This chapter studies post-war Japanese history through the lens of sciences that engaged with reproductive and population politics. It examines two scientifically informed projects, the knowledge of which directly interacted with statecraft in postwar Japan; namely, a bureaucratic exercise to count population numbers in the political turmoil after the Asia-Pacific War and the policy-relevant birth control research headed by Koya Yoshio. Through these cases, this chapter stresses the importance of locating post-war Japan into the transnational context, by arguing that postwar Japanese history was constructed through the reconfiguration of material and political conditions surrounding Japan and beyond.

Introduction

Postwar Japan's history as it relates to reproduction and population is a well-studied topic, approached by scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives. Demographers have contextualized the patterns of reproductive behaviors since the end of World War II in terms of long-term population trends. Social historians and scholars in gender or disability studies have narrated this history in terms of its linkages with various forms of social activism that emerged after Japan's defeat in the war, such as the popular birth control movement, the disability rights movement against abortion and the women's liberation movement. Anthropologists and sociologists have understood this history as mirroring the changing ideas and structures of personhood, kinship and other social relations as Japan was rebuilt from the rubble of the war. Historians of medicine and science have explored the role of medical and scientific theories as well as doctors, healthcare practitioners or scientists in postwar policies and practices in reproductive, infant and maternal health.

An important theme running through the historiography on this topic is politics, manifest in everyday negotiations and public debates over what to do with reproductive bodies. In Japan, reproductive bodies—which Kohama Masako and Matsuoka Etsuko concisely summarize with the expressions “umu, umanai [and] umenai shintai” (bodies that do, do not or cannot bear children)—gradually constituted a subject of political and policy discussion beginning in the 1860s. From this decade onward as Japan was transformed into a modern sovereign power, emerging groups of scientific experts and bureaucrats discussed the new concept of “population” in association with the wealth and health of the nation, along with childbirth as a factor directly affecting population trends.

What do readers imagine when they hear the words “environmental history in Japan”? Many people might think first of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The air pollution in Yokkaichi or Itai-itai disease in Toyama are also well known. However, this book does not deal with the above case studies head-on. Rather, it actively focuses on themes that are not necessarily well-known outside of Japan and may not even be well-known within Japan. Using this approach, we believe we can present a more vivid picture of Japan's environmental history to our readers, moving away from clichés.

This book, compiled with these intentions in mind, would not have been possible without the contributions of many people, of course.

First, the contributors to this book responded sincerely to my difficult request that they write a chapter that explains their unique issues and perspectives in a way that readers—specialists and non-specialists alike—would understand and value.

Second, the reviewers of this book read through the draft and appreciated the fact that it was written largely by Japanese speakers who had little experience presenting in English on a variety of fascinating topics.

Third, I would like to thank Mark Gresham, Managing Director of MHM Limited. He supported me, anxious about editing a book in English for the first time, by his meticulous editing work down to the smallest detail. I will never forget the beers we drank together at the yakitori restaurant “Saezuri” in Kyoto and the conversations we had about our lives.

Notes on the Romanization of Japanese

The Hepburn system of romanization has been used for Japanese terms, including the names of persons and places. Long vowels are indicated by a macron, except for place names and words that are in everyday use in English (such as Tokyo). The Japanese custom of placing the family name first has been followed for the names of Japanese persons. In the case of citations of works in English by Japanese authors, we have deferred to the romanization style and name order given in the original work.

Around eighty years have passed since Japan's defeat in the Asia-Pacific War and the beginning of the country's reemergence as a prominent global economy and liberal democracy. While the sense of a postwar era faded quickly for many other nations involved in World War II, for Japan the idea of the “postwar” has remained salient through to the present, albeit fading somewhat with each subsequent generation. The reasons for this persistence are complex, partly relating to wartime and colonial issues that remain unresolved but also due to the symbolism of the “postwar” as a marker for a positive turn away from a seemingly defective past. The essays in this volume attempt to rethink Japan's postwar era from multiple perspectives. As readers will discover, the authors hardly speak with one voice about the postwar era—no doubt to be expected when tracing the multiple and complex histories of such a tumultuous period in Japan's modern history. Nonetheless, in one way or another, all of the essays in this handbook point to the ongoing validity of understanding the period after August 15, 1945, as a coherent one, while also revealing how the era itself has incorporated identifiable sub-eras and phases. It is the authors’ hope that readers will be encouraged to think not only about the specific content of the chapters, but also the larger question of the “postwar” in Japan and why the notion has persisted for so long.

I would like to sincerely thank all of the authors who contributed to this handbook. It was an honor to edit their work from which I learned so much. The willingness of such a distinguished group of scholars to join this project and the effort they put into their contributions was truly humbling. Thank you to Bennett Richardson for initially contacting me about editing a handbook in this series. I fondly recall our first meeting together with Mark Gresham in Fujisawa City on the eve of the pandemic in early 2020. My deepest gratitude to Mark Gresham who was enthusiastically supportive of this project from the outset and thereafter provided an astounding level of support as the handbook took shape. Mark's steady hand and wise judgement made this volume better in innumerable ways. Thanks also to Shin Takahashi who served as a reviewer for the handbook. Likewise, Shin's feedback helped to improve the final product.

This chapter attempts to illuminate the continuities and linkages between Japan's forestry development in Southeast Asia before and after the end of the Asia-Pacific War. It first describes a brief history of the development of tropical forestry by Japanese corporations and Japan's state forestry policy during the wartime. Second, it elucidates how the utilization of tropical forests has been attracting attention in relation to the depletion of forest resources in mainland Japan during the war years. Finally, it examines the political and environmental context in which tropical forestry and imports from Southeast Asia were resumed by Japanese capital in the 1950s and 1960s and suggests continuities and linkages between wartime and postwar Japan's forestry development in Southeast Asia.

Introduction

In recent years, one of the most fertile areas of inquiry for environmental history has been the intertwined histories of imperialism and environmentalism. A growing number of studies have shown that modern environmentalism—from its key concepts to its practices and networks—is deeply embedded in the history of empire. Most of these studies have focused on the British empire and its colonies. Recently, however, a few researchers have begun to turn attention to the case of the Japanese empire; that is, to the distinctive interrelation between Japanese imperialism and environmentalism. For example, in her generative study of the forest policies of the Japanese empire, Tessa Morris-Suzuki contrasts the forest policies of the Japanese mainland with those of its colonial territories to bring to light the contradictory interfusion of rationalism and romanticism in the environmental vision that lay at the heart of colonial modernity. Another example is David Fedman's pathbreaking study of Japan's forest conservation practices in colonial Korea which suggests forestry and silviculture brought about by the Japanese empire functioned as a vital dimension of state power in colonial Korea. In order to understand the politics of forest management in Korea, Fedman suggests to “look beyond the peninsula itself “ and to “track the broader circulation as they were transfigured into the ligneous commodities that vitalized Japan's continental expansion.”

As Mark Peattie points out, the Japanese empire had one distinctive feature: its geopolitical structure was shaped by geographical expansion to neighboring countries to achieve the imperative of security.

This chapter examines the trajectory of manga production, circulation and consumption in postwar Japan to reflect on the ambiguity of the Japanese discourse of “internationalization.” It investigates institutional frameworks for the promotion of Japanese popular culture in relation to the discourse of kokusaika, internationalization, seen as both an attempt to open Japanese society to foreign elements, and an endeavor to reaffirm the value of Japanese culture and disseminate it globally. It further explores how producers and consumers of popular culture engage creatively with these governmental policies and social conventions, leading to the emergence of phenomena such as “gaijin manga.”

