Japan Archives - Page 2 of 2

Notes from the Field: Northeast Japan after the Tsunami

I lived near the port city of Kesennuma, in northeastern Japan, from 2006 to 2008. That was several years before the event they call 3/11. That’s March 11, 2011, the day a record-setting earthquake and tsunami devastated the area and cost over 18,000 lives. Most of the victims were Japanese, but several foreigners died as well, including two Americans who were doing same the job I had done: teaching English in elementary and junior high schools.

Kesennuma Fishing Port in 2006. Via Wikimedia Commons. — Kesennuma Fishing Port in 2006.

I kept in touch with several friends in Japan after I returned to the United States to attend graduate school. When the tsunami hit and it became clear just how bad the damage was, there was a long, tense period as I waited to hear from them through email or Facebook or mutual acquaintances. Fortunately, nobody I knew died in the tragedy. But many of them did lose their homes, their cars, and their own family members, friends, students, and neighbors.

Shishiori-Karakuwa Station after the 2011 Tsunami. Via Wikimedia Commons. — Shishiori-Karakuwa Station after the 2011 Tsunami.

I couldn’t help but wonder how the place I used to live had changed. In the months following the disaster I heard about the shops and homes that had been washed away, about the temporary housing that cropped up, and about the giant beached ships (Kesennuma is a major commercial fishing port) that were left sitting inland after the waters receded.

The blue placard near the window of a Karakuwa shrine shop marks the tsunami's water line. Many businesses in the area feature similar placards. — The blue placard near the window of a Karakuwa shrine shop marks the tsunami’s water line. Many businesses in the area feature similar placards.

My dissertation involves Japan, though it is not related to the tsunami, and I received the opportunity to research there for the 2013-2014 academic year. I was thrilled to go back, and even more thrilled that through happenstance and the invaluable help of Japanese historians on both sides of the Pacific I was able to live in the same general part of the country I had lived in years before. This time I was three hours away from Kesennuma, close enough to visit relatively easily.

Nothing I had heard could have prepared me for what I saw there. While many buildings I recognized were still standing, and some had already been rebuilt, large swaths of the town were simply gone. One of Kesennuma’s two rail stations had been destroyed, and I did not have a car, so I traveled there by bus. It dropped off in the middle of several cracked foundations. Only by memory could I tell that I was a stone’s throw from the site of a restaurant I used to frequent. A friend picked me up at the bus stop, and on our way to his home in my old neighborhood we passed a fishing vessel tipped on its side. The ocean was several meters away on the righthand side of the road, and the ship was on the left.

A bus stop in Kesennuma City. These foundations are that's left of buildings that once stood here. In some parts of this city there are acres of nothing but foundations. — A bus stop in Kesennuma City. These foundations are that’s left of buildings that once stood here. In some parts of this city there are acres of nothing but foundations.

In my old neighborhood we drove past the site of an elementary school I used to teach at. It had been a century-old wooden building, architecturally beautiful but with a permanent stench from bad plumbing. It had probably needed to be replaced, but not like this. In its place was a cluster of small, plasticky temporary houses that stood out among the modern homes and large, old wooden ones that survived the disaster. Many observers have argued, and I agree, that the Japanese government has been too slow to replace the tens of thousands of destroyed residences in the affected parts of the country.

Temporary houses in Karakuwa, the neighborhood of Kesennuma City where I used to live. Most people displaced by the tsunami stayed near their original homes, either with relatives or in temporary housing, but some moved to other cities in the area like Sendai City and Ichinoseki City. — Temporary houses in Karakuwa, a neighborhood in Kesennuma City. Most people displaced by the tsunami stayed near their original homes, either with relatives or in temporary housing, but some moved to other cities in the area like Sendai City and Ichinoseki City.

While there was ample physical evidence of the disaster, the attitudes of the people I met and renewed friendships with were almost universally “genki”—a Japanese word meaning healthy, happy, and lively. One friend who lost her home and her business on 3/11 treated me to her memories of that day, and concluded by insisting “This [loss of property] is not sad. Because there were many people who lost their lives.”

However, the nuclear aspect of the disaster is still a source of concern for many. The troubled and leaking Fukushima reactor is just a few hours south of Kesennuma. I visited one shop in nearby Sendai City that advertised “Fukushima-free” foods, made without any agricultural or sea-based products from the area around the plant. Every scientific study I know of has determined that food from most of Fukushima is safe to eat, but farmers there are having a hard time convincing the public to buy their goods. Almost every day’s television news broadcast leads with an update on the damaged plant. On the other hand, at one sushi party I attended another foreigner asked whether any of the fish was from waters off Fukushima. A Japanese patron responded, “Maybe, but we can’t worry about it.” Not to eat fish is too great a sacrifice.

