifist national identity after World War II. In his meticulously crafted narrative and analysis, the author reveals how postwar Japanese elites and American occupying authorities collaborated to structure the parameters of remembrance of the war, including the notion that the emperor and his people had been betrayed and duped by militarists. He goes on to explain the Japanese reliance on victim consciousness through a discussion of the ban-the-bomb movement of the mid-1950s, which raised the prominence of Hiroshima as an archetype of war victimhood and brought about the selective focus on Japanese war victimhood; the political strategies of three self-defined war victim groups (A-bomb victims, repatriates, and dispossessed landlords) to gain state compensation and hence valorization of their war victim experiences; shifting textbook narratives that reflected contemporary attitudes and structured future generations' understanding of the war; and three classic antiwar novels and films that contributed to the shaping of a "sentimental humanism" that continues to leave a strong imprint on the collective Japanese conscience.

After World War II, Japanese intellectuals believed that world history was moving inexorably toward bourgeois democracy and then socialism. But who would be the agents—the active "subjects"—of that revolution in Japan? Intensely debated at the time, this question of active subjectivity influenced popular ideas about nationalism and social change that still affect Japanese political culture today. In a major contribution to modern Japanese intellectual history, J. Victor Koschmann analyzes the debate over subjectivity. He traces the arguments of intellectuals from various disciplines and political viewpoints, and finds that despite their stress on individual autonomy, they all came to define subjectivity in terms of deterministic historical structures, thus ultimately deferring the possibility of radical change in Japan. Establishing a basis for historical dialogue about democratic revolution, this book will interest anyone concerned with issues of nationalism, postcolonialism, and the formation of identities.