The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 26 (2015)
Copyright © 2015 Jun Furuya. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this noticeincluded, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
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Between Republic and Empire: The Trajectory of
Postwar Japanese Historical Studies of American
Politics and Diplomacy

Jun Furuya*

Sixty-nine years ago today [June 7, 2014] Okinawa was in the last stagesof a ferocious battle between invading American troops and Japanese
defenders. After landing on the main Okinawan island on April 1 theAmerican troops steadily cornered the resisting army, which had taken withit many civilians to the southern part of the island. At last, the organizedresistance of the Japanese army dissolved. The commanding general and thechief of staff of the 32nd Army, the main force defending Okinawa,
committed ritual suicide on June 22. Afterward, resistance by guerrillas
gradually tapered off, but it continued sporadically until the official
surrender was declared. In the battle of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest in theentire Pacific War, civilian deaths and injuries were particularly appalling,
not only because the victims were subject to fierce shelling from US sea andland forces, but also because many Okinawans, including even young
women and children, were forced to cooperate with the Japanese army andwere thus deeply involved in the defensive war of attrition.
Today, at this especially memorable occasion of the first conference of
the Japanese Association for American Studies to be held in Okinawa, I
would like to review the development of American studies and history inpostwar Japan and focus on the areas of politics and diplomacy. Prior to*Professor, Hokkai School of Commerce

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starting this task I would like to remind you of what happened here sixtynine years ago and note that we owe much to the enormous sacrifices of theBattle of Okinawa for Japan's current peace and prosperity. From theperspective of the present political and intellectual state of things, however,I should emphasize that postwar Japan has largely failed to ponder themeaning of the disastrous war experience of people on the Japanese
mainland let alone on Okinawa. The lesson of these experiences has hardly
been incorporated into the so-called postwar regime. Today we are now
paying the cost of this failure. Controversies continue over questions of US
military bases in Okinawa, the right of collective self-defense, the revisionof the Japanese constitution, a defensible historical perspective, and otherserious issues.
Let me go back sixty-nine years. Immediately after landing on the main
Okinawan island, the American forces began to remold Okinawa into anadvanced base for attacking the Japanese mainland. The US government
and military had anticipated massive resistance from the Japanese militaryand civilians, who were desperate in their determination to fight to thedeath. That was why the US military so persistently bombed Japanese cities
in advance of the landing operation. As the US military intended, thesestrategic bombings, which culminated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
completely demoralized the Japanese people. The latter had already beenworn down by incessant notices of deaths in oversea battlefields, innumerable
family breakups, and above all widespread starvation. This wearinessenabled the US troops eventually to enter and occupy the Japanese mainlandwith little resistance.
In his 2013 book entitled Year Zero, which refers to the year 1945 and thestart of the postwar world, Ian Buruma undertook a comparative examinationof various experiences across the world immediately after the terminationof World War II. He begins his fascinating study by pointing to a “liberation
complex,” which was typically observed among those who were freed fromconcentration camps, slave labor camps, prisoner-of-war camps, or
displaced persons camps. In the words of one witness, the liberation complex“involved revenge, hunger and exultation.” These three qualities “combined
to make displaced persons, when newly liberated, a problem as to behavior
and conduct, as well as for care, feeding, disinfection and repatriation.” As
Buruma states, the liberation complex was not necessarily confined toinmates of the camps. It could be found in “entire countries newly liberated,and even in some respects the defeated nations.”1
Many Japanese quickly developed exactly this kind of complex afterBetween Republic and Empire