A bowl of raw seafood. Some of this may have come from water near the damaged Fukushima reactor, but when it's right in front you, you just "can't worry about it." — A bowl of raw seafood. Some of this may have come from water near the damaged Fukushima reactor, but when it’s right in front you, you just “can’t worry about it.”

While in Japan I hosted several visitors from America (and two from Australia), and they all reported having a wonderful time. Disaster-affected areas are working to increase tourism to help their ongoing recovery. It is safe to visit the northeast of Japan, and the area is home to several unique, ancient sites that are off the usual tourist path but every bit as rewarding as locations in Tokyo and Kyoto. If you get a chance to go, let me know, and I’ll give you a list. I miss Japan greatly and look forward to going back again someday.

Few foreign tourists visit this breathtaking gorge in northeast Japan, even at peak fall leaf viewing seasons. It is not far from Sendai City.

David Conrad at Takkoku no Iwa, a shrine built into a rock face near Ichinoseki City.

First two images via Wikimedia Commons.

All remaining photos courtesy of David Conrad.

Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)

Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli produced many internationally celebrated and beloved animated films, including the award-wining Spirited Away. His farewell masterpiece, The Wind Rises, however, received mixed reactions from international audiences. Viewers who expected to see a fast-paced fantasy like other Miyazaki movies may have been disappointed, because The Wind Rises is a slow-paced historical film. It traces the life of Horikoshi Jiro, an aircraft engineer who invented the famous Zero fighter, which was used by the Japanese navy during WWII. And it chronicles the life of Jiro’s wife, Nahoko, a fictional character from Hori Tatsuo’s acclaimed novel, on which the film is loosely based. Miyazaki describes the tragic fate of the young couple in the maelstrom of prewar Japan.

The Wind Rises vividly depicts Taisho and Showa Japan from the economic hardships in the 1920s through the rise of militarism in the 1930s. Jiro encounters the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 on a locomotive to Tokyo. The magnitude 7.9 earthquake shook the entire metropolitan area, destroying 111,000 buildings. Moreover, since Japanese houses were mostly built of wood, fire spread rapidly, burning down 212,000 residences. As a result, 105,000 people perished, and Japan lost 47% of GNP. Despite Tokyo’s quick recovery, which surprised Jiro’s younger sister Kayo, the earthquake ushered in recurring economic crises. When Jiro arrives in Nagoya to work for an aviation company, he witnesses a run on a local bank, a common phenomenon during the Financial Crisis of 1927, when widespread hysteria precipitated the collapses of 37 banks throughout Japan. While we watch Jiro striving to produce a high-quality fighter aircraft for the army, the Showa Depression hits Japan in 1929. The worst depression in prewar Japan caused severe deflation, financial meltdown, and countless bankruptcies, leaving 2.5 million people unemployed. Meanwhile, thorugh Jiro’s eyes Miyazaki shows us the contradictions in Japan’s ambition to catch up with the West in modern military technology while its people were suffering from the excruciating poverty. “The fact is this poor country pays us [engineers] a lot of money,” Jiro’s colleague Honjo sneers at him, “Embrace the irony.”

Bank run during the Showa Financial Crisis

Following the so-called Taisho Democracy in the 1920s, symbolized by universal male suffrage, active labor movements, and cooperative diplomacy, militarism engulfed the Japanese society in the 1930s. During this period, Jiro’s romance with Nahoko takes place in the quiet mountains of the Karuizawa resort., A German traveler, Castorp, whose name derives from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, describes the quiet mountains as a shelter from the gloomy atmosphere in Japan caused by the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, and the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. After his engagement with Nahoko, Jiro becomes extremely busy creating a new fighter aircraft under surveillance of the secret police, as Japan prepares for war with the United States. As tuberculosis, then an almost incurable disease, makes Nahoko increasingly feeble, the young couple decides to get married so that they can spend what little time they have left together. Although Jiro becomes ever more engrossed in the project, Japan’s war machine trumps his dream to craft “a beautiful airplane,” when he develops its ideal blueprint. “The weight becomes the big problem,” Jiro explains to his colleagues, “One solution would be… we could leave out the guns. [The colleagues burst into laughter.] So I decided to put this design back on the shelf.” These lines reflect Miyazaki’s caustic sense of humor.

