Post-War Japanese Historiography and Memory: Debates on War, Fascism, and National Identity

The shifting interpretations of Japan’s history after 1945 formed an integral part of the nation's attempt to come to terms with a contaminated past, much like in other defeated nations such as Germany and Italy. Post-war Japanese historiography was structured by the methodological premises of its discipline yet remained deeply embedded within the volatile dynamics of public memory. Historians themselves acted as memory activists, while the surrounding political debates inevitably influenced the trajectories of historical analysis. Crucially, historiography and memory were not only fields of mutual influence but also of intense contestation, with academic perspectives frequently formulated in opposition to official state narratives.

Conventional wisdom suggests Japan has failed to reconcile with its imperialist history, but this sweeping assessment is flawed, especially regarding the early post-war period. Immediately after surrender, a broad consensus emerged among Japan’s elites that a thorough historical critique was essential for democratization and modernization. Even the conservative establishment joined this call for reflection, exemplified by Prime Minister Prince Higashikuni’s August 1945 slogan for a ‘collective confession of the 100 million’ (ichioku sozange). Intellectuals engaged in the seminal debate on ‘subjectivity’ (shutaisei), probing psychological and societal origins of fascism and war, thereby aligning historical scholarship with profound social self-examination.

In this climate, Marxist historiography dominated early analyses, focusing on macrostructures to explain the paradox of a feudal-absolutist regime fulfilling a fascist function—the supposed highest stage of capitalism. These historians, including members of the Historical Science Society (Rekishigaku Kenkyūkai), framed Japan's modern trajectory as a ‘deviant modernity’, seeking long-term structural causes for its failure. Their work diagnosed deep-rooted socio-economic contradictions, particularly the persistence of ‘semi-feudal’ landlordism and the authoritarian ‘emperor system’ (tennōsei), which had blocked true bourgeois revolution and enabled militarism.

Alongside Marxist thought, the liberal political theorist Maruyama Masao provided the era’s most influential analysis of fascism. In his seminal essays, Maruyama defined Japan’s experience as ‘fascism from above’, imposed by the state elite, unlike Europe’s mass-based ‘fascism from below’. He diverged from Marxist orthodoxy by locating fascism’s roots not in economics but in a defective ideological formation that stifled the modern, autonomous individual. As illustrated in Figure 1, which contrasts top-down vs. bottom-up fascist models, Maruyama’s theory emphasized a corrupted spiritual structure, though he agreed with Marxists on the Meiji Restoration’s failure to separate public and private spheres.

Two critical contextual observations shaped these intellectual debates. First, military defeat meant the sudden loss of an adjacent empire built since the late 19th century. The repatriation of millions from Asia and the legal renunciation of colonial territories forced a fundamental, if often unspoken, reconfiguration of the Japanese nation. This created what scholars term a ‘colonial unconscious’, a repressed undercurrent in post-war discourse where the imperial past and the forced de-Japanization of Koreans and Taiwanese remained largely unacknowledged until the 1990s.

Second, the intellectual reckoning occurred under the American Occupation (1945-1952), which actively structured the critique of Japan’s past. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trials) symbolically punished wartime leaders, while Occupation authorities implemented a comprehensive politics of pedagogy. This included purging educational institutions, commissioning new history textbooks, and disseminating an American narrative of the war. More deeply, reforms like the land reform and the Postwar Constitution were predicated on the belief that surviving feudal structures had facilitated Japan’s militarist turn.

The Occupation’s influence persisted beyond 1952, but the 1950s initiated a second memory phase lasting until the 1990s. This period saw declining public influence for leftist intellectuals and the resurgence of nationalist narratives casting Japan as the war’s primary victim. This ‘victim consciousness’ (higaisha ishiki) portrayed the Japanese as victims of a militarist clique, Western imperialism, and the atomic bombings, becoming a central, unifying theme in public memory.

This victim narrative was not exclusively conservative; pacifist movements powerfully adopted it, especially after the 1954 Lucky Dragon #5 (Daigo Fukuryū Maru) incident. The irradiation of a fishing boat by U.S. hydrogen bomb tests solidified Hiroshima and Nagasaki as potent icons of Japanese victimhood, rallying support for pacifism and the Peace Constitution (Article 9). However, this pervasive victim consciousness also created discursive space for overtly nationalist and revisionist accounts to gain public traction.

At the revisionist extreme, literary critic Hayashi Fusao argued in his 1964 book, ‘Daitōa Sensō Kōteiron’ (In Affirmation of the Greater East Asian War), that Japan had waged a ‘Hundred Years’ War’ against Western imperialism since 1853. More mainstream was the monumental seven-volume documentary collection, ‘Taiheiyō Sensō e no Michi’ (The Road to the Pacific War), edited by Tsunoda Jun (1962-63). While scholarly, its narrative suggested Japan unintentionally ‘skidded into’ (tsumari-iru) the war, downplaying long-term aggression and emphasizing diplomatic miscalculation.

Opposition to this victim-centric narrative persisted. Grassroots groups like the Japan Memorial Society for the Students Killed in the War (Wadatsumikai) preserved memories of student-soldiers’ tragic sacrifices. Investigative journalist Honda Katsuichi, through his work in the 1970s on the Nanking Massacre (Nankin Gyakusatsu), forcibly reintroduced the issue of Japanese perpetration and colonial violence into public discourse. His fieldwork in China challenged the state-sanctioned amnesia regarding Japanese military atrocities.

The most consequential clash over memory occurred in the courtroom. Historian Ienaga Saburō sued the Japanese government in 1965 over the Ministry of Education’s textbook certification system, which had censored his depictions of Japanese wartime conduct. The Ienaga Textbook Lawsuits, supported by citizen groups, contested state control over historical narrative, charges of harming national pride, and the homogenization of memory. These protracted trials, yielding partial victories for Ienaga, became the primary battleground for competing visions of Japan’s past, as detailed in the timeline presented in Figure 2.

Ultimately, during the decades of high economic growth and security under the U.S. umbrella, public memory trended toward a ‘normalization’ of the past and what critics labeled ‘collective amnesia’. Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro embodied this shift, vowing in 1982 to overcome the ‘Tokyo Trials view of history’ (Tokyo Saiban Shikan). His official visits to Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Class A war criminals, symbolized a new discursive hegemony, provoking regional protests that were largely ignored in a Cold War context. This period set the stage for the more transnational and contentious ‘history wars’ that would erupt from the 1990s onward, as Japan’s imperial past resurfaced in debates over apologies, compensation, and regional leadership.