21

their country’s surrender. Like people who had been held in camps, Japanesecitizens had plenty of reasons for holding sentiments of vengeance. But
unlike former inmates who could wreak their revenge rightfully upon theirenemies, the vengeance of this defeated nation was frustrated and directed
inward. The people felt betrayed by the emperor and his government andmost of all by military authorities who had wielded absolute power over theentire nation until only a few days before the war’s end. But, above all, mostJapanese in Year Zero were disappointed with themselves and their blind
past enthusiasm for such a hopeless war.
Hunger, shipwrecks, and suicide attacks were the chief reasons forfatalities among Japanese soldiers in the Pacific War. According to ahistorical estimate, roughly 60 percent of the total deaths of about 2,300,000
soldiers and paramilitary personnel between 1937 and 1945 were caused byhunger and diseases related to malnutrition.2 This number indicates the utter
failure of the Japanese military in logistics. But it was not only men on thefighting front who starved. The prolonged war and a poor crop of rice in1945 worsened a terrible food shortage that also afflicted the civilian
population in the homeland. There was hunger all over the country wellbefore the end of the war.
The surrender declared by the emperor no doubt shocked the Japanesenation into a state of profound grief. But, in the above mentioned
psychological and physical situation, the defeat itself proved a kind ofliberation to many. Now at last they were freed from incessant air raids,
jackboot militarism, a stringent war economy, the suppression of freespeech, and so on. Although the widespread hunger was of course notadequately addressed instantly, the vast amount of food that the GIs brought
into the devastated country at least kindled Japanese hopes of an escapefrom the dire plight of famine. Except for some war leaders, fanatic rightwingers, or ultranationalists, the bitter grief over the defeat was accompaniedby the exultation of being liberated. This is one of the main reasons why thelanding of US troops on mainland Japan took place relatively peacefully.
Looking backward from today, it was fortunate for the Japanese people,
including their anti-Communist war leaders, to be invaded and occupied
almost solely by US forces. This is not to say that the rule by Occupation
forces was lax. Free speech under the Occupation was suppressed as harshly
as under the ultranationalist regime. The number of violent crimes committed
by GIs was never negligible, especially in the early days of the Occupation.
But atrocities and oppressive measures were far fewer than most Japanese
had feared. This was somewhat comforting to a populace that had been22

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brainwashed about “demonic Anglo-Americans.” Japanese demobilized
servicemen returning from China and other Asian countries surely knew
from their own and fellow soldiers’ barbarian conduct how brutal invading
and occupying forces could be against civilians in occupied areas. And
many civilians who were repatriated from Manchuria in the last stage of thewar had witnessed the viciousness of attacking Russian soldiers. These
returnees anticipated that the future of their country under the foreign
occupying forces would be grim indeed. The fear of the Japanese, however,quickly diminished when they met actual GIs, who tended to be far friendlier,easy-going, and less arrogant and authoritarian than Japanese soldiers.
The foregoing brief account of what happened in Japan around Year Zerosuggests the immeasurable importance of the presence of the United States
for reconstructing postwar Japan. As one young historian recently
emphasized, one ought to remember that everything began with the utter
defeat of the ultranationalist state and the power vacuum that this defeat left
in the Japanese polity.3 The United States, as represented by its military,swiftly filled that vacuum. For this reason, after Year Zero, America
suddenly loomed large in the eyes of the Japanese. America now appeared
as an enormous irresistible reality in national life. To Japanese of the postwar
era, this initial reality provided the basic framework for accepting andunderstanding America.
From the very beginning, most Japanese felt ambivalent about thisAmerican influence. On the one hand, the United States was a domineeringsuperpower. The American war machine, particularly the two atomic bombs,
left an indelible sense of dread on the Japanese national psyche. The
Japanese felt at once the enormous gap between Japanese and American
power. This was amplified by the physical presence of cheerful well-fed
GIs. Later it was impressed on the national psyche more decisively throughthe somewhat ignominious picture of the emperor standing side by sidewith General MacArthur. US military bases, which continued to stand longafter the Occupation ended, always caused mixed feelings among Japanesepeople: while they aroused a sense of fear and awe, they also provided a
demilitarized nation with an invincible citadel. This was particularly true
after the start of the Cold War. In the end, Japan was left with few options
other than uneasily placing itself within the domain of the American empire.
On the other hand, America served as the model of a prosperous
democratic society. The US occupying forces came to Japan not only as
victorious oppressors but also as great benefactors to a war-torn country.