A Japanese Navy Mitsubishi A6M2 "Zero" fighter (tail code A1-108) takes off from the aircraft carrier Akagi, on its way to attack Pearl Harbor during the morning of 7 December 1941. — A Japanese Navy Mitsubishi A6M2 “Zero” fighter (tail code A1-108) takes off from the aircraft carrier Akagi, on its way to attack Pearl Harbor during the morning of 7 December 1941.

While most Japanese films about WWII either glorify or demonize prewar Japan, The Wind Rises movingly depicts the era through a personal tragedy of loss and dashed dreams. Not only did Jiro’s beloved wife pass away in solitude, but the war also destroyed his Zero fighter. In early Showa Japan, Jiro’s beautiful airplane was indeed “a cursed dream,” as Italian aircraft designer Geovanni Caproni tells him in the imaginary world they shared. In the final analysis, however, Miyazaki emphasized not only the tragic history but tells a story about how Japan’s youth tried to live in this time, as indicated by his reference to Paul Valery’s poem: Le vent se lève! Il faut tenter de vivre! The wind is rising! We must try to live!

Student Showcase – The “Knock Knock Who is There” Moment for Japan: The Signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854

By Kathleen Ran

Read the full research paper

In 1854, a fleet of American naval ships arrived in Japan’s Tokyo Bay. The squadron, led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, was charged with the mission of convincing the Tokugawa shogunate to open commercial and diplomatic ties with the West. Beginning in the mid-17th century, the island’s feudal leaders enforced an economic, political and cultural isolation, allowing no contact with foreigners in order to preserve traditional Japanese society. After a series of tense negotiations between Japanese and American officials, including indications from Commodore Perry that his ships were willing to use force, both sides ratified the Kanagawa Treaty, also known as the Convention of Kanagawa, which officially opened Japan to international trade and diplomacy.

Kathleen Ran’s Texas History Day paper, “The ‘Knock Knock Who is There’ Moment for Japan: The Signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854,” explores the historical impact of this watershed agreement on Japanese society. She argues that significant political, economic and cultural changes took place as a result:

Woodblock print portraying an 1854 meeting between Commodore Perry, his officers and Japanese noblemen, circa 1887 (Image courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum)

“The Americans came to Japan and sought access to ports and friendship. They got what they wanted through the Treaty of Kanagawa. The Japanese were reluctant and in some ways were dragged to the treaty table. However, the treaty later turned out to be very profitable to Japan. The Treaty of Kanagawa was primarily responsible for the rapid transformation of Japan from an isolated and feudal empire to one of the world’s most powerful and successful nations.”

The opening of Japan stirred a negative reaction from many segments of Japanese society. This 1861 woodcutting reflects such sentiments, depicting a traditional sumo wrestler throwing a foreigner to the ground. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

“Before the treaty came into effect, the country was far behind in areas of technology, economics and entirely shunned foreign relations. Now, though, Japan is among the world’s cutting-edge producers of technology and an integral part of the world community. The Treaty of Kanagawa opened the door of Japan and initiated the nation’s transformation from a feudal empire to a modern world power; therefore, it was a turning point in history.”

Kathleen Ran
Junior Division
Research Paper

Mark Metzler on Post-War Japan

By Mark Metzler

In the fifteen years after World War II, Japan made an astounding transition from wartime devastation to the boom known as the “Era of High-Speed Growth.” Japan’s High-Speed Growth system was an epoch-making innovation that opened the current Asian age of world industrialization. The inflationary creation of credit by banks funded this industrial transformation, set its directions, and forced its pace. In fact, Japan’s style of hypercapitalist growth illustrates basic principles of capitalist development in an exceptionally clear way. Credit-leveraged growth also has built-in insustainabilities—we see them reflected today in the building up of international debt bubbles on an unprecedented scale. Here too, Japanese experience has lessons to offer.

In trying to grasp this process, I found that the name of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter entered the story in an unexpected way. Not only does Schumpeter’s century-old book, The Theory of Economic Development, help us see this industrial revolution in a clearer light. More surprisingly, Schumpeter’s Japanese students chaired some of the country’s most influential policy councils during this crucial period. They took Schumpeter’s ideas and put them to work in entirely new ways.

Schumpeter’s basic realization was that the inflationary creation of new credit-capital—new purchasing power— mainly by banks, is the basic mechanism of capital creation under modern capitalism. On one hand, this is a form of monetary expropriation: high inflation, by its nature, robs the purchasing power of existing monetary wealth. But in appropriate developmental circumstances, when properly modulated, inflationary credit creation can also generate rapid industrial growth. No past economic system has approached what industrial capitalism has achieved in this respect. In Japan’s case, a highly rationalized system of credit-capital provision funded a kind of growth that seemed miraculous. We might also call it Faustian, for a classic literary work points to some of its sources.

