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Simon Avenell, "A History of Postwar Japan: Recovery, Prosperity, and Transformation" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)
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- [00:03]
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- [02:10]
Hans Wagenberg
So welcome to the New Books in Japanese Studies, the channel of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Hans Wagenberg. I'm a student at Penn State and Kiss University. Today I will be talking to Simon Aveno about his book A History of Postwar Recovery, Prosperity and Transformation which came out this year. University of Hawaii Press. In the history of postwar Japan, Avno offers a sweeping yet incisive account of Japan's post war trajectory, tracing how the country moved from the ruins of 1945 to rapid economic growth, social transformation and political reinvention to become One of the world's prominent economic and cultural powers. The book examines the meaning of post war as a historical era and as a concept, while situating Japan experience within a broader regional and global context. I've long known Dr. Elka's work and I'm delighted to have him on the podcast today. Hello.
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Simon Aveno
Hello. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here.
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Hans Wagenberg
So, Simon, if you don't mind me just using your first name, what brought you to write this book and why now?
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Simon Aveno
Yeah, so there are a couple of reasons, I guess, in terms of teaching and research over the past 30 years. The post war is an era that I've personally been focusing on and had a great interest in. And you know, I've been wanting to write this book for a long time actually because of that. My sense also was that the field was ready for an updated kind of comprehensive narrative. You know, a narrative covering 1945 to the present that integrates politics, economy, society, culture, environment, and Japan's place in the world. All those kinds of aspects in, you know, in something that's, I guess, cohesive, hopefully, and also hopefully readable. So that was another reason, I think we haven't really had an updated, at least an English language, updated version of post war history for probably a couple of decades now. So I thought we were ready for that. The other reason too was that eight decades now have passed since the end of World War II. So we're 80 years after the war. And when you think about it in terms of Japan's modernization, if you think about the beginning of Japan's modernization in 1868, then the era from 68 through to 1945 is about 77 years. And then we've got 80 years of the post war. So I also thought now might be a good time to kind of reflect on the meaning, the coherence, and perhaps the internal phases of this era as well. And of course, over the last couple of years, there's also been more and more debate about whether the so called post war era has ended and conservative calls for Japan to break free of the post war regime, et cetera. So I thought that, that it was also an interesting moment perhaps to think about the post war in that context and more generally. I just wanted to write something that I thought I would enjoy doing. We spent a lot of time, I guess, writing very serious books that dig in really, really deeply to specific issues. And I wanted to challenge myself writing something completely different. I mean, I haven't written a comprehensive history before and I wanted to know if I could do it and what it would be like to do it, what the challenges would be of doing that. So that was another reason why I wanted to give it a go.
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Hans Wagenberg
Yeah. And I really enjoyed, especially someone who's a post war historian myself, really enjoyed how you talk about post war as a concept, right. And the idea of post war identity. And I'm kind of quoting from your quote of Narita Diucci, right, that Sengo, like post war, always mean the present. So you have this whole fascinating discussion of what post war means. So Narita Ryuichi said it encapsulated a distinctive national imaginary in Japan. So in what way? What does it mean that Japan is in this perpetual post war?
