Post-War Japanese Historiography: The Rise of Marxist Historical Analysis

The autumn of 1945 marked a profound rupture in Japanese historical writing. The American occupation authorities halted history instruction in schools, which only resumed a year and a half later with new textbooks. In academia, the wartime orthodoxy of kokoku shikan—an ultra-nationalist, Japan-centered view of history focused on the imperial house and empire—collapsed. Its chief proponent, Hiraizumi Kiyoshi, resigned from Tokyo University, and his colleagues were purged. This created an intellectual vacuum, allowing previously suppressed Marxist historiography to emerge swiftly as the dominant interpretive strand.

This dramatic transformation resembled a Kuhnian paradigm shift, but it had a deep genealogy. Marxist thought had gained traction among Japanese intellectuals early in the 20th century, becoming influential in economics departments by the 1920s. The founding of the Japanese Communist Party in 1922 provided a political focal point. Despite severe wartime repression, seminal pre-war debates, like the "controversy on Japanese capitalism" in the 1930s, crucially shaped post-war scholarship. Thus, the post-1945 ascendancy was not an entirely new beginning but a resurgence of an established, though marginalized, intellectual tradition.

The immediate post-war context uniquely favored Marxist scholars. They were among the few academics untainted by collaboration with the imperial war effort. Viewed as a natural opposition to fascism, they were initially supported by the American occupation authorities. An unlikely coalition formed: occupation officers facilitated Marxists' return to universities, while the Japanese Communist Party hailed the Americans as liberators. This brief "honeymoon" ended by 1948 with the "reverse course" in US policy, but it critically aided Marxism's institutionalization.

A massive university expansion further solidified this trend. To democratize education, the occupation oversaw an increase from 49 to 220 universities in seven years. This created unprecedented opportunities for a new generation of scholars, many sympathetic to progressive historiography, to secure academic positions. Although recruitment at elite imperial universities remained conservative, the overall expansion provided a powerful platform for the new historical paradigm.

Marxist historians quickly achieved virtual hegemony, but the "progressive" camp was not monolithic. Factional strife, often mirroring Communist Party conflicts, divided Marxist scholars. Furthermore, they opposed the "modernists" (kindai shugisha), like social historian Otsuka Hisao and intellectual historian Maruyama Masao. Influenced by Max Weber, the modernists emphasized cultural and mental factors as historical drivers, challenging Marxist materialism. Despite conflicts, both groups shared a critical stance toward the pre-war state and contributed to a hegemonic social history.

This discursive shift operated on methodological, political, and interpretative levels. Methodologically, it challenged German historism (Historismus), which focused on political narrative and source critique. Marxists countered this "conservative positivism" (jissho shugi) with historical materialism, prioritizing the economic base over political superstructures and emphasizing class analysis. This translated into a macro-structural social history seeking large-scale causal explanations for historical change.

Politically, Marxist historians saw scholarship as direct intervention. Many were party affiliates, and their research responded to current events. The 1949 Chinese Revolution and the 1950 Korean War reshaped their views, framing modern Japanese history as a reaction to imperialist threat. They committed to public engagement, rejecting the ivory tower to disseminate scholarly findings to a broad audience.

Interpretatively, a new master narrative emerged, depicting Japan's path as deviant. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 was seen not as a bourgeois revolution but as an "absolutist" transformation preserving "feudal remnants." This led to "Tenno System Fascism" (tennosei fashizumu), a fascism imposed from above during the inter-war crisis. The paradigm focused on structural deficits and "failed modernity," with the Restoration as the key aberrant turning point.

The seminal work of this narrative was Toyama Shigeki's "Meiji Ishin" (1951). A social history of Restoration politics, it defined the event as a long process (1841-1877). Toyama argued that lower samurai (kakyu bushi) exploited peasant uprisings to overthrow the Shogunate but ultimately established an absolutist state, not a modern democracy. He concluded that reforms "from above" stifled bourgeois revolution, leaving feudal relics in Meiji period society. This analysis became canonical, influencing textbooks for decades.

Subsequent debates refined but rarely overturned this paradigm. Historians contested the true agent (shutai) of change and, amid the Cold War, sometimes stressed the Restoration's role in ensuring national independence. Nevertheless, research into the civil rights movement (jiyu minken undo), landowner parasitism, and autocratic politics was guided by this model of distorted modernization, or "transition narratives."

Strikingly, this critique was framed by a universalist notion of history. Scholars sought to inscribe Japan's past into world history (sekaishi), assumed to follow universal laws with Europe as the "pure and classical" model. As historian Takahashi Kohachiro argued, studying Europe revealed developmental stages to apply to Japan. Thus, understanding Japanese history meant measuring it against a Eurocentric universal standard.

This framework paradoxically fostered an internalist perspective. While invoking world history, scholars rarely analyzed Japan's global entanglements, colonialism, or foreign influences. Instead, history unfolded within the nation-state's boundaries. The world-historical character lay not in interconnectedness but in using a universal benchmark to judge national development.

A second paradox was the enduring centrality of the nation (minzoku), despite Marxist class analysis. Post-war historians defined national particularity through negative traits—backwardness and aberration—creating a "left-wing nationalism." After 1950, facing what they saw as US imperialism, many Marxists adopted a more positive national perspective, emphasizing Japan's struggle against foreign threat. This gradual shift from class to nation would significantly shape future historical debates in Japan.