Faustian Capital

In Part Two of Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe presents an allegory of paper money and capitalist development. The scene opens at the court of the emperor at a time when the empire is overburdened with debt. Faust and the devil Mephistopheles, appear at court. Mephistopheles, in the guise of court jester, tells the emperor that he need not wait for treasure to be dug out of the ground before spending it. Mephistopheles understands that a credible, negotiable claim to money is money. He explains that the vast unknown treasures underground can be represented by paper notes. The emperor’s paper money represents nothing more than potential wealth, yet the creation of believable claims written on slips of paper is enough to enroll legions of followers and set them to work creating new productive resources. The emperor’s debts are erased at a stroke and Mephistopheles and Faust earn a place at the emperor’s side. Faust goes on to become an entrepreneur, which of course is when the devil comes to collect his debt.

Faust’s venture into capital creation recalls an episode in history that Goethe knew well: the story of the financier John Law, who after the great war of 1701–14 proposed to the French regent that the kingdom’s land could be a basis for creating paper money. The French regent hired the Scottish bankerand fired his alchemists, who were now redundant. Then he set up a state bank that paid off the kingdom’s immense war debts.

Joseph Schumpeter considered John Law’s scheme an epoch-making capitalist innovation, despite the notorious Mississippi bubble of 1719–20 it produced. He credited Law with the discovery that banking operations could “manufacture” money—“and hence capital in the monetary sense of the term.” The problem with Law’s plan, Schumpeter said, was that the newly created credits were not directed to a commercial or industrial enterprise that would have repaid the social investment. As it happened, Law’s banknotes lost their purchasing power, Law’s bank collapsed, and Law fled the scene.

Schumpeter originally described the mechanism at work here as “forced savings.” New credits created for new investment reduce the purchasing power of already existing money—it is a privately imposed “inflation tax” and, in effect, a fractional expropriation of purchasing power from others. In this way, capital formation could be forced upon the community “through monetary witchcraft,” as Schumpeter’s friend Fritz Machlup put it.

Schumpeter’s idea of forced savings appeared in Japan’s first and most influential textbook of neoclassical economics, written by Schumpeter’s student Nakayama Ichiro. And hence the explanation given by Okita Saburo, the Japanese government’s top economic planner, in 1957: if a country were to restrict its new investment to the amount of monetary savings already collected, “not much could be done.” But by investing in excess of savings, great deeds could be accomplished.

Mirrors and Miracles

It is in the nature of credit-money that it can somehow be “in” two places at once, without really being “anywhere” at all. Schumpeter joked that you can’t ride on a claim to a horse, but you may be able to create new claims on the basis of that claim. This is what economist Hans Christoph Binswanger, returning to Goethe for inspiration, described as “the modern economy’s alchemical core.”

Schumpeter developed a sophisticated justification for the extraordinary money-creation license given to banks, arguing that new purchasing power created by banks, although inflationary in the short run, would not be inflationary in the long run, if it were directed to the expansion of production. The new production would balance, or over-balance, the new means of payment. Cycles of price inflation and deflation are not incidental to the capitalist developmental process but rather are the very mechanism through which it operates.

Schumpeter’s idea is a credible description of the main direction of capital investment during Japan’s Era of High-Speed Growth. This was also a time when Japanese governmental and central bank authorities actively restricted the use of capital for nonproductive purposes.

But what of capital created by banks for speculation in land, or in already existing commodities? And what of capital created for the even more reflexive, recursive business of purely financial speculation, capital scarcely or not at all mediated by investment into the world of material commodities? This brings us to the economic bubbles of recent decades.

The first great economic bubble appeared in Japan; the appearance of the same phenomenon in the United States, Britain, and Europe suggests a further idea: that Schumpeterian finance, on the scale of the credit creation that funded the first great age of industrial capitalism, has outlived its usefulness in the already industrialized world. More than that, it appears radically incompatible with the emerging circumstances of countries that are experiencing zero population growth and need now to embark on a course of qualitative development rather than rapid, extensive industrial growth. Massively leveraged finance, created in ever greater volume, cannot continue to correspond to an ever greater torrent of production. In these new circumstances, the type of banking system that funded the first great age of capitalism works as a bubble machine, casually throwing up immense debts that act as a dead weight on everything else.

