Imagining Democracy: Generational Differences in 1950s Japan

• In Event: Culture and Democracy in the Making of Modern Japanese Intellectuals

Abstract

In the mid-twentieth century, Japanese society was transformed by war, defeat, and military occupation. These events left their mark on subsequent generations of Japanese citizens, who made sense of the divisions and conflicts of the postwar present with reference to collectively shared past experiences. My paper focuses on the origins and political function of these generational divisions in postwar Japan, mainly divided by the period spent in one’s adolescence: a pre-war generation, a wartime generation and a postwar generation.
After 1945, the US Occupiers sought to make Japan a more democratic country through institutional reforms and a new constitution, yet they relied on the authority of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers to enact these radical changes. As a result, a contradiction emerged between democratic theory and democratization in practice, in which the former required the people’s autonomy and the latter their obedience. In search of a remedy to this problem, intellectuals such as Tsurumi Shunsuke (1922-) and Matsushita Keiichi (1929-) discovered the value of generational experience. Each generation gravitated toward different ideas about how a democratic life should be lived, especially after Japan’s period of rapid economic growth in the 1950s. I argue that, after the collapse of a wartime ethics that sacrificed the private to the public, the middle-range concept of the “generation” mediated between the recovery of private life and the urgent need to continue to participate in public matters – not as a loyal subject but as a democratic citizen.

Author

• Sungeun Cho, The University of Tokyo