Did Japanese culture change after world war two? How exactly?

Factual Questions
1

From what i can gather in the 30’s and 40’s The Japanese government was imperialistic, very abusive towards human rights, militant and expansionist. The government appears to be the opposite now, exerting efforts to promote human rights abroad and having virtually no military.

Governmental changes (going from one extreme to the other) i can understand as government is just a group of individuals dictating policy but what about the people in Japan and the changes they underwent? How did Japanese views on racial superiority change due to world war two? I assume the Japanese will no longer commit suicide to avoid disgracing the emperor but how did that happen? Did the shame of being conquered by inferiors (white europeans) shatter Japanese ideas of superiority, bringing the whole system down or what?

2

I am going to disagree on the “having virtually no military” - the Japanese Self Defense force is one of the best militaries in the world; Japanese military spending is 4th in the world, behind the US, China, and France. CIA World Factbook

3

And many require opinions as answers.

I’ll give you my own quick take. The big cultural change for Japan came when Admiral Perry of the USA arrived in the 1850s. He pretty much opened the country to outside influence by force. This shock was the main cause for the civil war that happened in Japan thereafter, in which the supporters of feudalism lost. Japan wanted to become more European and more powerful–it turned more to England and Germany than to the US for advice and influence.

Japan successfully militarized and built up its economy and industry–one of the great success stories in human history.

Then Japan won the Russo-Japanese war in 1904 or so (the peace was brokered by Teddy Roosevelt, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so). It had defeated a major European power; it had arrived. The military and protofascist philosophy of the government had been validated. Japan went on to fight on the side of the Allies in WWI, battling its future parter in crime Germany in the Pacific.

Around this time, Japan started becoming not such a nice country. It took over Korea in 1910 and Taiwan around that time. By the 1930s, Japan was building an empire in Asia. It took over huge chunks of China (the Nanking Rape occurred in 1937). Despite the absolute horror of Nanking, things settled down in China rather quickly, and there was an uneasy but reasonable status quo in place. (At this time there were coups and little chunks of chaos in Japan itself. There was a fairly strong Communist contingent.)

Then WWII. But things could have turned out otherwise. The 1940 Olympics were scheduled to be played in Tokyo but were cancelled because of WWII. The relationship between Japan and the US was chilly, but the point of no return had not been reached. If you look at Japanese movies from the 1930s, you see the same Art Deco Euro aethetic that you do in US films. You have nice music, books critical of the war in China (Ikite iru Heitai by Tatsuzo Ishikawa, which was eventually banned), etc. Sure, you had fascism and all the emperor sh*t, but my impression of Japan at the time (including Japanese culture) is not one of absolute madness. It was nothing like Nazi Germany.

So, Japan lost the war, and the culture that appeared directly after it is not so radically different than what you see today, and my guess is that it’s not so different than what was before it. Our grandma here talks about life in Tokyo before the war. It was not so wild or weird.

Personally, I view the whole fascism/militarism thing as being a failed experiment that really didn’t reflect the base culture. Japan had never been expansionist before the 20th century, and there had been relative political stability under the shogunate for hundreds of years. Sure, it was a narrow-minded, insular, xenophobic country with some weird military traditions (samurai and whatnot).

I don’t know–that’s my spin. Like anything else, it’s an egregious oversimplification.

4

Damnit, it seemed like a good idea at the time! :smack:
:wink: :smiley:

5

I think the major factor was the devastation caused by Allied bombing of the Japan and, more importantly, the subsequent Allied occupation, restructuring and rebuilding programs. Remember the famous photo of Macarthur standing next to the emperor? Here is the enormous American conqueror towering over the emperor, who suddenly doesn’t seem so god-like anymore. The military junta, ie Tojo et al, have been killed, executed, disgraced and the japanese people, being the good, conformist, island-living people that they are, start getting with the new program.

Again - a vast simplification and generalisation, but important factors to consider

6

I’m not trying to be facetious here, but I have heard the posit that all the Godzilla and other giant rubbery monsters were a direct result of the national psyche after the dropping of the first atomic bombs.

7

Well, the radiation from the two atomic bombs we dropped on Japan caused many mutations in a large section of the Japanese population. These mutations are responsible for the animation atrocity called “anime”.

Well, how else do you explain “Lupin III”?