In considering our twenty-first-century world, the Japanese experience may have a more universal significance than has hitherto been recognized. Japan’s High-Speed Growth, the culmination of an eighty-year process, was itself a historic super-compression of capitalist development. And now, it seems that Japan is the country that completed the modern inflationary process first. Simultaneously the country is making a highly compressed transit from the “first” demographic transition to the “second”—meaning that population decline is already under way. Underlying forces tend now in the direction of deflation rather than inflation. The present slowdown may thus signify a turning point on a very long timescale: the culmination of Japan’s modern era of inflationary industrial-capitalist development. This question will be answered by a history that remains to be seen. It is also a question in the spirit of Schumpeter’s own approach and vision of economic life as a rhythmic, dynamic developmental process.

Mark Metzler, Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle, (2013).

Further Reading

Hans Christoph Binswanger, Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe’s Faust. A senior professor of finance, Binswanger makes an important contribution to economic philosophy in this brilliant and popular interpretation of Goethe’s life’s work.

Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World. This is Volume III of Braudel’s magnificent trilogy, Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th–18^th Century. Markets and market economy were something very different from modern capitalism, as Braudel explores with a combination of marvelous detail and panoramic sweep. Many would vote Braudel the twentieth century’s greatest historian and Schumpeter the century’s greatest economist.

At first approach, Joseph Schumpeter’s own prose style is meandering and overfull with illustrations, asides, and historical qualifications. He is also sensitive to the aliveness of economic life and his new insights often emerge from the detail. His big three books are The Theory of Economic Development (1912; English edition, 1934), with its theory of innovation, capital creation, and development through cycles; Business Cycles (1939), with its historical vision of economic long waves; and his wartime essay Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Each book alludes only lightly to the theories developed in the others; when they are read together the whole vista of modern economic history opens up.

Schumpeter’s work inspires many others. One recent and important work is Chris Freeman and Francisco Louça, As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution, which focuses on waves of technological innovation, boom, and bust. Another, also highly readable, is Erik Reinert’s book, How Rich Countries Got Rich, And Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, which revisits the question of economic development by reference to an alternative canon of continental European thought, exemplified by Schumpeter. Schumpeter’s inspiration crops up also in some less expected places, including the cyclic vision developed by the ecologist C. S. Holling in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems.

Photo Credits:
Hiroshi Okura, “Satoyama to konbinato” (Village landscape and Kombinat)
Joseph Schumpeter in Japan in 1931 via Wikipedia Commons

Musui’s Story, The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai by Katsu Kokichi (1991)

Musui’s Story is an exceptional account of one man’s hell-raising, rule-breaking, and living beyond his means. The autobiography documents the life of Katsu Kokichi, a samurai in Japan’s late Tokugawa period who adopted the name Musui in his retirement. Katsu is something of a black sheep within his family, being largely uneducated and deemed unfit for the bureaucratic offices samurai of his standing were expected to hold. As such, he typifies in many ways the lower ronin, or masterless samurai, many of whom famously led roaming, directionless lives and wreaked havoc among the urban poor and merchant classes.

The book is quick and simple to read, with barely literate Katsu’s prose skillfully translated by Teruko Craig. The autobiography follows Katsu’s whirlwind of adventures, which involved a great deal of fighting, name-calling, and extortion. What Katsu lacks in ambition is more than made up for by his knack for getting into trouble. The supposed premise of the autobiography is to serve as a cautionary tale for his descendants, as Katsu advises from the very beginning, “Take me as a warning.” In actuality, however, the story smacks of a thinly veiled account of braggadocio.

Many of the stories are almost certainly exaggerated, and even if they were not, they would not be exemplary of the samurai class as a whole. Still, the expectations and conflicts Katsu faces are representative of the underlying economic and social tensions of Tokugawa Japan. Musui’s Story offers a money-obsessed voice to the low-ranking samurai class, in light of its struggle to establish its purpose in a society that increasingly saw it as parasitic. Katsu broke with the accepted moral code of his class, exemplifying the societal struggle that marked one of Tokugawa Japan’s most distinctive features. The role of the Tokugawa samurai was increasingly out of touch with the social reality of the period. It was a class plagued by insecurity of both income and identity. Samurai had emerged as the dominant, warrior class during Japan’s feudalistic era. Originally a rural class, many samurai including Katsu came to live in Edo (modern day Tokyo) during the Tokugawa period, where they lived on capped government stipends. Samurai were, in name, at the top of Japan’s four-tiered shi-no-ko-sho system, but many found themselves unemployed, heavily indebted, and directionless.

Musui’s Story epitomizes the growing pressure many samurai must have faced as they were torn between outdated cultural expectations and an impossible financial reality. Katsu gives a charming and hilarious voice to the struggle, and through his story we see that a study of samurai teachings is insufficient to capture the samurai life in its actuality. Katsu all but abandons the bushido code he would have been taught, venturing among the urban poor and abusing the threat of seppuku, or honorable suicide, as a means of extortion to avoid payment and punishment.