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The postsurrender policy of the United States naturally focused on restoringand stabilizing national life. The Japanese people were supplied withindispensable resources for surviving these critical times. The United States
appropriated a part of its military expenditures for funding the program
known as Government and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA), which
aimed at mitigating starvation, disease, and social unrest. The programprovided Japan with daily necessities, including food, medical supplies, andchemical fertilizer. In addition, the United States implemented anotherprogram, Economic Rehabilitation in Occupied Areas (EROA). This was
also funded through the military budget and served mostly to foster
economic reconstruction. The Japanese government used much of this fundfor importing industrial raw materials such as cotton and wool. Aid to Japan
under GARIOA-EROA amounted to about $2 billion from 1947 to 1951.4
The early Occupation policy also provided a substitute for democratic
revolution and planted in the Japanese a taste for the freedom found in a
democratic society. The occupying forces led by the Supreme Commander
for the Allied Powers (SCAP) and his General Headquarters (GHQ) pursued
two main lines: demilitarization and democratization.5 Among the major
reforms during the early years of occupation were the complete destructionof the Japanese military organization, the dissolution of the zaibatsu(financial conglomerates), the disbandment of ultranationalist andparamilitary societies, and the purge of about two hundred thousand leadersactive in the war period. It also included educational reforms, fundamental
agrarian land reform, the encouragement of a labor movement, and thedenial of the emperor’s divinity. Shinto was dismantled as a state-supported
national religion. All these reforms culminated in the new constitution.
Before the start of the Cold War began to color Occupation policy, theUnited States sought to lead Japan out of a fascist regime based on theemperor system into an American-style democracy. From the Meiji
Restoration to World War II Japan had concentrated its modernization effort
chiefly on the improvement of the nation’s defenses and economy. Now,
through the early Occupation policy, the Japanese for the first time glimpsed
ethical aspects of modernity such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion,
universal human rights, and self-government. As an agent of these modern
projects the United States showed a different face to the Japanese than in its
effort to build its empire. Against the backdrop of occupation, this face wasfar from congenial or agreeable, but it still represented America the republic.
While most Japanese first encountered and coped with American powerin the wake of the war, Japanese American studies struggled to free24

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themselves from their worst predicaments. Academic American studies inJapan sprouted in 1918, when a new chair in the American Constitution,
history, and diplomacy was established at the Law Department of the
University of Tokyo. This chair was endowed by the American banker A.
Barton Hepburn, who intended to promote Japanese understanding of theAmerican nation. A few private universities followed suit and started theirown American studies program. These incipient programs of American
studies, however, were not necessarily regarded as a fully independent andlegitimate academic discipline in the Japanese academe. This was partly
because in the humanities departments of prewar Japanese universities
American studies were usually categorized as an insignificant subfield ofWestern studies in general. Moreover, American-style republicanism wasseen as utterly incompatible with Japan’s national orthodoxy, the notion ofa “national polity” (kokutai-ron). Some diehard conservative scholars of the
Law Department of the University of Tokyo despised Americanization anddemocracy and even opposed the establishment of the so-called Hepburn
chair in their department.6
Nonetheless, the Hepburn chair was eventually established and filled by
the scholar Yasaka Takagi (1889–1984), a promising young intellectual whocame from the aristocratic circles of Meiji Japan.7 Before starting to teach
American political and diplomatic history in 1924, Takagi had gone to theUnited States to study at Harvard University with Frederick Jackson Turner.
It was the heyday of the influence of Progressives in the field of history, andTakagi developed his framework for understanding the United States under
the influence of the era’s outstanding proponents, including Turner himself,
Edwin Seligman, Charles Homer Haskins, Edward Channing, Samuel Eliot
Morison, Charles H. McIlwain, Andrew C. McLaughlin, and Charles A.
Beard.
After returning home Takagi inaugurated the Hepburn chair. In 1927 hepublished his first scholarly article, “The Significance of Land in the
Political History of the United States.” This study launched professional
American studies in Japan. As its title indicated, it was written under thestrong influence of Turner’s frontier thesis, which, along with Puritanism—
Takagi himself was a disciple of Kanzō Uchimura, the leading Puritaninspired Christian in Meiji Japan—would become one of two major pillars
supporting Takagi's understanding of American history. From this dual
point of view Takagi was to write his first major book, An Introduction to
American Political History (1931), which established his position as thepioneer of American history in the Japanese academe, where Europe had