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Simon Aveno
Yeah, it's very interesting, isn't it? I think that. And this is not only me, other historians have also remarked on this before. But I think the idea of post war, or Sengo came to signify more than just a chronological period. It described a mentality, a sense that 1945 in many ways marked a radical break with the past and a new beginning. And I guess in my own mind, what I like to do is split up this idea of post war into its two elements, post on the one hand, and war on the other hand. And when you think about that things, I guess things start to become a little bit clearer. The post aspect of the post war, for me, I think represents the ways that many Japanese embrace this new era or embrace the stability, the democracy and the peace and the affluence of this new era. So in this sense, the post war, in certain ways becomes a kind of default identity rather than a temporary stage just after the war. And I was thinking here a lot about the sociologist Karl Mannheim, who spoke about generation, a generational consciousness, and he was particularly talking about post World War I Germany. But I think you can think about Post World War II Japan, particularly the early years, in this sense as well, that we can kind of identify a similar post war generational consciousness in Japan after 1945 by thinking about this post aspect. Now, of course, having said that, we need to be careful not to lump everybody together into a single kind of monolithic idea of a monolithic post war generational consciousness, because individual experiences differ dramatically. You need to keep that in mind. Now, on the other side of this post war mentality is, of course, the war of the post war. And that really is about memories of the war that continued to kind of influence this mentality, especially, I think, the popular sense of victimization born out of events like the Tokyo Tribunal, et cetera, and we know that the tribunal's focus on a small handful of leaders encouraged, I think, perhaps a popular belief that ordinary people had been victims, which arguably enabled a kind of emotional distance from the post war past in the way that people imagined themselves in this new era. So I think this, this war aspect of the post war also reinforced the, how can I put it, the psychological basis for a post war generational identity oriented more toward the present. But I hope at the same time that my narrative in the book shows how this popular consciousness changed over time. And that's something I tried to put into the three words of the book subtitle. I must say originally, originally had something really kind of plain and boring like History of Post War Japan, 1945 to the present. I thought, no, that's just too bad, I need to put something more meaningful in there. So I chose these three terms, recovery, prosperity and transformation. And I think that if you think about the post war mentality in these terms, you can also trace it through those three phases. We've got the early post war defined by peace recovery, democratic freedoms in the pursuit of economic growth. Then we move into this period of prosperity when the post war becomes associated with affluence, consumer society and a globalizing Japan. And then finally, I guess from around the 1990s onward, the post war identity perhaps begins to unravel in certain ways with economic stagnation, disasters, et cetera. Yet the term, which is really interesting for me, the term post war still persists in public discourse. And in fact, if you look at some of the statistics, the use of the term Senghor even increases. So even though the notion and the understanding of the post war changes over time, it's still there in public discourse right throughout this period.
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Hans Wagenberg
Yeah, and this is very similar. You mentioned Karl Mannheim in Germany. It's very, very similar to the West German case or the German case as a whole after 1990. And when we were talking before, and I was telling you that when I was reading this book, I was thinking about a very similar book that I read by Julius Nieringer, who is historical in Germany, who's one of the professors untrained in German history originally. And 1945, this zero hour. She writes a lot against this seductive metaphor, but it is still seductive, it's still important and it's still divide in Germany and Japan. 1945, this is such an important year. What did change? Because you do spend a lot of time on continuities before. So why pre, why post? Because there's until in the last Couple, maybe when I was in grad school, at least this already a couple of years ago, there's a lot talk about trans war. So why post war? Why starting in ground zero? Sorry, in zero hour?
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Simon Aveno
Yeah, very, very good question. So, as you know from the book, the first chapter of the book actually starts back in 1868. And I spend a whole chapter trying to recount the way that pre war history connects to the post war. And I thought that it was really important and I needed to do justice to earlier historiography which has made it very, very clear that 1945 is not a zero hour. Everything doesn't change dramatically and we need to consider these trans war continuities. Nonetheless. Nonetheless, I'm writing a book on post war Japan here, on post 1945 Japan. So implicit in that is my argument that something changes fundamentally after 1945. And I guess one of the arguments I try to make through the narrative is that the 1945 rupture mattered both politically and also psychologically. Even though continuities persisted, Many Japanese experienced 1945 as a moral, an institutional and an emotional break. And I felt like therefore justify treating this moment as an important historical watershed where we could start writing about a new era and just consider some of the massive ruptures that happened in 1945. The Japanese Empire almost disappears overnight and we witness, I guess, a new phase of not only a post war Japan, but something I've written about before, a post imperial Japan and the problem of so called de imperialization after 1945. So post war Japan, post 1945 Japan is as much post imperial Japan as it is post war. So for me that's a huge change. And then of course there's the political rupture, demilitarization, the new constitution, the purges of the militarists, the democratizing reforms. I think all of these created substantial institutional discontinuities unmatched by anything since the major reforms of the mid 19th century. Now maybe we'll come back later and talk about this, but certainly not all of these reforms stayed completely in place and not all of them were as successful as originally hoped. But nonetheless there is this change. So that's one side of the story. For me, there's a big change. But of course the other story that I tried to tell as well, particularly by including this first chapter, is that we don't have a tabula rasa. Bureaucracies survived, their names changed in some cases. But in many ways bureaucrats became more powerful in the post war era because of the disappearance of the military industrial policy policies for economic mobilization during the war reborn in post war developmentalism in Japan. So continuity is there again. Even land reforms during the occupation are building on ideas about land reform from the pre war era. So the bottom line there, coming back to the comparison with Germany, is that Japan's zero hour, and hopefully I'm showing this in the narrative is incomplete and it's ambiguous. Japan's imperial institutions partially survived, especially the emperor system. So I guess this hybrid of rupture and continuity is at the core of my narrative that Japan experienced multiple post wars. Yeah, I know it's not a very satisfying answer, is it? That there's continuity and change. But I guess if I have to take a stand, well, I suppose I've just written a book on post war Japan, so I'm pretty much arguing that there's a big enough change to say that things did in fact change substantively after 1945.
