Japan since 1945 : from postwar to post-bubble

About the Author

Christopher Gerteis is an historian of Modern and Contemporary Japan at SOAS University of London, UK and The University of Tokyo, Japan. His first book, Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (2009), is an interdisciplinary study of the forgotten history of wage-earning Japanese women who during the 1950s militantly contested the socialist labor movement's revival of many prewar notions of normative gender roles. His second book, Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (forthcoming), examines the forces that shaped the political consciousness of Japanese youth who engaged in political violence during the 1960s and 1970s. It unpacks how notions of class and gender shaped the discourses produced by, and for, young men and women of the 'Sixties Generation'. Dr Gerteis is co-editor of the Bloomsbury book Japan since 1945: from Postwar to Post-Bubble (2012) and is Founding Series Editor of the Bloomsbury series SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary. He also served as Chief Editor of the interdisciplinary academic journal Japan Forum from 2014 through 2019.

Timothy S. George is Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island, USA.

Product Description

Does Japan really matter anymore? The challenges of recent Japanese history have led some pundits and scholars to publicly wonder whether Japan's significance is starting to wane. The multidisciplinary essays that comprise Japan Since 1945 demonstrate its ongoing importance and relevance. Examining the historical context to the social, cultural, and political underpinnings of Japan's postwar development, the contributors re-engage earlier discourses and introduce new veins of research.

Japan Since 1945 provides a much needed update to existing scholarly work on the history of contemporary Japan. It moves beyond the 'lost decade' and 'terrible devastation' frameworks that have thus far defined too much of the discussion, offering a more nuanced picture of the nation's postwar development.

Review

"Because of the quality of the individual contributions and its display of the current state of research, the book is without doubt a most warmly welcome and necessary addition to the reading lists of students and researchers of modern Japanese history." –Till Knaudt, Heidelberg University, Japan Forum

"An excellent interdisciplinary collection of essays on "postwar" Japan, from 1945 to 2011 - from the ashes of defeat to the anxiety of decline. It deserves to be read not only for its fascinating glimpses of Japanese society, economy and culture, but also for the comparative light it implicitly sheds on other advanced capitalist societies and their not always acknowledged arcs of uneven historical change." –Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor of History, Columbia University, USA

“The book’s focus on the post-1945 period is a welcome update to the new-landmark 1993 collection Postwar Japan as History, which set the parameters of postwar Japanese historiography over the subsequent two decades. This volume may provide a similar function, engaging as it does with history’s influence on and by other disciplinary approaches in recent decades, notably in the fields of transnational history and memory and heritage studies.” –Mark Pendleton, University of Sheffield, UK, The Historian