Introduction

Manga, Japanese comics, are a particularly useful lens to examine and problematize the notion of postwar Japan, both because the medium acquired its distinctive contemporary form in the years after the end of the Asia-Pacific War, and because its public perception underwent several major transformations in conjunction with public events over the course of the second half of the 20th century. Tracing the history of manga production, circulation and consumption from the late 1940s to the new millennium can thus offer insight into a plethora of social, political, economic and cultural phenomena. One of the most interesting aspects of postwar manga is its intersection with notions of national identity and internationalization. The evolution of postwar manga's themes and styles is best described as characterized by a constant oscillation between inward and outward drives. An examination of the institutional approach to the medium reveals a similar oscillation between shunning manga in the domestic arena and promoting it as a valuable cultural export on the international level. This chapter analyses the trajectory of manga production, circulation and consumption in Japan from the late 1940s to the 2010s, to reflect on the ambiguity of the Japanese discourses of national identity and internationalization, and their connection with the notion of the postwar era. The world of manga is extremely vast and varied, and it would be impossible to present a comprehensive picture of even only the most important among its subgenres within the scope of one book chapter. I will focus primarily on the genres, authors, and texts that in my view best exemplify this tension between nationalistic and transnational drives.

Educational reforms after the Asia-Pacific War brought a strong emphasis on equality into Japanese compulsory education, in terms of provision, pedagogy and participation. The effects upon post-war Japanese society have been profound, ranging from a dramatic levelling of differences in academic attainment to a sense of national identity as a broadly homogenous society. In contrast, educational structures and policies in post-compulsory education have emphasized differentiation over equality, resulting in fierce competition for educational credentials. This tension between equality during compulsory education and competition in post-compulsory education has been crucial in the shaping of post-war Japanese society.

Introduction

Education has been a powerful shaping force in post-1945 Japan, as well as a battleground for competing ideas. Particularly notable have been the striking contrasts between compulsory and post-compulsory education. The nine years of compulsory education at elementary and junior high school have been marked by attempts to approach equality of provision, instruction and treatment of pupils. However, post-compulsory education is a different and more complex story. The high school system has been the arena for competing visions of what education should be: comprehensive, universal and equal, or differentiated, hierarchized and competitive. Meanwhile, the proportion of young people receiving university education has soared, yet without a fundamental change in the system's hierarchical character.

Education can thus be understood as reflecting some of the strongest competing sets of ideas in postwar Japan—the idealization of equality of opportunity and treatment on the one hand, and the (enthusiastic or reluctant) acceptance of differentiation and competition on the other. In turn, experience of these materialized ideals has shaped successive generations of postwar Japanese. Examining education helps us understand how and why Japanese society as a whole has continued to embrace ideas and practices that may seem in tension, if not downright contradictory.

Many features of Japan's postwar education system have roots in the decades before 1945, which have continued to exert powerful influences, as noted below. However, the starting point for any account must be the Allied Occupation (1945–1952), which saw the greatest reshaping of Japan's education system since the Meiji period (1868–1912).

This chapter describes the proceedings of the conflict provoked by one of the worst environmental degradations of modern Japan. It emphasizes the various aspects of these historical events, and how the exploitation of the Ashio copper deposit in Tochigi Prefecture triggered an intense public debate on mining contamination at the turn of the century. Among other factors, scientific expertise mobilized both by protesters and the government contributed to the emergence of pollution as a social, political and environmental issue.

Introduction

On 18 December 1891, during the Diet of Japan's second session, Tanaka Shōzō (1841–1913), a representative from Tochigi Prefecture, called on the government to take action regarding the activities of the Ashio copper mine because they were contaminating agricultural land located downstream. Private property—protected by the imperial constitution—and the public good (kōeki) were at risk, he said. In the newly established Diet (1890), this intervention made a strong impression. While there had been local actions and denunciations prior to Tanaka's intervention, the fact that he raised the issue at the national level heralded the beginning of an intense social debate on industrial pollution.

Environmental degradation, however, was not something entirely new. Ancient and early modern Japanese societies had also put nature under pressure. For instance, on several occasions throughout history, forests were chopped down for major construction projects or to gain more agricultural land. In addition, the early modern period (1573–1867) saw contamination events due to mining activities, and records of complaints go back to the 17th century.