- [17:51]
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- [19:26]
Hans Wagenberg
Yeah, and I add, and again, going back to work on Germany, but also my own work in Hiroshima, the physical environment was completely destroyed for most Japanese. Well, most, I think urban and rural. We can argue about how this but for at least for people who work in urban Japan, there's a complete destruction of their urban environments, which has added to the destruction of their value system or the devaluation at least a temporary one under the occupation. You can argue again, as you said, a cultural and psychological it's transformation to an extent. Yet they were the same people.
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Simon Aveno
Who.
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Hans Wagenberg
Grew up in a particular place, who would be educated in a particular place. So it's something that you always kind of struggle with when you work on a post war. I want to focus on the immediate post war, the occupation. You have whole chapter, you might have a chapter and a half on occupation and the 50s, because the occupation, as you already said, have really worked both to transform Japan, but also to keep it as it is in many ways. So can we strike a balance there with occupation transformative or conservative? Or there's the reverse course, which we can talk about also. Or is it both? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Simon Aveno
So again, it's both. Yeah, I have a bet both ways here. Right? Yeah. So yeah, there are two phases, right, of the early occupation and then the later occupation, what you call that. And we can talk about that in a moment, whether it's a reverse course or not, or what it is. But again, just looking at the early phases of the occupation, my sense is that there are some, again, as I sort of intimated already, some really significant transformations that we can attribute to the US Led occupation. And maybe that's again why I give it so much time in the book. Of course, democratization is one of the big changes that the US Led occupation helps bring about. And I was thinking as I was preparing for this podcast, podcast, if somebody said what's the one big, really big thing that marks off the post war from the pre war? And for me it's got to be the Constitution. This is a really, really important change because what do we see? We see expanded civil liberties, we see women's suffrage, we see the protection of labor and the right to organize, although this is later challenged. We see land reforms all sort of growing out of this new legal institutional structure centered around the Constitution. So I think this is a really, really important change brought about by the American occupation. The other really big one. And again we'll come back and talk about the reverse course, but demilitarization is huge, I think, particularly removing the military as a political actor. Now the military comes back, but it doesn't come back as a political actor. And I think that is also something really, really important. And of course then we again coming back to the Constitution, Article 9 in the Constitution and the pacifism of the post war era. And I've already mentioned de imperialization, the dismantling of empire, other reforms of the occupation are kind of successful, but not so successful. Economic decentralization, for example, and pulling a part of the business conglomerates only go so far. So there are also in this sense continuities which are empowered by the occupation on that level. And I guess one other major thing or two other major things, let me mention one is bureaucratic predominance. The occupation as we know couldn't have happened without the assistance of the Japanese bureaucracy. The occupation forces needed them for various pragmatic reasons, whether that be linguistic ability or whatever. The occupation helps maintain that continuity of bureaucratic influence in governance across the war era. And also of course the other big one is the emperor. The emperor becomes symbolic, but he is preserved in a kind of form of cultural continuity on purpose by the occupation. So again, coming back to the what does the occupation mean? Just looking at this early period, there are huge institutional changes, but at the same time there are also carryovers. So it's not simply one or the other. But if you want to push me to say was it more transformational than it was not legally speaking, I think it definitely was. There's no question about that in terms of the legal institutional structure.
