The idea of postwar Japan

Japan's postwar era beginning in 1945 and (arguably) continuing to the present is now around the same duration as the prewar and wartime periods combined (1868–1945). Although politicians, bureaucrats, commentators and historians alike have ceaselessly declared the end of this era, both the postwar (sengo) and postwar Japan (sengo Nihon) have been remarkably durable concepts and, if usage is any indication, actually appear to have grown in frequency throughout this almost-eighty-year timespan. In its most straightforward connotation— although nothing is ever absolutely straightforward in historical periodization—the postwar simply refers to the era after the end of Japan's war in the Asia-Pacific region. As the grammatical construction “the postwar” denotes, in Japanese sengo is used as both an adjective—as in “postwar Japan”—but also as a noun with its own “substance.” In this sense, the postwar as both an idea and as a lived experience has for many Japanese represented the transition to a new nation—a severing of what came before. As Carol Gluck has observed, part of the attraction (or the repulsion) of the postwar idea has been the way it speaks to this sense of “utter rupture” and the “inversion of the prewar.” This attribute of re-creation, rebirth and/or redemption may help to explain why the idea of the postwar has retained such currency and provoked so much animosity for such a long period of time both in popular consciousness and among historians and other observers. Interesting too, is the fact that the idea of postwar Japan as a comprehendible slice of history has resided quite comfortably alongside other period markers, like the imperial eras of Shōwa (1926–1989) which crossed the war divide, Heisei (1989–2019) which has come to represent a lost Japan, and Reiwa (2019–) whose beginning roughly coincided with the onset of a historic global pandemic. These eras certainly have their own historical resonances, yet they have not undermined consciousness of the postwar era as a contemporaneous historical overlay.

Although immediately after defeat postwar simply meant after the war—apres-guerre—it has somehow managed to become more than this, certainly because of its inextricable link with the war but, just as importantly, because of its association with a zeitgeist or mentality that has continued to make sense to many people across a great many years.