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even on the left, Japan’s imperial legacy receded into the background — even in moments when imperialism was a central political concern. For example, 1960s citizen movements, as part of the New Left, were in principle ready to connect their opposition to the Vietnam War with the memory of Japanese encroachments in Asia — but the privileged parallel to the US bombing of Vietnam was not the Japanese attacks on south-east Asia, but rather the US air raids on Osaka in 1945. The perception of US imperialism in Cold War Asia colluded with the occlusion of Japan’s own imperial past.88

The disappearance of empire was clearly not a discursive phenomenon alone, but was deeply embedded in the broader political and social developments of post-war Japan. It was connected to the fact that Japan did not experience the pangs and traumas of a long, drawn-out and violent decolonization process. Compared with the devolution of empire in Britain, France and the Netherlands, the Japanese case was a form of instant decolonization, brought about largely by external forces. There was no public debate within Japan about the fate of its possessions: the Japanese empire was simply gone. The sudden erection of boundaries between Japan and her former colonies was reinforced by the population politics of the Allies immediately after the war, which sought to disentangle the population groups of the empire. Within a few months, the seven million or so Japanese (civilians and soldiers) abroad, and large parts of the more than two million Koreans, Chinese and Taiwanese, were reassigned to their respective nation states, thus reversing the migratory flows of the colonial period.89 In the following years of superpower antagonism, cross-border mobility was virtually frozen. Unlike in Britain or France, then, there was no sizeable migration to the Japanese archipelago from the former colonies — and no significant post-colonial pressure groups to stake out claims that would keep the memory of the imperial past alive. As a result, empire was never a domestic concern in Japan: it was someone else’s business.

The separation of Japan from her former colonies was further entrenched by US occupation and by the polar structures of

88See Simon Andrew Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the ‘Shimin’ in Postwar Japan (Berkeley, 2010), 112.

89Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).

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the global Cold War regime. This larger geopolitical framework, and the way in which Japan was incorporated into it, was a major factor that colluded with, and made possible, the post-war disappearance of empire. The occupation played a crucial role in casting the history of war and fascism essentially in domestic terms: the war was presented as caused primarily by internal factors and could thus be addressed by social reform measures.90 Economically, the integration of Japan into Cold War dichotomies guaranteed virtually unrestricted access to Western markets, in particular in the United States. At the same time, Asia’s relevance as an economic partner was in steep decline.91 The reinvention of Japan as a model within the internalist paradigm of modernization theory thus corresponded to the segregation of Japan from East Asia as a result of the global Cold War order.

These processes culminated, it is no exaggeration to say, in a fundamental reconfiguration of ‘Japan’ and of what it meant to be ‘Japanese’. As one of its striking characteristics, Oguma Eiji has demonstrated how after 1945 the discourse on the ethnic foundations of the nation underwent significant shifts. During the war, the Japanese people had been represented as ethnically diverse (kongo minzoku ron). This was, in essence, the particular ideology of the Japanese empire, with characteristic differences from the ideologies of European empires. The Japanese, accordingly, were an amalgamation of southern and northern Asian peoples, including the native populations of Taiwan and Korea. The union of these peoples in the Japanese empire could thus be interpreted not as an annexation, but as a form of homecoming. However, this perspective disappeared as the empire vanished, and in 1945 lost all plausibility. The dominant discourse from then on rested on the construction of a homogeneous Japanese people (tan’itsu minzoku ron) that dwelt on its peaceful archipelago in ethnic isolation and purity.92 This view continues to hold sway over the academic and popular self-assurance of the

90Dower, Embracing Defeat.

91See Aaron Forsberg, America and the Japanese Miracle: The Cold War Context of Japan’s Postwar Economic Revival, 1950–1960 (Chapel Hill, 2000).

92Oguma Eiji, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen: Nihonjin no jigazoˆ no keifu [The Myth of the Homogeneous Nation: A Genealogy of the Meaning of Japaneseness] (Tokyo, 1995). The notion of the homogeneity of the Japanese people has since been a central element in so-called ‘Nihonjinron’ literature that postulates the uniqueness of Japanese culture: see Peter N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (London, 1986).

