Re:Japanese Economic Takeoff After 1945 (2002)
by user982 on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @11:44PM
(#14252874)
The same section you quoted from discusses the cyclical nature of popular acceptance of continual claims of Japanese superiority, ebbing with the immediate post-war hardship and flowing with the actual economic takeoff of the following decades. The sentence immediately following your first quote is: "A major controversy surrounds the question regarding the affiliation of the post-war nihonjinron theories with the prewar conceptualization of Japanese cultural uniqueness," which speaks to the ongoing and historical nature of these "exhortations" and supports my rebuttal.
Re:Japanese Economic Takeoff After 1945 (2002)
by kalleboo on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @11:56PM
(#14252923)
I guess it depends on your definition of "constantly". To me, if it's cyclical and followed by a national debate, it's different.
I'm certainly not debating that nationalism didn't (or doesn't) exist in Japan. I just wonder to what level it was "indoctrinated". I would have expected there to be far broader and stronger nationalism left today if it was that bad post-war. I'm trying to compare to stuff like how the effects of the Red Scare in the US are still very strong
The frequency of these chronic transitional upheavals engendered a remarkable intensity of debate about national directions and identity, whose complexity over time renders a synthetic judgment or bird's-eye view of the literature in question rather difficult
During the early post-war period, most of nihonjinron discourses discussed the uniqueness of the Japanese in a rather negative, critical light