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always served as the major fountainhead of knowledge and inspiration since
the early years of Meiji.
In the meantime, the relationship between the United States and Japanwas worsening. The Japanese were offended by US laws prohibiting
Japanese immigration; the Americans protested the escalation of theJapanese armed invasion of China. While building his academic career,
Takagi soon became an authority and trustworthy source of information
regarding current American politics and diplomacy. He was looked to byelite circles within the Japanese government and became an active memberof the famous transnational organization known as the Institute of Pacific
Relations. From the Manchurian Incident to Pearl Harbor and throughout
the years of the Pacific War, Takagi quietly assumed multiple roles ofscholar, teacher, adviser, and even negotiator of US-Japan relations.
Remarkably, in those difficult years he maintained his high scholarly
standard with great composure and never lost his admiration for theachievements of American civilization and for American democracy.
Before and during the war a few young scholars and journalists
independently began to investigate US politics and economics, which they
saw as formidable rivals to their Japanese equivalents. These included
Shigeharu Matsumoto (1899–1989) of the Dōmei News Agency; Moritane
Fujiwara (1901–1977), who led the newly established Institute for American
Studies at Rikkyō University (b. 1939); Keiji Ohara (1903–72) of the Tokyo
School of Commerce; Hiroshi Shimizu (1907–93) of Rikkyo University;and Ken’ichi Nakaya (1910–1987) also of the Dōmei News Agency. When
the war ended and Japan found itself tossed around in the torrent of
democratization, these young scholars rallied to support Takagi’s project oforganizing the discipline of American studies in response to a mounting
national interest in American civilization. They were motivated, as Takagi
later recalled, chiefly by a deep regret for their complete failure to stop
Japan’s reckless attack on the United States. It was this small group of
Americanists who in 1947 gave birth to the first Japanese Association for
American Studies.
According to Makoto Saitō (1921–2008), Takagi’s successor as the
Hepburn chair and the youngest member of this association, Takagi intended
to make the new association as purely academic an organization as possible.
Takagi had rejected all influence and funding from the Occupation army.8
The association’s activities centered on frequent study meetings in whichprimary historical documents of American civilization were read anddiscussed. Based on these activities the organization published its monthly

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journal The American Review for three years.9 Later it issued its six-volume
Documentary History of the American People (1950–57).10 This stood as amonument to the first generation of postwar Japanese American studies andlaid a solid foundation for younger generations of Americanists.
In the meantime, however, America and the world were changing with
unexpected velocity. Many of the younger Japanese Americanists had been
university students who had been drafted and set to fighting against theUnited States in the war. They had been more severely buffeted by war anddefeat than their elders, and it therefore took them much time to recoverfrom their physical and psychological wounds and return to academic life.
It was around 1950 that some Americanists of this generation were sent to
the United States under the sponsorship of the GARIOA aid programs, theAmerican Council of Learned Societies, or private organizations such as theRockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace. It was now the age of McCarthyism, the Korean War, and the heightof the Cold War. While studying at major American universities during theearly 1950s, young scholars from Japan could observe the democratic
processes of the American Republic in full. They could also witness its dark
aspects and confronted the relentless face of American empire. Owing tothat experience, their view of America was considerably more nuanced andcomplex than that of the preceding generation, which had often simply
sought to adjust their country’s future to the American model.
Saitō, for instance, ranked among the young scholars who studied
American politics and history in the heyday of the consensus. Although his
major field was early American political and constitutional history, he wasso impressed with the limited war that the United States was fighting in
Korea, with the American people’s reaction to the war, and particularly withthe prevalence of conformism and intolerance in American society andpolitics in the early 1950s that he began to incorporate both the American
Republic and the American Empire into a contextually integrated view of
US political and diplomatic history. Under the strong influence of theconsensus historians, particularly of Louis Hartz, with whom Saitō worked
at Harvard, Saitō tried to place McCarthyism within the broad context of
US politics and diplomacy under the pressure of the Cold War, as well as
within the long historical framework of American liberal democracy.
In his article tracing the historical origins of the paranoia of disloyalty in
McCarthy’s America, Saitō reached a kind of Tocquevillian view of theAmerican Republic and argued that the problem was rooted in individuals’
loss of a “sense of belonging” in a mass society.11 Although Saitō as a

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historian was careful enough to locate the time of the establishment of masssociety during the 1920s, he, borrowing from Alexis de Tocqueville, pointed
out the authoritarian disposition inherent in an independent but lonely
citizen in a democratic society. Tocqueville found that an individual in a
democratic society tended to seek “a huge entity” “as the sole and necessary
support of his individual weakness,” one could therefore see in the individual
the two conflicting passions for freedom and the need of guidance at thesame time.12 In Tocqueville’s argument Saitō perceptively read the paradoxof individualism in modern democracy. Saitō thus found in McCarthyism
the most recent manifestation of this paradox. To him, McCarthyism was
simply the expected product of the American Republic.
Japanese Americanists of Saitō’s generation also encountered thedramatic shift of American diplomacy brought on by the increasing intensityof the Cold War. Saitō later recalled that as he faced American politics at
Harvard during the days of the Korean War, he was deeply impressed withthe reaction of the public to such key incidents as General MacArthur’s
returning home and the presidential election of 1952.13 He found in American
diplomacy a unique tendency to stress morality and beliefs in decision
making, which he defined as “a moralistic and creedal approach.” And hethought this characteristic of American diplomacy was once again the resultof the incompleteness and insecurity of national integration based on deepseated individualism and a multiethnic composition. He thus invented andproposed an integrated view both of the American Republic and theAmerican Empire.
After returning home in 1953 Saitō published several pioneering articles
based on the scholarship he had acquired in the United Sates. Saitō’s
interpretation, however, did not always fully convince other JapaneseAmericanists. During the early postwar years under the Occupation Japanese
views of America diverged considerably. Before turning to otherperspectives, a few more remarks should be made concerning thecharacteristics of the conceptual framework that Takagi and Saitō endeavoredto establish in order to better understand US politics and diplomacy.
Both Takagi and Saitō directed their interest to dichotomous aspects of
the American political tradition. Takagi proposed a pivotal dichotomy forgrasping the unique development of the American polity: Puritanism andthe existence of the frontier. For Takagi, Puritanism was the everlasting
cultural fountainhead from which sociopolitical reforms of later periods
derived their inspiration. For him as for Turner, the frontier, above all thevast amount of free land found there, represented a unique stage of national