- [24:59]
Hans Wagenberg
But I would push back a bit, I think. Please do. So you think about the niche is events. The general strike of February 1, 1947, right. For me it is the other zero hour where everything that we talked about basically was crushed or just put a halt. Someone pulled the brakes, right? The Americans pulled the brakes. And there is from there on, of course the reverse course. We talk about a lot which emphasize continuity, stability and anti communism, right? And you see this tension. I would argue there's this tension. And I think you see it also in your 1950s chapters, right? The age of politics there where on one hand you have the politics democratization which expand and you trace it to 1920s, right, expansion. But on the other hand you have entrenchment 55 system and this anti communism and conservatism and revival of the nation, I would say, which was maybe there all along. So how much is this tension is important for this age of politics and how much of it stays beyond the constellation of forces it led from 47 onward?
- [26:19]
Simon Aveno
Yeah, so this tension between democratization and anti Communism is really interesting to me as well. And as you say, I talk about that quite a bit during my discussion of the 1950s. I guess one of the bottom lines is that I think there is certainly a tension between democratization and anti growing desire to contain communism tension. But at the same time, because of that, democracy starts to resonate in ways with anti communism. We're talking about the Cold War here. Right. And in the context of the occupation of Japan, this unfolds in this idea of a so called reverse course. And in researching the book, I realized various people have different. They want to call this period various different things. Some people say it was just a change in gear, other people say no, it was a complete reverse course. I think you're absolutely right. There were important changes. US policy did shift from that earlier emphasis on, I don't know, radical democratic reform, if you want to put it that way, to stabilizing Japan as a Cold War ally. And this incorporated a whole range of things like limiting leftist influence, as you said, curtailing labor activism, promoting conservative parties. But it also extended further to rebuilding police power, rebuilding security forces. We see the emergence of the Self Defense forces during the 1950s. So many of these changes are directly, I think, a result of the Cold War and the US desire for communist containment. And they do compromise, they certainly restrain, but they arguably compromise to a great extent many of the earlier democratization initiatives without completely removing them. What else happens? The emergence of conservative rule in the 1955 system, again, the emergence of the Liberal Democratic party in the mid-1950s as the kind of the pillar of stable conservative dominated party of rule in Japan really can't be explained without understanding the kind of domestic and international context of the Cold War at that time. The re emergence of the Japan socialists in the mid-1950s, the Korean War, the earlier fall of China, all of those factors feed into it. So yeah, I think the reverse cause is absolutely important on all those levels. And economically, of course, for the Japanese economy as well. There's a huge burst as a result of the Korean War. So the Japanese economy benefits in significant ways from this growing attention to communist containment in the context of the Cold War. But one other thing I guess I would add to that and coming back to my idea about the post War having a kind of psychological dimension is that I think there's also a psychological dimension at this moment as well in terms of people's consciousness. And I guess what I'm trying to say is that the Cold War fostered a mindset perhaps that democracy, growing prosperity and US alignment are all in one way or another fundamentally linked. And this continues to shape political culture and popular ways of thinking for many, many years after that. So I guess, as I said at the outset, it's not simply a process of democratization then being replaced by policies of anti communism, but rather the interesting thing for me is the kind of inherent tensions and also the resonances between democratization and anti communism that sort of starts to structure the whole field as we get into the 1950s.
- [31:03]
Hans Wagenberg
Yeah. And again, Japan is not very different from other places. I mean, the us, Germany, other places where the meaning of democracy is really tested during the Cold War. Mekartism and all this stuff you have in the US and Europe, the anti nuclear struggle and the peace movement in the 50s, the very meaning of what it means to be democratic is tested all over the world at the time, but also what you have all over the world. And I think this is where the real break is. And I think you also show it when you move from what you call the age of politics, the age of the economy. Right. You talk about those three phases before. There's actually, I think, six you write about in the book, but they're kind of aligned. There's like two and two. Right. So the age of economy, then Japan as a superpower is kind of a unit. Right. From the 60s to the 80s, or in Blake Crew to the 80s, I would say, and I would argue it as a cultural shift, because if you've. And you see it again, going back to Julius Naring, a book about Germany, what was really different is the youth, the rise of the youth, as a cultural power, as a consumer power, and as a power that dominates society. And you see it all over the world. Right. You see it in the 60s, politically and culturally, but you see it really in Japan, in the flourishing consumer society. Right. Youth activism and kind of lead me to ask you, can you think about a real break here in terms of culture, rather in terms of politics and democracy.