These disjointed expectations for displaying wealth regardless of a samurai’s income level offer a simple explanation for Katsu’s decision to run away, twice, in shame. Tokugawa social insecurity might also be in some ways reminiscent of our contemporary society’s complex relationship to debt. Despite their temporal and geographical distance from the events in Katsu’s autobiography, UT students might find a few striking parallels to their own lives, but hopefully not so much that they would be inspired to imitate Musui’s violent antics.

Photo credits:

19th century woodblock print of the famous Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Edgar Walters is a Plan II junior. He is an undergraduate intern at the Harry Ransom Center and associate editor at the Daily Texan. He would like to pursue a graduate degree in the humanities in the future.

Check out Jacob Troublefield’s winning submission for Not Even Past’s Second Annual Undergraduate Essay Contest.

Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village by Ronald P. Dore (1994)

by David A. Conrad

Ronald P. Dore’s Shinohata brings to life the recent history of rural Japan. Shinohata is a small, wooded village in Tochigi prefecture, part of Japan’s central plain. Dore, an English sociologist who first came to Japan during the American occupation after World War II, wrote the book after more than two decades of intermittent visits and observations in the town. Shinohata is a unique blend of scholarship and anecdote, insight and humor. The book goes beyond simple facts and impersonal statistics, and offers a memorable narrative of small town life in postwar Japan.

The first three chapters describe the town’s prewar history. Nineteenth-century famines, Meiji-era tax reforms, and twentieth century market fluctuations all affected the residents of Shinohata. Naturally, the war with America and the occupation that followed left their marks as well. But the basic social structures of the traditional village survived the upheavals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relatively intact. In Shinohata in 1955, Dore says, “[n]obody subjectively felt that the world had fundamentally changed.”

By 1978, though, change was everywhere. Over the preceding twenty-three years, Dore and his friends in Shinohata had witnessed major shifts in the material aspects of village life. Items that once were luxuries, such as bicycles for children, now abounded. Virtually everyone had remodeled their homes to install tiled floors, tatami mats, modern bathtubs, color televisions, and so-called “Western” toilets that, as anyone who has been to Japan will confirm, are far superior to actual toilets in the West. Farming, the traditional mode of employment in Shinohata, had become mechanized, and almost nobody relied on it anymore for income. Household finances in Shinohata compared favorably with urban household revenues, and people in the town enjoyed more leisure time than they had in the past. Japan’s postwar economic boom proved more influential than all the crises and violence of the prewar decades.

Throughout the book, Dore provides a respectful and intimate look at the lives of Shinohata’s residents. A chapter called “Couples,” for example, deals with marriage and relationships, while “Growing-up” examines the habits of children and young adults. The townspeople Dore writes about are colorful and friendly, and he intersperses his clear prose with a chorus of local voices. He shares personal anecdotes and long passages of villagers’ conversations, and is careful to replace real names with pseudonyms to safeguard the privacy of people who were his neighbors and friends. The charm and poignancy of this rustic Japanese town will linger with readers, as will Dore’s important observations about the nature of twentieth-century rural Japan.

You may also enjoy David Conrad’s review of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower (1999)

Before John Dower’s Embracing Defeat, many English-language accounts of the United States’ occupation of Japan contextualized the event in terms of American foreign policy and the emerging Cold War. Scholars writing from this Western-centric perspective produced much fine scholarship, and no doubt will continue to do so. But Embracing Defeat shifted the discussion from a debate over American motives to an analysis of the Japanese experience, and in doing so won critical acclaim and popular success. This Pulitzer Prize-winning tome reveals to Western audiences what many in Japan have long understood: that the American occupation was, in many ways, the most transformative event in modern Japanese history.

Dower sets out to convey “some sense of the Japanese experience of defeat by focusing on social and cultural developments. . . at all levels of society.” Initially, the bitter reality that their exhausting war had ended in defeat proved profoundly demoralizing for many Japanese citizens. Dower’s portrayal of the shantytowns of bombed-out Tokyo provides poignant evidence of the impoverished condition in which many Japanese found themselves at war’s end. But as Japan embarked on its long occupation interlude, its citizens seized opportunities to start over, rebuild, and redefine their nation. Defeat became a creative process rather than a destructive one and the people of Japan embraced it with eagerness. In the atmosphere of reform that characterized the occupation, an efflorescence of what Dower calls “cultures of defeat” emerged. For example, kasutori culture explored the sleazy underside of urban life. Radical political movements tested the limits—and sincerity—of American reformism. Changes in artistic images, popular entertainment, songs, jokes, and even the Japanese language itself reflect the vitality and diversity of Japanese culture during the American occupation.