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development, one in which people could bring democratic ideas to new
locations and develop forms of self-governance on their own initiative.14
We can see behind Takagi’s view of American civilization an optimistic
Whig conception of historical progress. According to Takagi, American
westward expansion during the nineteenth century meant establishing
American democracy on a continental scale. In this construction we findlittle contradiction between republic and empire. In a public lecture in 1946
in which he attempted to explain the foundation of American diplomacy inrelation to the American national character Takagi pointed to a dual purposein current American diplomacy: America assumed a great international rolewith the aim of “maintaining and propagating democratic thought” and, atthe same time, wished to “solve the real and economic national problemsby . . . expanding overseas markets and achieving full employment.” Theapparent contradiction between these two purposes, however, was blurredin his conclusion that “the American nation is now launching out into theconstruction of a new international order . . . from a highly idealistic
position.”15
Following Takagi, Saitō also proposed a powerful cognitive dichotomy
as a framework for understanding American political and diplomatic history.
But Saitō’s binary opposition was not as harmonious as Takagi’s notions of
Puritanism and the frontier. Instead, Saitō focused on inherently contradictory
forces working in American politics such as freedom versus power, diversity
versus integration, and centrifugal versus centripetal force. In Saitō’s viewof American political history nothing proceeded in one direction forever.
No historical act resulted in the precise consequences originally intended.
In McCarthyism, for example, Saitō saw a typical case of this contradictionof American history, in which the suppression of freedom was justified by
the pretext of fighting for freedom against communism. By interpreting the
dynamics of American history Saitō thus disagreed with Takagi, who foundonly the same static, democratic ideal at the core of the American republic
and empire. For Saitō, it was the dialectic interaction between the opposing
poles of freedom and power, or diversity and integration, that provided
American history with a powerful source of change.16
Returning now to the general development of American studies in postwar
Japan, I must refer to the rise of the Marxist view of America in the context
of the Cold War.17 As I mentioned earlier, for many Japanese, their country’s
defeat was also experienced as a liberation. This was particularly true for
Marxists affiliated with the Japanese Communist Party (JCP). This party
had firmly resisted the brutal oppression of the ultranationalist government.

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When, after the war, the GHQ decided to free about three thousand convicted
political criminals including the leaders of the JCP, the party won an almost
complete liberation that was experienced as something of a revolution.
Almost overnight the party’s standing and popularity soared. In the first
postwar general election in 1946 the JCP succeeded in obtaining 2.1 million
votes and five seats in the House of Representatives. Along with thispolitical ascent, Marxism quickly spread among intellectuals and academics.
The collapse of the prewar kokutai seemed to attest not only to the gallantryof the party’s activists but also to the scientific verity of the official Marxist
doctrine that determined the party line. Orthodox Marxism as acomprehensive scientific theory took a strong hold on the minds of many
academics in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. History
was no exception, and Marxists assumed leading roles in various historicalassociations or study groups in postwar Japan.
America as an academic subject, however, was at first a conundrum topostwar Marxists. To them America appeared at once as a friend and as anenemy, a liberating force and a quintessential form of capitalism. At first the
JCP understood (or misunderstood) that the initial Occupation policies for
demilitarization and democratization were in substantial agreement with
their party line opposing the prewar regime. The seeming agreement
between the GHQ’s purpose and the JCP’s aspirations worked favorably forthe party, at least temporarily. Despite the growing displeasure of SCAP, the
JCP increased its electoral power in the 1949 election, winning 3 million
votes and thirty-five seats. But this meager success augured ill for the futureof the party. In the following year the party split over Cominform criticism
of its pursuit of “peaceful revolution” and its lukewarm attitude towardreforms under the Occupation. While some top leaders of the party accepted
criticism from the international Communist camp, SCAP launched a “Red
purge” and banned the party’s top leaders from engaging in politicalactivities. As the Cold War intensified, the honeymoon between the JCP and
the so-called liberation army of MacArthur came to a quick end. Now
Marxists began to regard the United States as a capitalist, imperialist, andthus intrinsically corrupt, undemocratic force.
American studies of the Marxist sort engaged in criticism and concentrated
mainly on the seamy side of capitalist America. Downplaying or overlooking
America’s founding ideals and its republican and reform traditions, theytended to focus on topics such as slavery and racial segregation, militaryinvasion of other countries, fascist-like political oppression, and suppressionof labor unions. McCarthyism, from this point of view, was nothing but a

