The Evolution of Japanese Historiography: Challenges to Marxist Dominance and the Rise of Pluralism

While Marxist historiography and modernist thought established a powerful discursive hegemony in early post-war Japan, this dominance was never absolute or monolithic. A conservative strand of political history persisted, organized around the venerable Shigakkai association and its journal Shigaku zasshi. However, the true transformation began in the 1960s as the Marxist paradigm faced sustained challenges, leading to a vibrant plurality of scholarly approaches. These shifts mirrored global trends but unfolded with a distinct Japanese chronology and intellectual preoccupations.

The year 1960 serves as a critical turning point, marked by the convergence of mass protest and imported theory. Widespread demonstrations against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) saw Marxist historians aligning with the Japanese Communist Party in opposition. In direct response, American institutions like the Ford Foundation promoted modernization theory as a liberal alternative to historical materialism. The seminal Hakone Conference aimed to convert Japanese scholars, recasting Japan not as a "deviant" case but as a non-revolutionary, successful model for Asian development.

This modernization theory fundamentally re-evaluated Japan's past. The Meiji Restoration was reinterpreted as a successful anti-colonial transition led by a modernizing elite, not a failed bourgeois revolution. Traditions once deemed obstacles were now seen as catalysts for organic growth. Crucially, this theory was not merely a Western import; Japanese thinkers like Kuwabara Takeo and Ueyama Shumpei had long engaged with modernity, while Maruyama Masao's work represented an indigenous modernist discourse that critically engaged with these new ideas.

The internal fragmentation of the Marxist camp further enabled this shift. Following the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and de-Stalinization, fierce debates erupted, such as the controversy over the Marxist textbook "Showashi." Younger historians criticized its rigid structuralism and party-line orthodoxy. This disillusionment prompted a turn toward "history from below" (minshushi), led by scholars like Irokawa Daikichi and Kano Masanao. Inspired by E.P. Thompson and indigenous folklorist Yanagita Kunio, they centered the experiences, values, and agency of common people (minshu) in the narrative of modernization.

Concurrently, women's history emerged as a major field from the 1970s onward, blending transnational feminist influences with robust Japanese traditions. Early scholarship confronted the exclusion of women from "general history," seeking lost heroines and analyzing repression. This built upon foundational works like Takamure Itsue's culturally nationalist "Josei no rekishi" and Inoue Kiyoshi's Marxist "Nihon joseishi." The subsequent institutionalization of women's studies and the adoption of gender as an analytical category further diversified historical inquiry.

Finally, the cultural turn of the 1990s introduced profound epistemological challenges. Influenced by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Hayden White, scholars launched a critique of the essentialisms underlying post-war social history. Concepts like the nation, class, and the autonomous subject were deconstructed, shifting focus to discourse, representation, and contingency. New research areas—the history of the body, sexuality, memory, and postcolonialism—reconfigured the mainstream, cementing the pluralistic landscape of contemporary Japanese historiography.