An aerial view of a destroyed residential area of Tokyo after the fire raids.

Dower’s Japan-centered perspective informs his judgment of the occupiers, whom he views as agents of imperialism as well as facilitators of positive change. If the occupation was a prologue to a new period of Japanese history, it was also the epilogue to an era of Western exploitation that began when Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to “open” to Western trade in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dower calls the occupation “the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as ‘the white man’s burden.’” The occupiers, under the leadership of the notoriously vain Douglas MacArthur, lived in enclaves of lavish comfort and issued imperious edicts. Nevertheless, Dower concedes that American reforms were “impressively liberal,” and he is critical of those in Japan and Washington who resisted reform. This group includes Japanese conservative politicians as well as the “old Japan hands” in the U.S. Department of State. To Dower, these were old-fashioned elitists who sought to restrict the influence of average citizens in the new Japan. Dower’s interpretation of the American occupation as a neocolonial as well as a progressive exercise rings true, but it is a delicate balancing act.

Embracing Defeat has received high praise in the academic and popular presses, and justly so. Nevertheless, the book has certain limitations. Dower concentrates almost exclusively on the experiences of urban-dwelling Japanese. The half of the population that lived in rural areas suffered more than their share of hardship during the war, and their story of change and recovery during the occupation is as fascinating as it is neglected. Still, Dower’s exploration of urban cultures in the occupation period is a monumental task, and he executes it marvelously. Embracing Defeat‘s engrossing account of social change during the American occupation of Japan has earned it a permanent place in the literature of that epochal event.

The Atomic Bombs and the End of World War II: Tracking an Elusive Decision

by Bruce Hunt

In what amounted to the last act of World War II, US forces dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later. Ever since, controversy has swirled around the decision to drop those bombs and annihilate those two cities. But exactly who made that decision, and how did it come about? Conventionally, of course, the decision is ascribed to President Harry Truman, but there is in fact very little documentary evidence that he ever made an affirmative decision to drop the bombs. Instead, the most that can be said with certainty is that he did not intervene to stop a process that had already acquired enormous momentum even before he became president on Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945.

Remarkable collections of primary documents, now readily available online, shed substantial light on the story of the development and use of the first atomic bombs. Two of the best collections are those maintained by the National Security Archive and by the Truman Library. On the NSA website, for instance, we find a long report General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, prepared for Secretary of War Stimson. The meeting on April 25, 1945, at which Groves and Secretary of War Henry Stimson delivered the gist of this report to Truman was the first time the new president was given more than the barest hint about the new weapons that had been in development, at enormous expense, for the past three and a half years. Groves’s memo gives a fairly full account of how atomic bombs would work and of the prospects that they would be ready to in less than four months. How much of all this, or of the shorter memo Stimson prepared, Truman really absorbed is not clear, but by the time the first plutonium implosion bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, Truman had certainly grasped that such bombs might play a pivotal role in ending the war with Japan, as well as in postwar relations with the Soviet Union.

In their effort to find the moment when Truman made “the great decision” to use atomic bombs against Japan, several historians have latched onto a memo (posted on the Truman Library website) that Stimson sent to Truman on July 30, 1945, and have focused in particular on the reply Truman scrawled on its back. “Suggestions approved,” he wrote.”Release when ready but not sooner than August 2. [signed] HST.” In his well known biography Truman (1992), David McCullough declared that “The time had come for Truman to give the final go-ahead for the bomb. This was the moment, the decision only he could make.” But examination of Stimson’s memo shows clearly that it was not about getting approval to release the bombs over Japan, but only about releasing a carefully crafted public statement to the press once the first bomb had been dropped. Approving a press release appears to be the closest President Truman ever came, at least in writing, to making a positive decision concerning the first use of nuclear weapons.

Photo Credits:

At the time this photo was made, smoke billowed 20,000 feet above Hiroshima while smoke from the burst of the first atomic bomb had spread over 10,000 feet on the target at the base of the rising column.Two planes of the 509th Composite Group, part of the 313th Wing of the 20th Air Force, participated in this mission, one to carry the bomb, the other to act as escort, 08/06/1945, Author Unknown, National Archives and Records Administration
President Roosevelt, Vice-President-elect Truman, Vice-President Wallace, by Abbie Rowe, Truman Library
Nagasaki, Japan, before and after the atomic bombing of August 9, 1945, U.S National Archives
All via Wikimedia Commons

The “Einstein Letter” — A Tipping Point in History

by Michael B. Stoff

On a mid-July day in 1939, Albert Einstein, still in his slippers, opened the door of his summer cottage in Peconic on the fishtail end of Long Island. There stood his former student and onetime partner in an electromagnetic refrigerator pump, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, and next to him a fellow Hungarian (and fellow physicist), Eugene Wigner. The two had not come to Long Island for a day at the beach with the most famous scientist in the world but on an urgent mission. Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from mines in Czechoslovakia it now controlled. To Szilard, this could mean only one thing: Germany was developing an atomic bomb.