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decisive proof of the corrupt nature of American democracy under unbridledmonopoly capitalism. This type of stereotyped view tended to stifle interestin the indigenous reformist tradition of the American Republic. For such
scholars, the United States could not serve as a model republic for Japan.
All interests and research about the American domestic scene converged ona critique of American imperialism. In other words, the interest in theAmerican Republic became subordinate to criticism of the American
Empire. Ironically, postwar Japan thus again developed its version ofAmerican studies as an investigation of the archenemy. The difference wasthat this time the investigation was launched not from the right but from theleft.
In sum, America in the wake of the Pacific War showed Japan two
opposing faces: empire and republic. It was not easy even for professional
Americanists to produce a fully integrated and consistent image of thisJanus-faced Leviathan. But one could distinguish at least three importantschools of interpretation on this question. First, scholars who had started
their careers as Americanists before the war tried to grasp American
diplomacy as a natural extension of reformist democracy. This type ofinterpretation was indebted to the Progressive school of American history
and political thought. Second, another group of scholars, deeply steeped in
Marxism, sought to characterize the essence of US diplomacy and internal
politics as the political manifestation of monopoly capitalism. Third, someAmericanists, starting after the war under the strong influence of theconsensus school of social sciences and history, stressed politicalcontradictions as a key to understanding American political and diplomatic
history. According to this interpretation, the contradictions between freedom
and power, diversity and integration, and idealism and reality have always
lurked behind the American political scene. They explained political change
as a matter of breaking the deadlock between such factors.
During the first two decades after the war—that is, during the so-called
golden age of American politics and economy, America took the intellectual
initiative in the world of knowledge. Americans of that period (particularly
the best and the brightest) had little doubt that their science and technology,
their democratic political thought and practice, and their capitalist economy
were universally applicable and that the United States could serve as amodel for all other nations. This belief crystallized into a modernization
theory that proposed a universal pattern for the development of decolonizednations after World War II. According to this theory, American policymakers

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promoted the transplantation of their sociopolitical scheme for creating amodern society into those nations. In Europe the modern ideals of the
Enlightenment and the dream of perpetual progress of human beings had
been fatally destroyed during the war years. By the early 1960s people in
the United States believed that in the Western world only their country
could escape the European fate and continue to keep the torch of
Enlightenment burning. To them America could and should be an invincible
bulwark against totalitarianism as well as a dependable protector of
decolonized but underdeveloped nations. America alone still maintained thesuccess story of the modern world.
From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, however, a sea change occurredin the American polity. The long and ugly war in Vietnam, intermittent
racial riots in big cities, violent revolts on campuses, and the Watergate
scandal shattered the Americans’ optimism and complacency. Americanists,
particularly those with leftist inclinations, increasingly turned their academic
interests to the negative side of current American politics. As Robert Bellah
deplored in 1975, the American covenant that crystallized in the Declarationof Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment to theConstitution was “betrayed by its most responsible servants and, what isworse, some of them, including the highest of all [Richard Nixon], do noteven seem to understand what they have betrayed.”18 As the foundationalcovenant was thus broken, the American Republic lost its former integration.
The economic crisis caused by the Vietnam War and by what were seen as
extravagant welfare policies also resulted in the decline of American
economic prestige. The foundation of the American empire was also
undermined. Now the grand narrative of America’s success story lost its
credibility. International trust in US political and intellectual leadership fell
into decline.
It was at this critical juncture that American studies in Japan witnessed
the rise of a new generation originating from the New Left movement.19
Like their counterparts in other advanced capitalist countries, the New Leftin Japan was composed of two distinct layers: the close-knit political sects
that had splintered from the JCP and a much larger loose gathering of
insurgent youth. The latter included politically oriented and culturally
oriented groups, but the common denominator was what might be termed
the culture of negation. The list of what the Japanese New Left negated waslong: American imperialism, of course, but also Stalinism, capitalism,
corporations, state power, every kind of bureaucracy, the police, existing
political parties (particularly the LDP and the JCP), the mass media,