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Japanese nation today, with important social and legal consequences.93 It is in this larger context of transformation of the Japanese imagination, corresponding both to the exigencies of the global Cold War and to the vanishing of empire, that the emergence of modernization theory in post-war Japan needs to be understood.

** *

Modern Japan has hardly been studied in isolation. There is a long scholarly tradition that has looked at the Japanese experience comparatively and by considering its various connections. Particular attention, typically, is paid to Japan’s engagement with Europe and the United States, and to efforts at ‘translating the West’ since the Meiji period.94 The sophistication of these studies has gradually grown, moving from an earlier preoccupation with Western impact and Japanese response to highly complex analyses of interpretations and modifications, translations and appropriations. They can build on a growing literature on the intricacies of cross-cultural transfers and connections and an histoire croise´e of cultural encounters.95

There remains a tendency, however, to situate processes of connectivity within the binary framework of comparative/transfer history. Such a perspective may lead to an emphasis on the bilateral relationship between ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’, and to a neglect of synchronous links beyond the immediate issues at stake. In our case, such an approach has suggested placing the history of the Hakone conference in 1960, and of modernization theory more generally, within a history that bilaterally connects Japan and the West: Japanese social science and the Weberian paradigm, and Japanese historians facing the East Asia initiative of US foundations and foreign policy. What I have proposed, instead, is to look

93In 1951 this new conception of the nation was legally confirmed. In the Peace Treaty of San Francisco, Japan renounced all territorial claims in Korea, Taiwan and south-east Asia. From this time on, the Japanese government treated all Koreans and Taiwanese who until then had been Japanese citizens as foreigners. See Won Soon Park, ‘Japanese Reparations Policies and the ‘‘Comfort Women’’ Question’, Positions,

v(1997); Sonia Ryang and John Lie (eds.), Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan (Berkeley, 2009).

94Douglas R. Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Honolulu, 2002).

95Michael Werner and Be´ne´dicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croise´e and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory, xlv (2006).

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at these interactions as part of larger structures of entanglement that transcend the East–West binary and form part of systemic change on a global scale. This enables us to read the Hakone conference and its effects as part of a larger transformation of Japan’s role in the global post-war order, and as a specific response both to the conflicts over democracy and social change within Japan, and to the challenges of decolonization and the Cold War in East Asia.96

One of the ways in which the emerging hegemony of modernization theory articulated these structural transformations was by making invisible the loss of empire and at the same time by naturalizing the triumph of market liberalism in post-war Japan. The new paradigm very efficiently explained Japanese development internally, without undue preoccupation with wartime expansion and mainland imperialism. At the same time it replaced a critical perspective on the Japanese past with a vision of development for its own sake. ‘The important thing is that people read’, lectured Marius B. Jansen in 1961 at Tokyo’s International Christian University, ‘not what they read, that they participate in the generalized functions of a mass society, not whether they do so as free individuals, that machines operate, and not for whose benefit’.97 The study of modernization was staged as value-free social science, and development as value-free growth. What was eclipsed by such internalist reading was thus not just the memory of Japan’s imperialist past and of wartime atrocities; what was ignored, and methodologically rendered invisible, was how the origins of post-war growth themselves had their own roots in empire, and in the effects of its fall.

96My concern here has been with the global contexts that help explain the Japanese career of modernization theory in the 1960s. It would be a different project to trace the repercussions in English-language debates about modernization that were prompted by approaches in Japan. One of the vanishing points of such an inquiry would be the debates about a pluralization of the notion of modernity, in particular by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt as one of the adepts of classical modernization theory, with origins in the unprecedented economic success of Japan in the late 1980s. See Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed.), Multiple Modernities, special issue of Daedalus, cxxix, 1 (2000).

97Marius B. Jansen, ‘On Studying the Modernization of Japan’, Asian Cultural Studies, iii (1962), 3–4.

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