Nevertheless, in Japan, as elsewhere, from the end of the 19th century the expansion of industrialization damaged the environment at an unprecedented scale. Among other activities, mining, dyeing and chemical industries had a significant impact, affecting water, land, air and living organisms. In many places across the archipelago, toxic effluent and fumes harmed people's livelihood and health, sparking long-term disputes among actors representing conflicting interests.

The pollution from the Ashio mine is one of the worst environmental crises of modern times: at its peak in 1896, the river network had spread pollutants (arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury, among others) to around 40,000 hectares of land downstream of the mine, across five prefectures and a part of Tokyo's territory.

In 1993, Carol Gluck argued that Japan's “long postwar” was distinctive, and that Japanese people clung to the “postwar” to express contentment with the status quo of democracy, peace and prosperity. This chapter shows the analysis is not valid in the Heisei era. After the mid-1990s, Japan's political and cultural elites, faced with Japan's diplomatic and economic stagnation, began to criticize the idea of the “postwar” in order to disrupt the status quo. The general public of the 2010s, on the other hand, viewed territorial disputes, the presence of US military bases and memories of the war as reasons why the “postwar” era was still continuing,

Introduction

In January 1989, the Showa Emperor, Hirohito, died and the Heisei Emperor, Akihito, took the throne. Nineteen eighty-nine was also the year that the Cold War ended. In other words, the Heisei era (1989–2019) overlapped with the post-Cold War era. Furthermore, within Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party having been in power since 1955, lost power in 1993, and the so-called 1955 System that was the domestic manifestation of the Cold War in Japan, ended. Thereafter, a generation of politicians who had not experienced WWII ascended to the post of prime minister.

However, Japanese mass media and intellectuals continued to use the word “postwar” (sengo) even in the Heisei era and beyond. Every time an important event occurred, such as the earthquake in and around Kobe city in 1995, the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, the change in security policy in 2015, or the Covid-19 pandemic starting in 2020, the mass media described these as “the first time in the postwar [era]” or “the turning point of the postwar [era].” What remains uninvestigated, however, is how the Japanese people of the Heisei era actually perceived the “postwar.”

In this chapter I investigate this issue from three angles. First, I reconsider Carol Gluck's commentary on the postwar published in 1993 and then categorize possible definitions of postwar. Second, I explore debates among political and cultural elites over the postwar era following the Cold War. Third, I then scrutinize opinion polls conducted in the Heisei era in order to understand how the postwar era was perceived by the Japanese general public. Following this analysis, I reconsider whether Gluck's commentary is still valid today.

This chapter presents Japanese colonialism as an environmental process, one fueled by resource extraction yet also committed to “greening” the territories it occupied. Planting cherry trees in places such as Korea symbolized Japanese rule. At the same time, Japanese agricultural and botanical ideals had to adapt to meet the conditions of diverse ecologies. Even when attempts to remake landscapes fell short, they established legacies that persist across East Asian landscapes through to the present day.

Introduction

By the time the Japanese empire reached its greatest extent during the throes of the Second World War, it occupied territory ranging from Alaska's foggy Aleutian islands and the Mongolian steppe to Burmese mangroves and the phosphate island of Nauru. This diversity of ecologies was no accident. It reflected not only the empire's vast geographic reach but also the fact that Japan's Asia-Pacific War was a resource war. Coal, oil and rubber are seldom found in a single location, and as they fueled Japan's engines of war they also pushed the empire into new environments. While the spatial scale of this process may have been unprecedented, Japan and its empire had been expanding in ecologically transformative ways for a long time.

This chapter addresses what I call Japan's colonial environments. Taking a cue from the field of environmental history, “environment” here connotes neither a passive background for human events nor a universalized and singular entity (“the environment”). Instead, I take “environment” to reside first in the mass of non-human materials, minerals, rivers, seas, marshes, mountains, trees, grasses, shrubs, crops and animals that constituted the physical reality of the Japanese empire and also in the relationships these various objects, organisms and landscapes had with each other and with humans. The colonial or quasi-colonial spaces within the modern Japanese empire on which this chapter focuses are, by year of acquisition or incorporation, Taiwan (1895), South Sakhalin/Karafuto (1905), Korea (1910), the South Seas Mandate (1919) and Manchukuo (1932).

Before addressing any of the above cases, I examine the early modern incorporation of Ezo/Hokkaido, where the stage was set for the drama of Japanese imperialism to play out across continental Northeast Asia and islands to the south and north of the Japanese archipelago.

Western feminists often assume that feminism originated in the West; by this logic, all other feminisms must be the product of borrowing or imitation. Yet the Japanese case clearly illustrates that feminism is necessarily the product of local concerns, even as it finds inspiration in foreign models and develops according to a logic of transnational exchange and negotiation. In this chapter, I explore the development of postwar Japanese feminism in transnational frame, focusing on four major loci of discursive negotiation: the early postwar Cold War context, travel and study abroad, translation, and international organizations and frameworks.

Introduction

Western feminists have often assumed that feminism originated in the West. By this logic, all other feminisms must be the product of borrowing or imitation. In this chapter, I argue that the Japanese case provides clear evidence that feminism is necessarily the product of local concerns, even as it finds inspiration in foreign models and develops according to a logic of transnational exchange and negotiation. Here I take a capacious view of both halves of the term “transnational feminism.” I understand “transnational” to mean any activity that reaches beyond the boundaries of Japan as they are currently defined (territorial disputes notwithstanding), and “feminism” to mean any endeavor or discourse that seeks to improve women's status or broaden the range of possible forms of subjectivity available to them. In particular, I understand the latter term in a flexible sense because of the diversity of viewpoints that has historically characterized women who sought such improvement, and because the terminology that has denoted such activity in Japan has been equally diverse. It was only in the 1970s that Japanese women began to reclaim the term feminisuto (feminist) from its earlier usage to mean “ladies’ man.” Meanwhile, although terms as different as fujin mondai (the woman problem) and danjo dōken (lit. “same rights for men and women”) have been employed in Japanese feminist discourse, and every such term carries its own historical significance and baggage, we can nevertheless argue that women who engaged in such discourse can be said to have sought to improve the circumstances of women, though they may have defined such objectives very differently.

The previous chapter examined audiences’ engagement with TV horror, verbalized on social media, illustrating various aspects of the abject spectrum that pendulate between emotional and somatic, ideological, and aesthetic affect. Alongside consuming screen media, audiences, particularly fans and anti-fans, delight in producing their own content pertaining to, affirming, and/or transforming extant genre objects that they subsequently share with other like-minded individuals. Therefore, further conceptualizing abject spectrums beyond watching horror television as a sealed-off experience, we can analyse these ‘prosumers’ – a hybridization of media producer and consumer – and the work they create as affective meaning-making practices, ‘as a form of interpretation and reception’ (Pavličkova and Kleut, 2016, p. 351). In doing so, the chapter better accounts for fandom and anti-fandom within horror scholarship (Booth, 2012a, p. 70).

Moreover, considering the techno-spatial facilitation of horror participatory cultures, digital media scholarship and Fan Studies have largely examined social media sites’ written posts, tweets, and blogs (as Chapter 4 attests to), as well as transformative work such as literary fan fiction. Whilst such written logos remains fundamental to the ontologies and textualities of social media, there has also been a salient visual turn online. As Gillan remarks, the ‘web interfaces of Tumblr, Pinterest, and YouTube, among others, not only allow, but also encourage visual commentary’ (2016, p. 13).

This book has sought to examine two central and interrelated components: 1) the increased popularity and variety of twenty-first century horror television within a post-TV paradigm that includes screen media content and broader transmedia ecologies. 2) abject spectrums as a conceptual model that accounts for the heterogeneity of responses and readings of horror television and how these filter into audiences’ own participatory cultures and meaning-making practices. This section ruminates on where we might turn our attention to build on these components and the fields of Horror Studies, TV Studies, Digital Media Studies, and Audience and Fan Studies.

Naturally, with any study supported by case studies there are further examples that can support and/or add further complexity to analyses, arguments, evaluations, and concepts. Certainly, as Chapter 3 attests to, the transnational potential for formal and informal dissemination routes of TV horror further enriches the field on inquiry beyond commonly examined Anglophonic territories (see Abbott and Jowett, 2021a). Much like the study of horror film (e.g. Schneider and Williams, 2005), the international production and circulation of televisual horror allows us to research industries that produce such genre vehicles, cultures that the genre is contextualized against, and global audiences who consume the genre.

Furthermore, post-TV has challenged, but not eradicated, television's ontology that has fostered new areas of horror media beyond traditional broadcast that evince televisual qualities.

The book has thus far looked at textual content and its distribution through channels, services, and portals as part of the formal post-TV horror media ecology. However, access through such official means is not readily available to all. Whilst the global COVID-19 pandemic has seen subscriptions to subscription video on demand (SVoD) services such as Netflix drastically increase (Hazelton, 2020), others are unable to consume twenty-first century TV horror through official routes for a host of reasons. Unsurprisingly, then, during the same period the pirating of media has also greatly increased (Cuthbertson, 2020). Questioning and revising the TVIII ‘TV everywhere’ doctrine (Faltesek, 2011), this chapter addresses how and why some audiences cannot or will not use legitimate official distribution channels for media consumption and how this is remedied by delving into the shadows of informal media circulation that also form part of the post-TV landscape.

TVIII and DVD/Blu-ray formats have aided in the transnational flow of content moving beyond national borders (Shimpach, 2010, pp. 51–52; Gillan, 2011, p. 87). However, informal digital distribution routes evidence nuanced cross-border media flows (Lobato and Thomas, 2015, p. 4), fitting within the milieu of convergence culture (Hjort, 2010, pp. 13–14).

Thus far, the monograph has predominantly framed post-TV's transmediality in digital and/or online forms. But while such cross-media networks are paramount to horror television and twenty-first century TV in general, Freeman and Gambarato assert that ‘beyond the digital domain, transmediality can and should involve a variety of alternative combinations between online and offline platforms’ (2019, p. 4). This is because ‘the possibilities to enrich the audience experience via offline activities, live events, and analogue initiatives, are immense because they can dramatically contribute to (1) the feeling of immersion, (2) the sense of belonging, and (3) the emotional response of audiences’ (ibid.). The offline and analogue are equally as significant to post-TV horror transmedia as digital new media, yet the former is often neglected in favour of stressing the latter. Addressing this oversight, Chapter 6 focuses on physical real world transmedia.

Relatedly, while Chapter 5 located audiences’ image transtexts within online media's visual turn, Fan Studies has often ‘privilege[d] textual over tactile engagement’ (Rehak, 2014), neglecting more craft-based practices (Hills, 2009) and ‘object-oriented’ fans (Santo, 2018). Dovetailing these two points, this chapter explores two instances of offline material transmediality that cultivates a more holistic understanding of the post-TV horror (trans) media landscape, introduces novel fan practices and creativity, and further develops notions of horror audience affect understood through the abject spectrum model: the continuum of emotional/corporeal, ideological, and aesthetic affective responses to screen media horror.

The first half of this book examined how horror rose from the depths of premium cable subscriptions to bedevil the post-television landscape, birthing in a host of channels and services that supported existing brand identities within an increasingly crowded marketplace of broadcast-and online-native portals. Textual analysis was employed to undertake a range of case study readings ‘supported and developed around […] wider contextual or extratextual framework[s]’ (Creeber, 2006, p. 35), which argued horror TV interpellated genre fans, target brand audiences, and wider viewership via various textual and paratextual features. However, media's ‘[m]eaning comes into being only with the person who experiences it’ (Nowell-Smith, 2000, p. 15). Moreover ‘neither signification nor information guarantees meaning’ (ibid.). Therefore, Part 2 of the book focuses on myriad audience responses to TV horror by conceptualizing and applying the abject spectrum model. Chapter 4 does so by analysing viewers’ online post, presenting a ‘portfolio of interpretation […] [highlighting] that contextual and individual factors form […] viewing experience[s]’ (Hill, 1997, p. 5).