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universities, academics, professors, anyone with privilege or prestige, every
authority, the family, every established status (including that of student),
and eventually even the self. The only people who were spared negation
were those who supposedly had nothing to lose: poor people in the third
world and the urban slums in the big capitalist countries. Behind the façadeof the culture of negation, however, as Christopher Lasch later pointed out
with his characteristic poignancy, there lay the culture of narcissism and an
insatiable desire for authenticity. What then did America mean in the cultureof this Japanese New Left? Not much beyond a short-lived opposition to therenewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty of 1970. Of course America was aprime object of the New Left politics of negation, particularly when it wasseen from the third world’s point of view. The Vietnam War provided theforemost example, but the oppressive presence of CIA agents in the small
countries of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa was also
detested. Race riots raging in American cities every summer were nothing
but third world revolts against America from within.
The New Left school of American studies in Japan reflected thesecharacteristics of the movement. Like its predecessors it owed its
methodology and perspective to a group of American historians. This loose
gathering of various “left” views represented the historical revisionism thatseverely criticized mainstream liberalism and the consensus history. They
also rejected elite history and espoused instead a history “from the bottom
up.” Under the influence of those New Left historians plus new social
historians in America, their Japanese counterparts cast doubt on the verityof the foregoing understandings of the American Empire and American
Republic.
The Japanese New Left historians saw America from quite a different
perspective than not only liberals and conservatives but also orthodox
Marxists. Unlike those Marxists who viewed Japanese capitalism as
basically dependent on its American counterpart, the New Left indicted
Japanese imperialism as an independent force. Also, unlike orthodox
Marxists, the New Left abhorred the Stalinist Soviets as much as imperialist
America. Strangely enough, because the New Left negated almost every
existing political regime, their image of America did not differ in essencefrom that of other political regimes. In addition, partly because New Leftrevolts were taking place simultaneously all over the world, and partly
because a cosmopolitan or global youth culture was on the rise, nationalboundaries separating peoples were softened and carried far lesspsychological weight. As a result, after the 1970s, young scholars andBetween Republic and Empire

33

students felt much more at ease studying America than the previous
generations, who had suffered under harsher political and cultural
constraints. After the New Left revolt subsided, therefore, American studies
in Japan as a scholarly field began to flourish, at least quantitatively: in theamount of research, the number of fields and topics explored, the number of
PhDs in American studies minted, and the quantity of publications issued.
By the end of the 1970s, however, the American polity had begun toundergo a set of long-term transforming phenomena that also would deeply
affect the existing paradigm of social sciences and humanities, including
American studies. At the center of the problem was the decline in sovereign
power of the federal government. The prolonged war, stagnating economy,increasing taxes, endless racial problems, political corruption, and highcrime rates all aggravated public distrust of the government. This tendency
has not proved short-lived. During the succeeding years public trust in thefederal government in United States has never recovered to the level thatexisted in the early 1960s. This is part of the universal tendency toward thedegeneration of the sovereign state in global society, which some politicalscientists have interpreted as the end of the Westphalia system. The
globalized free market economy, frequent civil wars, low-intensity conflicts,
and rampant international terrorism have weakened the once absolutecontrol of sovereign states over their national affairs. Simultaneously, out of
distrust of national governments, a number of nongovernmental, subnational,
and transnational organizations have sprouted throughout the world.
Even the United States, the superpower, could not escape this process of
the relativization of national sovereignty. Since the 1980s the American
Republic has often (particularly in wartime) witnessed the eruption of
jingoistic nationalism and almost unanimous support for the actions of thefederal government. But each time, the forged national unity has proved
short-lived and left behind much deeper cracks in the polity. In the meantime,
New Deal liberalism was replaced by neoliberalism as the basic tenet of theAmerican Republic. Some historians and social scientists loosely combined
as a “Republican school” and deplored the loss of public virtue owing toprevalent egotism. This school explored the possibility of recovering “theGood Society.” The American Republic, now divided into so many selfassertive groups, faces a difficulty in proposing to the nation a set of coherent
and consistent policies to sustain itself, let alone the American Empire.
Japanese Americanists are now confronted with an American Republicand American Empire with completely different faces from those represented
by MacArthur. We can no longer draw relevant connections between the