Szilard wanted Einstein to write a letter to his friend, Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium. The Belgian Congo was rich in uranium, and Szilard worried that if the Germans got their hands on the ore, they might have all the material they needed to make a weapon of unprecedented power. First, however, he had to explain to Einstein the theory upon which the weapon rested, a chain reaction. “I never thought of that,” an astonished Einstein said. Nor was he willing to write the Queen Mother. Instead, Wigner convinced him to write a note to one of the Belgian cabinet ministers.

Pen in hand, Wigner recorded what Einstein dictated in German while Szilard listened. The Hungarians returned to New York with the draft, but within days, Szilard received a striking proposal from Alexander Sachs, an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. Might Szilard transmit such a letter to Roosevelt? A series of drafts followed, one composed by Szilard as he sat soaking in his bathtub, another after a second visit to Einstein, and two more following discussions with Sachs. Einstein approved the longer version of the last two, dated “August 2, 1939,” and signed it as “A. Einstein” in his tiny scrawl.

The result was the “Einstein Letter,” which historians know as the product not of a single hand but of many hands. Regardless of how it was concocted, the letter remains among the most famous documents in the history of atomic weaponry. It is a model of compression, barely two typewritten, double-spaced pages in length. Its language is so simple even a president could understand it. Its tone is deferential, its assertions authoritative but tentative in the manner of scientists who have yet to prove their hypotheses. Its effect was persuasive enough to initiate the steps that led finally to the Manhattan Project and the development of atomic bombs.

Stripped of all jargon, the letter cited the work of an international array of scientists (“Fermi,” “Joliot,” “Szilard” himself), pointed to a novel generator of power (“the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy”), urged vigilance and more (“aspects of the situation call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action”), sounded a warning (“extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed”), made a prediction (“a single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with the surrounding territory”), and mapped out a plan (“permanent contact between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America . . . and perhaps obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories”). A simple conclusion, no less ominous for its understatement, noted what worried the Hungarians in the first place: “Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over.”

Looking back at the letter, aware of how things actually turned out, we can appreciate its richness. For one thing, it shows us a world about to pass from existence. Where once scientific information flowed freely across national borders through professional journals, personal letters, and the “manuscripts” to which the letter refers in its first sentence, national governments would now impose a clamp of secrecy on any research that might advance weapons technology. The letter also tells us how little even the most renowned scientists knew at the time. No “chain reaction” had yet been achieved and no reaction-sustaining isotope of uranium had been identified. Thus the assumption was that “a large mass of uranium” would be required to set one in motion. No aircraft had been built that could carry what these scientists expected to be a ponderous nuclear core necessary to make up a bomb, so the letter predicts that a “boat” would be needed to transport it.

More than the past, the letter points to the shape of things to come. Most immediately, it shows us that the race for atomic arms would be conducted in competition with Germany, soon to become a hostile foreign power. And in the longer term, of course, the postwar arms race would duplicate that deadly competition as hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union led them to amass more and more nuclear weapons. The letter also presents us with nothing less than a master plan for what became the Manhattan Project, the first “crash program” in the history of science. After the war, other crash programs in science—to develop the hydrogen bomb; to conquer polio; to reach the moon; to cure cancer—would follow. Finally, by stressing the entwining of government, science, and industry in service of the state, the letter foreshadows what Dwight Eisenhower later called “the military-industrial complex.”

In the end, the “Einstein Letter” is a document deservedly famous, but not merely for launching the new atomic age. If we read it closely enough, it gives us a fascinating, Janus-faced look at a tipping point in history, a window on a world just passing and one yet to come, all in two pages.

You can read the letter in its entirety here.

Photo Credits:
Albert Einstein, 1947, by Oren Jack Turner, The Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons
Dr. Norman Hilberry and Dr. Leo Szilard (right) stand beside the site where the world’s first nuclear reactor was built during World War II. Both worked with the late Dr. Enrico Fermi in achieving the first self-sustaining chain reaction in nuclear energy on December 2, 1942, at Stagg Field, University of Chicago. U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons

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