Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

After Imperial Japan's defeat in World War II in 1945, a broad pacifist social consensus emerged in Japan. By 1995, it came to permeate not just the peace movement, but also social movements in general as their guiding spirit. For decades this pacifism enjoyed majority popular support and served as one of the defining characteristics of post-World War II Japanese state and society. This pacifism, however, was neither a clearly defined credo nor the sole guiding principle of state and society in postwar Japan. It had to live in chronic conflict with two other factors defining the state – military alliance with the United States and the ruling group's usually concealed allegiance to, and justification of, the Japanese imperial past, both war-friendly and incompatible with pacifism. Indeed, this pacifism has seen concentrated attacks from conservative forces headed by far right political and ideological groups which set out in the mid-1990s to remake the postwar Japanese state into a new type of war-capable regime. They pursued two goals: legitimating the now unconstitutional Japanese military by changing the constitution in order to more fully satisfy US strategic global requirements, and openly reinstating the “glory” of the modern Japanese empire. The postwar pacifist principle is the main obstacle to the achievement of this design. This pacifism came into being reflecting a few ... log in or subscribe to read full text