34

Jun Furuya

American Republic and American Empire. In fact, we can hardly evenspeak of one American Republic or a single American Empire. If we are notto replicate the shortcomings of older writers we must take into account themultiplicity and diversity of American power and then analyze specificaspects of US politics and diplomacy. Such research requires, as always,
solid sources and documents. Numerous good monographs on American
politics, history, and culture, based on accurate documentation andmeticulous research, are today available in Japan. This must be counted asremarkable progress, the result of much work over the past four decades.
The problem is, however, that when research timidly seeks refuge in “facts”
whose selection and interpretation is not subject to reflection or in empiricalinvestigations behind which stands at best an anemic postmodern
micropolitics, the presumed transcendence of the political in fact becomesa step backward. The price for progress then turns out to be ignorance of themost fundamental question of all, the one that must properly continue tostand at the center for Japanese Americanists: What does America or
Americanness mean to us today?

Notes
This is a slightly edited version of my presidential address given at the 48th annual
meeting of the Japanese Association for American Studies on June 7, 2014, at Okinawa
Convention Center, Ginowan City, Okinawa.
Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), Kindle
Edition, loc. 233–40.
2 Yoshida Yutaka, Ajia-taiheiyou Sensou [The Asian Pacific War] (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 2007), 186.
3 Satoshi Shirai, Eizoku Haisen Ron: Sengo Nihon no Kakushin [A view of perpetual
denial of a losing war] (Tokyo: Ōta Shuppan, 2013).
4 Takashi Momose, Jiten: Shōwa Sengo-ki no Nihon [Encyclopedia: Japan during thepost-war Shōwa period] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa-Kōbun kan, 1995), 72–73.
5 Ibid., 73–126.
6 Makoto Saitō, “Nihon no Amerika Kenkyū Zenshi” [“An early history of American
Studies in Japan”] in Amerika Kenkyū An’nai [A Guide to American Studies], eds.
Hitoshi Abe and Takeshi Igarashi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1998), 257–58.
7 The following description of Takagi’s biography is based on Makoto Saitō, et al.,eds., Amerika Seisin o Motomete: Takagi Yasaka no Shōgai [In the pursuit of theAmerican spirit: The life of Takagi Yasaka] (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1985).
1

Between Republic and Empire

35“Saitō Makoto Sensei ni Kiku,” [An interview with Professor Makoto Saitō], Japan
Oral History Series 28 (1991), Center for American Studies, University of Tokyo, 62–63.
9 Amerika Kenkyū [The American review] (Tokyo: The Association for America
Studies, 1948–1950)
10 Genten Amerikashi [Documentary history of the American people] (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 1950–1957)
11 Makoto Saitō, “Amerika Dokuritsu Kakumei no Ichi Kōsatsu” [An aspect ofAmerican Revolution], Kokka Gakkai Zasshi [Journal of the Association of Political andSocial Sciences] 69, nos. 11–12 (April 1956), 529–44.
12 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner,trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 648, 667.
13 “Saitō Makoto Sensei ni Kiku,” 47–51.
14 Yasaka Takagi, Bei-koku Seiji-si ni okeru Tochi no Igi, vol. 1 of Takagi Yasaka
chosakushu [Collected works of Takagi Yasaka] (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press,
1970), 455–518.
15 Yasaka Takagi, Bei-koku Kokumin to sono Gaiko Seisaku no Kichō, vol. 3 of Takagi
Yasaka chosakushu [Collected works of Takagi Yasaka] (Tokyo: University of Tokyo
Press, 1971), 67–71.
16 See his lifework, Makoto Saitō, Amerika Kakumeishi Kenkyu: Jiyū to Tōgō [Aninterpretation of the American Revolution: confederation vs consolidation] (Tokyo:
University of Tokyo Press, 1992).
17 On post-war Japanese American Studies from the Marxist point of view, see Jun
Furuya, “Japanese Reception of American and Soviet Culture during the Cold War,
1945–1963,” The Hokkaido Law Review 54 (August 2003), 1030–42.
18 Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial,
2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 142.
19 On the New Left perception of American society and politics, see Jun Furuya,“Predecessor: A Personal View,” in Predecessors: Intellectual Lineages in American
Studies, ed. Rob Kroes (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1999), 337–38.
8