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This paper employs previously unused archival sources to highlight some of the misconceptions and debates which surround the Japanese National Police Reserve (1950–1952), the precursor to today’s Ground Self Defense Force. The paper, which is the first on the National Police Reserve in English, examines much of the current historiography’s categorisation of the Reserve as an army, based on a very thin set of sources, and contrasts this with the content of the primary sources in an attempt to reveal the true character of the force. In doing so it also attempts to assess the relative importance of the internal and external influences behind the NPR’s creation. The article and its conclusions will be valuable in deepening the understanding of the character of the NPR and its position in the broader histories of the Occupation of Japan, Japanese security policy and Japan’s Cold War(s). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines popular representations of Japan and China before and during the war, assesses the ideas of key figures from the press, and considers the ways in which media and policy interacted through the influence of opinion leaders. These prepared the way for the ‘soft’ peace relying on Japanese cooperation that would become the basis for a new alliance between America and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many recent studies have discussed the features of Japanese civil society. Some of them point out that these have been greatly affected by the legacy of the new left movements, a network of anti-Vietnam War groups, student groups, and young workers’ groups which developed toward the end of the 1960s. This article explores the formation and development of the ideas and actions of the Japanese new left movements, examining the discourse of student activists in particular. These activists were critical of the conservative consciousness – which they termed ‘everydayness’ – which was a product of the economic boom of that decade, and sought to transform it. They were willing to take confrontational direct action against armed police officers on streets and on campus in spite of the risks of arrest and injury. I analyse their activism, and the reasons leading to it. By exploring the ideas and actions of new left movements, this paper aims to historicize certain features of Japanese civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the way Japanese historians arrived at an increasingly uniform understanding of Buraku history over the course of the twentieth century. It analyses in detail the continuities and changes in pre-war perspectives on Burakumin and the roles renowned historians like Inoue Kiyoshi played in the development of a particular understanding of Buraku history in the early post-war period. This paper argues that Inoue's intervention in a key debate in the late Occupation years was of critical importance in the emergence of the mainstream narrative of Buraku history still widely subscribed to today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the guest editor discusses topics within the issue including the history of Japanese publishing in the late Tokugawa period, the growth of Tokyo, Japan suburbs, and the commonalities between French and Japanese imperialism.

Historical research on modern Japan has often given insufficient attention to the lives and experiences of children and young people. However, this situation is beginning to change, as historians start to exploit the rich documentary resources, including children’s diaries and letters, that have been collected by institutions across Japan. Japanese children’s responses to disaster and war are especially well documented, and the articles in this special issue begin to explore the potential of these resources. They illuminate different ideals of childhood in Japan during the years between 1920 and 1945, and show how tensions and conflicts between these ideals played out under the stresses of natural disaster and man-made catastrophe. In analysing documents written by children, one crucial methodological and theoretical question is how to assess the degree of agency that such documents show. Adult influences on children’s writing cannot be ignored, and in modern Japan, the education system was arguably the most important channel for such influences. However, we should remember that children also influence one another, and also that the writing of children is, as is of course the case with adults, powerfully shaped by contemporary cultural and social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given the clear convergence of practices of nature across the traditional East-West divide examined in these essays, it is not surprising to learn that the consequences of the particular practice of nature characteristic of industrial capitalism also converged around similar problems such as deforestation, smog, and water pollution, all with their attendant ill effects on health and prosperity. If we look at the key period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West and in Japan we also find a vast, shared reaction to and critique of the destructive aspect of the great convergence. Here I will focus on a particular instance of this global critical movement found in anarchism, specifically the thought and practice of Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956). Influenced by Edward Carpenter and the Reclus brothers, Elisée and Paul, Ishikawa did not privilege the newly emerging industrial proletariat as the revolutionary subject as did fellow anarchists Ōsugi Sakae and Kōtoku Shūsui. Instead he stayed in the countryside to focus on the separation of humans from nature as the greatest problem of modern societies, eventually developing a theory of ‘dynamic social aesthetics’ (dōtai shakai bigaku) critical of both the ‘cornucopianism’ of infinite exploitation and later the Japanization of nature during the war. In many ways Ishikawa anticipated the recent neo-Lamarckian ‘epigenetics revolution’ and the current call to consider humanity’s unprecedented ability to intervene in its environment a geological force that defines our age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study focuses on a comparison of the three most popularsakariba(entertainment districts) in Tokyo of the late 1920s and 1930s to highlight the new role of leisure in everyday life as Japan industrialized and urbanized. The comparison of Asakusa, Ginza and Shinjuku shows that even as Japan became a mass society, leisure practices and patterns became stratified and diversified. This stratification and diversification reflected class, age and cultural tastes. The threesakaribadeveloped distinctive characters and attractions for consumers, raising challenges to mass culture critics’ assumption that the rise of mass culture and commodity culture would lead to homogenization of taste and recreational products and a lack of consumer choice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Is the ‘1960s' a useful concept for understanding postwar Japanese history and, if so, what kinds of changes resulted and how might we chronologize the period? This article proposes the idea of a ‘long environmental sixties’ in Japan stretching from around 1959 to 1973. The article argues that this period marked important milestones in environmental protest, public opinion, and legislation. By the early 1970s Japan had addressed many of its most pressing industrial pollution problems, in the process placating protest, compensating victims, and establishing an environmental leviathan staffed by hundreds of bureaucrats nationwide. Japan's sixties were a moment of social upheaval, transformation, and new aspirations but, as this article shows, the country's long environmental sixties bequeathed a complex legacy, combining new forms of civic engagement with administrative programs and corporate initiatives to carefully manage the human–environment nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]