:smiley: :stuck_out_tongue:

8

The original Godzilla was released in 1954, less than ten years after the end of the war. It might not look like such a terrifying movie to you now but imagine someone who had seen Tokyo ravaged by the fire bombings, losing family, friends, someone who had spent the last ten years rebuilding the city. The symbolism of a giant fire-breathing monster that destroys Tokyo would be pretty obvious to someone like that, wouldn’t you think?

9

Korea during Hideoyoshi’s reign or the late Yamato period might disagree. For that matter northeastern Japan had been gradually conquered from the ethnically similar/identical, but culturally rather different Emishi from 730-810 ( with periodic rebellions for some years afterwards ). On a less governmental note, Japanese marauders plagued Korea from the early 13th to the early 16th century and of course in a related manner Japanese pirates were the bane of a declining Ming China.

If Japan was rarely outwardly expansionistic, it was only because there was rarely much opportunity. Geography mitigated against it to some extent and either internal turmoil or warfare prevented it or the looming presense of the various Chinese empires or the periodic strong Korean kingdom inhibited it. Japan was a very highly militarized society with a strong warrior ethos. This was taken to the point of absurdity during the reign of the militarists from 1932-1945. But it had always been a feature of Japanese culture to some extent.

There was a profound cultural shift ( perhaps more than one ) after the “opening of Japan” by Perry. But I would say there was also one after WW II in revulsion to the disaster that hypermilitarism had brought to Japan and in the context of the enforced hobbling of the Japanese military by the Allies.

  • Tamerlane
10

According to Thomas M. Coffey, in his book Imperial Tragedy - Japan in World War II: The First Days and the Last (1970), it wasn’t really the government that was like this. It was the army. Emperor Hirohito was apparently opposed to the war, and was opposed to much of what the army was doing. For example, the invasion of Manchuria was carried out against the Emperor’s wishes. Essentially, the army was out of control. Hirohito’s grandfather had abolished the Samurai class, and yet the army (and society in general) was still full of people who considered themselves Samurai - indeed, the majority of the army’s officers were the sons and grandsons of the last official generation of Samurai, and they didn’t want to let it go.

Although Hirohito was, for all intents and purposes, a figurehead, the army used the “sacredness” of the Emperor as a justification for what it was doing. In the years leading up to WWII, the army was pretty much running the country. Even near the end of WWII, when it was clear that Japan could not win, the army refused to surrender and continued to proclaim that they were fighting for the Emperor. Hirohito and his most trusted officials literally had to secretly negotiate for peace, because the army was assassinating government officials it suspected of wanting peace.

There was a somewhat amusing story in the book about one coastal city in Japan that had escaped being bombed by the US. One day, near the end, the army showed up and installed an anti-aircraft gun. The civilians in the city banded together and forced the army to remove the gun, because all that gun was going to accomplish was attract the attention of the bombers.

The book was based upon official Japanese documents as well as interviews with former Japanese military personnel, government officials and civilians. Good read.

11

From what I’ve read, the main focus of Japanese society from the Admiral Perry time onward was survival in a world rapidly being dominated by the West. From the time of the attempted Mongol invasion of Japan, the Japanese have been aware that there were Big Powers out there that Japan had to defend against, and this became even more the case as Europeans started showing up in the 16th century. The Phillipines, Indochina, Burma, and Malaysia/Indonesia all become colonial possessions. Thailand narrowly maintained independence by being at the border of the British and French spheres of influence. China, once the largest and most advanced civilization on Earth, was reduced to signing treaties at gunpoint. The Japanese at first relied on isolationism, but once Perry showed that that was no longer an option, they were acutely aware that if they couldn’t modernize and beat the Europeans at their own game, they too would be overrun.

So in addition to the modernization programs of the latter 19th century, there was the push to acquire a colonial empire. You simply couldn’t be a first rate independent power without an empire, or so it seemed. And if a relatively small island nation like Britain could be a world power, why not Japan? The defeat of the Russians and acquiring Korea and Formosa indeed seemed to signal that Japan’s day in the sun had arrived. What happened from the late '20s through 1945 was that the hyper-militaristic Bushido faction took control of the government, and decided on a more proactive course of conquest.

Then the worst happened. Japan was conquered by a western power, the US. But what didn’t happen was Japan wasn’t reduced to a colonial possession. Ironically Japan had tried desperately to get into the empire business when imperialism was on it’s last legs. Survival in a western dominated world turned from military and strategic competition to economic competition. So I wouldn’t say that the Japanese culture has fundamentally changed, just it’s focus.

12

(LOL) Thats funny…Cruel, but funny :dubious: :smiley: