“The Joy of Normal Living” as the Promise of Happiness for Japanese Women and their Families

“The Joy of Normal Living” is at once the motto and the ideology of Kurihara Harumi, Japan’s best-known charisma housewife and icon of domesticity. This article looks at the relationship between “normal living” and the promise of happiness, as formulated in postwar Japan. Beginning with the government’s promotion, in the early postwar period, of the idea of akarui seikatsu (bright new life) as related to the typical suburban middle-class family of salaryman husband and full-time housewife, the article goes on to look at the cultural idea of “being happy as a woman” in contemporary Japan. Based on in-depth interviews with full-time housewives, and an analysis of popular women’s magazines, this article seeks to decipher what constitutes the idea of happiness for these women and for their generation.     

Changes in Japanese strategy in 1939–1940 and the internationalization of the Sino–Japanese War

In the early stage of the Sino–Japanese War, Japan was trying hard to limit the conflict to within a scope where it could be resolved bilaterally between only the two nations involved. However, her actual behavior was in stark contrast to her wishful desire to be at peace with the United States, pushing the latter step by step instead in the direction of aiding China and thwarting Japan. Caught in a dilemma created as the United States abrogated the American–Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, and faced with the changes in the European situation, Japan’s policy makers were eventually pushed by their obsession with the “New East Asian Order” and by their yearning for the “Extended New East Asian Order” which was to include Southeast Asia, deciding to steer the Sino–Japanese War in the direction of “international resolution,” which was just an alternate route to the same goal sought by China. Subsequently, not only did Japan refuse to withdraw from China, she actually took one step further in an expansion southwards, trying to kill several birds with one stone. The war thus spilled over from China to encompass a much greater area. In this process, Japan’s diplomatic corps was often several steps ahead of the military, reflecting the carefully considered background in Japanese policymaking.     

The Japanese Administration of Guam, 1941–1944: a study of occupation and integration policies,with Japanese oral histories

Cane and Labour: the political economy of the Queensland sugar industry, 1862–1906. By Adrian Graves. Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press, 1993. xxi, 282 pp, maps, index. ISBN 0–7486–011711. £35 stg.     

“Friendly authoritarianism” and the bedtaun: public space in a Japanese suburb

In the West, public space ideally serves as the open, transformative core of urban democratic society. But what role does it play in a non-Western democracy with anti-individualist, authoritarian cultural mores, such as in Japan? The author used archival research, direct observations and informal interviews, as well as reference to key insights of actor-network theory (ANT) to investigate whether or not the public spaces of a Japanese suburb are conducive to individual freedom and expression. The paper concludes that these spaces help maintain what Sugimoto (1997) calls the “friendly authoritarianism” of Japanese society.     

Between banality and effervescence?: a study of Japanese youth nationalism

The study of taken‐for‐granted nationalism has been bourgeoning in the last two decades. With Michael Billig's seminal thesis of banal nationalism, it is now more common to see those studies that focus on day‐to‐day unconscious flagging of national symbols in established (as opposed to new) nations. There are also studies that re‐emphasize Durkheimian moments of collective effervescence through ecstatic events (such as the Olympics and the Soccer World Cup) that concretize national identities. By critically engaging with these concepts, this exploratory study delves into the nature of Japanese youth nationalism. What are the sources of their national pride? How proud are they? Or, not? How do the Japanese youth perceive the national symbols such as the national flag and how is it related to the sense of nation?     

Bridging between “here/now” and “there/then”: guiding Japanese mainland school “peace education” tours in Okinawa

Anthropologists and geographers have pointed out an inherent dilemma in educational tours, such as fieldtrips and educational “dark” tours, which bring tourists to the places where a tragic event befell. While these tours emphasize a difference between the learner-tourists’ home and their travel destinations as a source of great pedagogical potential, the learner-tourists must also bridge the gap for their educational experience to be meaningful. The article examines “peace education” school tours from Japanese main islands to Okinawa, the site of the tragic Battle of Okinawa in 1945 and the host of massive U.S. military bases today, guided by local peace activists who view tour-guiding, or what they refer to as “peace guiding”, at the sites relevant to the past war and current militarization as a means of political activism. Through two ethnographic snapshots of tour-guiding for the school tours by these “peace guides”, the article demonstrates how the educational tours’ spatiotemporal dilemma can be mediated by engaging and thought-provoking narrative performances by tour guides.     

Contextualising Australia–Japan security cooperation: the normative framing of Japanese security policy

On July 1, 2014, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's cabinet commenced a historic transformation of post-war Japan's security policy by overturning previous interpretations of the constitution's pacifist clause, Article 9. The Cabinet Decision on the Development of Seamless Security Legislation to Ensure Japan's Survival and Protect Its People stated that collective self-defence was consistent with the constitution and, consequently, Japan would immediately develop a more proactive and less constrained security policy. But while this outcome may seem sensible and overdue from a realist perspective of Japan's standing as a mature democratic nation in an increasingly difficult geopolitical situation, the manner in which it is being enacted may seriously undermine the normative legitimacy of Japan's new security identity. In this article, the author examines how Shinzō Abe's administration has attempted to shape the norms surrounding security policy revision in Japan, and how these norms, in turn, have affected or constrained Abe's agency. This is done with specific reference to the external contexts of the USA's ‘rebalance’ policy and the deepening of Japan's security relationship with Australia, with a view to anticipating how normative turmoil might impact on the potential of this relationship.     

A discussion of the concept of “feudal”

The Western terms feudal  and feudalism  have been widely and improperly translated as fengjian  in contemporary China. The early Western Sinologists and Chinese scholars, including Yan Fu, did not originally make such a translation. Yan initially transliterated the term feudalism  as fute zhi in his early translations. It was not until the 20th century, when Western classical evolutionism found its way into China, that feudalism  was reduced to an abstract concept, and the Western European model was generalized as a framework for understanding development in China and the whole world. Only then did Yan Fu first equate feudalism  with fengjian,  and China was believed to have experienced a feudal society  in the same sense as Europe. From the perspective of intellectual history, using evidential and theoretical analyses, this article attempts to show that feudalism was a historical product in the development of Western Europe and existed only in Europe, fengjian  is a system appropriate only in discussions of pre-Qin China, and China from the Qin to the Qing experienced instead a system of imperial autocracy. The medieval periods in the West and in China evidence widely divergent social forms and hence should not be confused with the same label.     

The “Chinese World Order” Encounters the “East Asian World Order”— Post-War Japanese Historians’ Debates on the Tribute System

In this paper, I trace the post-war Japanese genealogy of studies on China’s tribute system (imperial China’s relatively tolerant approach to its foreign relations) in relation to the English-language work of historian John King Fairbank (1907–91). I emphasize that, together with the sporadic Chinese studies into China’s tribute system prior to the 1950s, it was the post-war research of Japanese historians that inspired Fairbank, who, in turn, further stimulated critical debates on the topic in Japan. I first concentrate on post-war Japanese debates concerning an “East Asian world order” based on a “system of investiture/tribute.” This notion, developed by the Japanese historian Nishijima Sadao in 1962, precisely corresponds to Fairbank’s 1941 understanding of the “tribute system” or “Confucian world-order,” but contrasts with Fairbank’s later, controversial understanding of a “Chinese world order” as proposed in 1968. In the second part of this paper, I introduce Japanese historian Hamashita Takeshi’s 1980s and 1990s arguments on the “tribute trade system” as representative of the younger generation within this genealogy, contrasting it with the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank. In the third part, I locate this Japanese genealogy within the wider historical context of post-war Japanese intellectual cultural politics. This means that I examine Japanese historians’ arguments both from the angle of historiography and from the perspective of post-war Japanese intellectual history.     

The Democratic Party of Japan's security policy and Japanese politics of constitutional revision: a cloud over Article 9?

A Referendum Law took effect in Japan in May 2010. Since a referendum is a prerequisite to any change to the Japanese ‘Peace Constitution’, this is an event with potentially far-reaching consequences. By gauging the Democratic Party of Japan's views on the issue of revision of the constitution—particularly revision of the famous Article 9, with remains a foundation of Japanese security policy—and by extrapolating on the findings, this article aims to further the understanding of the new government's security policy more generally. After finding that the probability that the Japanese government will capitalise on the coming into force of the Referendum Law to reopen the constitutional debate is currently low, the article advances a number of hypotheses as to why this is the case, and discusses scenarios under which the status quo could change. Finally, it draws out the implications (a) of the preceding analysis for DPJ security policy, and (b) of DPJ security policy for the interpretation of the constitution where Article 9 is concerned.     

A Review of “Decision Points”

Abstract

A large body scholarship demonstrates that the population size of an electoral district affects elections in important ways, yet little is known about the implications of population size for campaigning and fundraising. I posit that the challenges of running a campaign in a populous electorate require candidates to focus their fundraising efforts on the wealthy. I analyze campaign finance records published by the Federal Election Commission during the 2006–2014 Senate elections and find that Senate candidates running in large states receive fewer donations per capita from in-state donors, but they tend to receive larger donations on average and more money from contributions of $1,500 and above. In sum, candidates running in populous states appear to rely upon comparably smaller pools of wealthy constituents writing larger checks to finance their campaigns. In the context of rising campaign costs, these findings suggest that constituency population growth may exacerbate representational inequalities between citizens and contribute to the growing influence of the wealthy in U.S. politics.