- [32:32]
Simon Aveno
Yeah. So again, another really interesting question that links to, I guess, the challenge that I discovered in trying to write comprehensive history, and that is changes in different domains don't happen systematically. It would be so much easier to write history if everything changed at the same time. So if politics, culture, economy, if they all changed in 1970 or 1960 at the same time, that would be great. But they don't change at the same speed. So subdividing and periodizing history becomes very difficult. So that's why I think what I'm trying to do in this book as well is show how we might try and understand the post war era as one of overlapping processes of change that are not always happening at the same speed or at the same timing as well. And from that perspective, I absolutely agree that the period from around the late 1950s onwards witnesses some really, really interesting cultural transformations. Of course, we have intensifying urbanization from the late 50s and consumer culture. More young people, you mentioned youth. More young people are completing high school university as well. We're seeing the spread of the consumption of durable goods, the three electronic treasures, as they're called, television, washing machine and refrigerator, all of which connect to a kind of growing standardization of lifestyles from around the late 1950s onwards. And this is different to what came before. This era during the 1960s certainly transformed everyday life in Japan, I think, in ways that were as fundamental as, if not more fundamental than some of the political reforms of earlier years. And certainly, as I've said, this is something we don't start to see until the late 1950s onwards. In the book, I present a variety of statistics on urbanization, consumption of consumer durables, et cetera, education, to try and point that out. And youth activism, as you mentioned, youth activism is another really key area of change. From the late 50s onwards, we see the rise in student protests, particularly against, of course, the renewal of the US Japan Security Treaty in 1960, the rise of the anti Vietnam War movement from the mid-60s, and then the rise of radical student activism from the late 60s onward. So young people, I guess, are becoming the primary drivers of political experimentation and cultural change. And again, as you said, this is a global phenomenon. But more broadly, the 1960s in many ways are a cultural watershed for Japan. In many other ways, the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, the opening of the Shinkansen, the bullet train, all of these things give Japan a greater global visibility than any other time in the post war. Up until then, popular culture, mass media, these new technologies are also starting to consolidate culture across Japan as well. So yeah, I think on all these levels, the major cultural rupture, if you will, arguably occurs not right after 1945, but it's during this period of high growth from the mid-50s through this, you know, through the 60s and early 70s, when, you know, affluence Begins to I guess reshape identities and aspirations at scale, you know, at a very large scale that we hadn't witnessed before. Although having said that, you know, I again think about youth, many of the kind of cultural innovations of youth and youth as the leading lights of cultural change. You can also go back and look in the 1950s for example, and see some of the beginnings of that youth energy that's going to come and dominate at least cultural change later on.
- [37:21]
Hans Wagenberg
Yeah, but as you said also I think it's an issue of scale in the late 60s, what you see is a completely different generational shift. And I know we're going to talk about generational attention later, but I keep thinking when you're talking about. But how in my research right now about 1968 and on one hand you have all the older generations celebrating the unreal of Meiji and they have all those educational reforms that's supposed to be to bring back a little bit more healthy nationalism, quote unquote. But then in the middle of this you have the Shinjuku riot and like the young and people throwing a lot of cocktails in the polices. It's which you can say they're in a way also continuing Japanese tradition of throwing malt of cocktails and police boxes. But it's really, you can see this huge break between the generation of post war and wartime generation and then in 68, 67, but then going 10 years later after the oil shock and Nixon shocks and suddenly everything is in harmony supposedly again. Right? So and this is a moment I don't know, I will not think about. And now I'm going a bit off script here, right, because you have the arrival of affluence, right? You have the dip during the oil shock, right? But then you have corporate Japan kind of rise in the 70s and 80s and you have this like Showa mindset, right? How does this came about? This like. Like late Showa corporate model capitalism is good. Japan is. Are working long hours, not making too much fuss, not talking about politics. I mean this is a late Showa era model, right. That is still dominate supposedly our image of Japan today. I mean how much of how does it came about and how much and going way forward now how much is like the post 89 shocks kind of challenged it. Because this is very different from. It seems as like an eternal Japan for us, where we are because we were born and we grew up when Japan was dominant. But it's very different from the 70s, from 60s and I would say even different from the 90s. There's a question there.
- [39:37]
Simon Aveno
So good, so good, so good.
- [39:40]
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Simon Aveno
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Simon Aveno
Yes, yes. So, yeah, I guess there you're asking a couple of things, right? So the 1970s, what happens to that student energy or that youth energy in the 1970s? And then again, I guess the question then is, what about after 1989? What then happens then? Yeah, it's interesting. Right? So just to make a few comments about student activism and the way that youth are thought about at that time. Yeah. So the image of youth throughout the 1960s, and particularly as we get into the radical student movements of 1968 and even more radical in the early 1970s, is as youth as the kind of leaders of this cultural typhoon or this cultural change, massive cultural change in Japan. And then what happens to all of them after that? And the argument is that, well, the ones who leave university go on and become corporate warriors and they quieten down and they toe the line and become the supporters of the Japanese economic model. What about youth of the 1970s who are in a university? It's really interesting because observers start to talk about these youth as apathetic, as having no kind of political interest, as just wanting to sit around and read books, talk about philosophy, or just engage in everyday popular cultural pursuits. And it's kind of recurring sort of of generational critique of youth.
- [42:33]
Hans Wagenberg
There's a space invader craze in the mid-70s, and the youth are. Or not late-70s, I think, but like the youth are playing video games. They don't even burn stuff anymore.
- [42:44]
Simon Aveno
Yeah, right. So, yeah, I mean, of course there are real political reasons for why we see the kind of, I guess, the end of radical youth activism. That's because there's a massive societal reaction and also political reaction to what arguably had become too over radicalized. And there's a crackdown. So that's one of the reasons why we see the end of it. But I also think, and this kind of connects perhaps to the wider question here about the 1970s as a critical moment. And I think this is something I've been talking about with colleagues as well. The 1970s. Yeah, they're an understudied moment historically. And I think these years are important in fundamental ways in terms of a kind of post war transition, if you will, a phase of transition in the post war era. And there are the big moments, right? There's the Nixon shocks, then there is the really big one, which is the oil shock, the first oil shock of 73. And this is not only an economic watershed, but also, I think, a cultural one as well. Cheap energy is gone. We see the decline of heavy industries. We see corporate Japan forced into technological upgrading, et cetera. Labor. Exactly, labor. There is also new approaches, not only technological innovation in companies, but also trying to achieve cost cuts through redeployment of workers or having workers retire early, et cetera. So labor also has to pay a price as well. And the other interesting thing about the 1970s for me as well is that it's also accompanied by a wider, I guess questioning, if you will, of the growth model of unbridled growth up until that moment. And that's becomes patently obvious to Japanese from throughout the 1960s, but particularly the late 60s and early 70s in the form of industrial pollution. And so the environment, the living environment and the costs to human health as a result of a polluted environment, that also becomes another issue. And interestingly, that's a conduit through which other groups that have been traditionally kept out of or ostracized in politics are able to enter it. Women in particular. So I think in all of these ways the 1970s represent an interesting moment of. Yeah, an interesting moment of transition in many ways. Positive in certain ways. Environmental consciousness, as I've said, but also perhaps negative in terms. Terms of even greater levels of standardization within Japan.
- [46:13]
Hans Wagenberg
Yeah, so yeah, you can definitely think about people like Saito Kyohe and like all the growth ideology going back all the way to the 70s. Right. And this critique of corporate society and neoliberalism, which was never as bad here as it was in the Anglophone world. I don't know about Australia, where you're from, but the UK and US for sure. But there is this Crystallization of corporate Japan. Right. This whole like, you know, right now and we were all in big Japanese organization, universities or companies where there's this, you know, this very strict mindset, you know, like the fourth year all graduates are going to look for jobs and they go into the companies. And the life cycle is very standard for everybody. Everybody's middle class. This crystallization that really get to its peak in the 80s because it's more successful in the 80s, right. Was you would think it would break down 1989 again. Right. The other moment. Right. But it survived in a way. I mean now Nami and I was already like 35 years ago, amazingly so. Right. What changed if anything, during Heisei of all of this? I mean we have this particular tension we talk about. Right. Between you know, conservatism and challenge. Right. Did you can. But how much of it you can see in heisig in post 89.
- [47:37]
Simon Aveno
Yeah, again. So again, coming back to the very structure of the book, I do make a chapter break and I guess then a subdivision of the post war era around the late 1980s, early 1990s. And this is as you suggested, I think, because it represents for me a major transition point from that period of homogenization standardization into the bubble era. And then we get from the early 1990s the collapse and the story here is quite familiar to everybody. The, the asset price bubble collapses. As a result of that we see the undermining of key post war corporate institutions, at least in large corporations like lifetime employment, enterprise unions, seniority wages, those kind of institutions start to shake as a result of this collapse in the early 1990s. And on the other hand, what do we see? We see a new kind of capitalism emerging in Japan. Non regular employment, rising precarity, these kinds of things which had not necessarily been non existent but had been concealed I think up until that point. And on top of that new demographic challenges, right. The government is faced with new strains on public finances because of an aging population, a decreasing population, lower rates of fertility. So what happens as a result of that is that the nature of policymaking as well, the nature of policymaking starts to move away from, or is forced to move away in many ways from this old model of state led developmentalism opening the door to, I don't know, I guess we can call it neoliberal forms of policymaking during this era. So yeah, the period that late 1980s certainly represents a transition. And then the question is, well, so then what happens after the 1990s? Where does Japan go? What have been the major things that have shaped the country of this past 35 years. And when you think about it, 35 years is a long time. Right? It's a long time. So something must have happened. And as I try to explain in the book, I think a couple of things I've already mentioned the kind of shift to a new kind of capitalism. Another thing which becomes more and more important is a re engagement with Asia. We might call it a kind of re. Asianization in some ways in Japan during this. During the Heisei era.
- [50:50]
Hans Wagenberg
You preempted my question.
- [50:52]
Simon Aveno
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, you know, reintegration with China, also particularly a reintegration with Southeast Asia, the Asian nations, Japan becomes deeply intertwined, if you will, with not only Asian economic supply chains, but also through tourism, through popular cultural flows, all of these ways, Asia starts to become more and more important during this era. And I think that's a really positive change and something that only becomes possible as a result of that, that watershed of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the other side of the coin, of course, that we've seen over the past 30 years is that this re engagement with Asia in this post. Well, it's not really post Cold War in East Asia because we still have the Cold War. But in many ways this re engagement with Asia is also accompanied with new pressures to face the past. And that's another important feature of, I think, this past 35 years, Japan being faced with the unresolved issues of the war and dealing with, or not dealing with those issues. And again, this sort of comes back to my argument about the post war still being a relevant way of thinking about this era. In other words, post war, the war of that post war is still there all these years afterwards. So, yeah, that's why I think it's interesting to think about post 1989, 1991, this 35 years, as an interesting new phase of Japan's history. There are other things I can talk about, but.
- [52:54]
Hans Wagenberg
But yeah, I think you quote Nakamura Masanori in conclusion about why is it still not post war? Right. And I think that he talked about three, that most of the international issues need to be resolved before they can be really post war. So dependence on America was one of them. And I'm really trying to find my notes here. Dependence on America, I hear it unresolved with terror deputes with Asia, as we just spoke about. And he also added that Japan should be a permanent member of the un, which is less relevant, I would say, but it's Kind of fascinating to me that it's a post war is an international thing, but it's not quite right because relationship with Asia is also a domestic issue. You get to do that with Japanese nationalism. So you end up with a really interesting conversation about post war. As we just arrived here at the end, what are some of the. Because there is no real conclusion to this debate. Right. And so what is your take on the post war? I mean, we mentioned the scenario, but you also fought Carl Glock, Laura Hein and I hope, and a lot of other people here. Where do you stand on this, if I may ask?
- [54:08]
Simon Aveno
Oh, is the post war over?
- [54:09]
Hans Wagenberg
Yeah.
- [54:12]
Simon Aveno
Well, yeah, I mean, that's what I sort of lead to in the conclusion. And I must say, when I originally wrote this book, I had a very short introduction and I think maybe I had an epilogue or very short, just something short in the conclusion. And my editor came back and said, can you write something a little bit more substantive for both the introduction and the conclusion? So then I was sort of forced to sit down and kind of make some decisions. And I guess in terms of is the post war over? My take is that as we were talking about before we started the podcast, I've been thinking a lot about generational consciousness. And I think that. So I guess I would say, no, I don't think it's over as a mentality, as a way of understanding the world that Japanese live in, that there is still an understanding that, yeah, we're in a post war era, but it's becoming weaker over time. And I think I even write about this in the last paragraph of the book, that it may be a generational factor and that the generation, probably one of the last generations to remember this, is the, you know, the baby boomer generation. And as they, you know, begin to pass across the, you know, the horizon of history, maybe that, you know, maybe that will be a factor that will, you know, help Japan move towards something into the future. But the other thing, I guess the other thing I would say is this. I called this book a history of post war Japan because I couldn't think of another title that I could use for the era that would be recognizable to people. Now, I'd love to get your opinion on this, but I could say a contemporary history of Japan or Japan since 1945, although that still invokes the post war idea. My base perspective was that this era since 1945 does represent a whole that we can look at as a whole in certain ways. Then what else can we call it? What Else what other term could we use? And so yeah, in that sense.
- [56:59]
Hans Wagenberg
The.
- [56:59]
Simon Aveno
Problem then is not so much the name. Well, the problem is the name. But if you could remove post war, then you wouldn't have the problem of endings anymore. Maybe, but that's not a very good answer for you.
- [57:12]
Hans Wagenberg
Yeah, well, there is no good answer because as you write, there is not just one post war, there's multiple post wars. There's also a series of overlapping transition that you can see relate back to 1945 and before. But in a way they all were very much shaped by 1945. Right. If you think about democratization, economic transition, it's all. Some ended, some less so, some are transitioning to something else. But I think the argument you said about the war, the fact that the war is still loom so large because of the, the continuing Cold War and as long as there's no resolve, some kind of resolution, I don't see how we can move beyond. I mean, you don't talk about post war Germany anymore. Once you have a reunification with some sort of resolution. Right. And you have riskation, you have also the fact that the Germans came to some kind of, I mean, relatively so. Right. To some kind of more of a understanding and, and confrontation of their past. Relatively so. Relatively so. So I don't think we can escape the post war. Right. Especially as a generation. And we mentioned, as you mentioned, a generation that was shaped by this whole idea of post war is still around and still making decisions. Right. And speaking of generation, if we can, I know because we spoke about it before, I want to ask you, because we did mention it a lot now and does inform a lot of the book. So I wanted to talk a little bit about research you're doing now. What's next for you?
- [58:47]
Simon Aveno
Yeah. So I'm now starting out on what hopefully will be a large research project that examines what sociologists have called generationalism and also social psychologists. Generationalism and generational politics in post war Japan. And I guess the project will try and look at the ways that Japanese policymakers, intellectuals, journalists and other cultural producers have tried to frame social and political problems and changes and various other phenomenon through the language of generations. And I've only really just started, but post war Japan has been really, really rich. I think in generational labeling. For example, you can go right back to the early post war 1950s and you get discussion of sun tribes who are part of that Ishihara Shintaro generation. Then you get the Dankai sedai in the 1970s, right through the present lost generation of the 1990s. Japan has its own generational labels. So I'm interested in looking at not only at how those labels emerged, but I guess, the ways that they became explanatory tools, if you will, for all kinds of phenomenon like political engagement or lack of political engagement, consumption habits, all kinds of things, democracy, economic stagnation. All of these areas, interestingly, are very often discussed through the lens of generation. So I thought that generation perhaps is an interesting way to try and dig into Japan, post war Japan from a, from a different perspective that we haven't seen to date.
- [61:02]
Hans Wagenberg
It's fascinating and we already seen how, how useful it can be. I mean, in our conversation today, before we recorded and now how useful this concept can be. I'm looking forward to this. So thank you very much, Simon. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today.
- [61:15]
Simon Aveno
Well, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.
- [61:18]
Hans Wagenberg
Thank. You.
- [61:33]
Marshall Po
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- [61:49]
Hans Wagenberg
Is that kind of. With the binoculars watching us?
- [61:51]
Marshall Po
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [61:52]
Simon Aveno
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- [61:59]
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- [62:00]
Simon Aveno
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