Academic trends in postwar Japan studies are once again shifting away from objective, empirical history toward ideology.
Through a dialogue featuring Takashi Itō and others, this article critically examines the return to New Left historical interpretations, the revision of the Reischauer line, and the spread of a “dark view of modern Japan” in both Japanese and American academia.
It is a sharp warning against a scholarly climate in which factional logic overrides empirical inquiry.

2019-03-07
She had originally been New Left, but under my guidance she did highly empirical and excellent work.
The moment she no longer had anything to do with me, she returned to her original New Left position, but there are many such people.

What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.

The Reischauer line revised by the Dower camp.

Fukui.
The framework that Professor Itō presented in the 1960s was epoch-making in that it added a vertical axis of reform and preservation of the status quo to the previously conventional horizontal axis of right and left, or restoration and progress.
Within this framework, communism and so-called national socialism, which appear irreconcilable as opposite extremes on the usual horizontal axis, belong to the same group on the vertical axis in the sense that both are forces of reform or revolution.
In that sense, it was natural that many Marxists at the time suddenly turned into “imperial-system fascists.”

After you proposed this framework, a similar way of viewing things attracted attention overseas in a completely different context.
There is a book titled Ni droite ni gauche (1983) by Zeev Sternhell, a Jewish historian and political scholar who once worked in France.
The title means “Neither Right nor Left,” and it became a worldwide topic of discussion.
An English edition has also been published.
Using France as an example, he made important observations about the political situation in prewar Europe, which cannot be understood through the conventional categories of right and left.
In countries like Britain, where traditional conservatism as a force for preserving the status quo was strong, fascism as a revolutionary force was weak.
Conversely, in France, Germany, and Italy, where forces defending the status quo were weak, fascism, alongside Marxism, became a major force, and in Germany and Italy it even took power.
It is the same as the framework you proposed of “reform and preservation of the status quo.”
It is so similar that one is led to wonder whether he had read your paper.
You have not published an English edition of your own work, have you? (laughs)

Itō.
No, I have not.
However, in the sense of my work having appeared in English, I believe it was at Stanford University, where a speech I gave at an international conference was translated into English.
It was a proposal that perhaps if one looked at things in this way, various matters would become visible.

As I also wrote in History and Myself (Chūkō Shinsho), those who criticize do not turn toward me and criticize directly, but instead address their criticism to their own camp.
They say, do not be deceived by someone like Itō (laughs).
There is also the method of criticism by ignoring or silently passing over someone.

Ezaki.
Is it the case that today’s Japanese historical establishment and part of the mass media are trying to cling to error-ridden “orthodoxy” by ignoring Professor Itō’s proper revisionist work.

Itō.
If I speak dramatically, that is probably so.
Many of my seminar students have also gone over to that side, or try not to touch the issue at all.

Ezaki.
In the December issue of WiLL, I had a dialogue with Atsushi Iwata on the subject of Yōko Katō, under the article title “Professor Yōko Katō, Please Stop Deceiving Junior High and High School Students!”
She too was one of your seminar students.

Itō.
She had originally been New Left, but under my guidance she did highly empirical and excellent work.
The moment she no longer had anything to do with me, she returned to her original New Left position, but there are many such people.
Yoshiaki Yoshimi of Chūō University is like that as well.
Even now, he is doing things on the comfort women issue that I find difficult to understand.

Fukui.
There is a similar tendency in America as well, where younger scholars born after the 1940s are reverting to Marxist historical interpretations.
It may well be a global tendency.
If you read James Gregor’s Totalitarianism and Political Religion (2012), it says that Japan’s political system can by no means be called fascist.
He is now in his eighties, just like Professor Itō.
And yet, even in America, among the younger generation one can see a regressive tendency toward what may be called a “dark view of Japanese history.”

Itō.
In the end, even Edwin Reischauer’s objective historical view of Japan, which was far more sound than that of Herbert Norman, who was a communist and suspected of being a Soviet spy, is now being denied.
That too is a bad form of revisionism.
George Akita, who may be called Reischauer’s last disciple, is still active, but almost everyone else follows an “anti-Reischauer” line.
Andrew Gordon at Harvard as well.
Otherwise, one cannot get a job as a Japan specialist at an American university.

Many of the people who were in my seminar have also gone over there.
But unfortunately, much of their research is of a kind that makes it hard to understand what they are even aiming at.
Their themes avoid touching the core of politics, and instead take up trivial issues on a grand scale.
They either ridicule the attitude of confronting matters head-on, or else flee from it.
What matters is publishing papers and books and accumulating points.

Ezaki.
Although Reischauer corrected the course of what might be called a “dark view of modern Japan” in works such as A New Look at Modern Japanese History (Kodansha Gendai Shinsho), researchers of the New Left such as John Dower gradually rose to prominence, engaged in line struggles, and revised Reischauer’s line one after another.
John Dower and the other New Left scholars effectively took over American academic studies on Japan and Asia.
Howard Schonberger wrote about that proudly from the Left’s point of view.
The book is Aftermath of War, 1945–1952: A Certain American and the Reconstruction of Japan.
Leaving Grew aside, it is mistaken to praise people such as Bisson, who also appears in Venona.

To be continued.