2025 marks 100 years since Showa: Japan then, Japan now

Next year, Reiwa 7 by the Japanese calendar, marks a prologue to a new century, the second since the dawn of the Showa era (1926-89).

Showa’s curtain rose on a nation still reeling from natural disaster: the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, whose firestorms, destruction, massive death toll (140,000) and panicked violence (the hysterical slaughter of thousands of ethnic Koreans) prefigured, though no one dreamed it at the time, unnatural and much worse disasters to follow. 

 It fell, in 1989, on a reconstructed, reconstituted – reborn is hardly too strong a word – country that is democratic, peaceful, prosperous as never before and perhaps never again, eager in pursuit of a brand new purpose in life, learned from the very America that in defeating it had come very close to destroying it: the Constitutionally-protected pursuit of happiness.

Things look darker now. Reiwa Japan is an aging, declining land in a world increasingly adrift, dangerously uncertain, ominously reminiscent in many ways of early Showa. What lies ahead? Economic depression? Environmental destruction? World War Three?

“Is this,” asks Masaru Sato, writer, professor of divinity and former foreign ministry bureaucrat in a dialogue featured in Shukan Post (Dec 20), “a new prewar period?”

Early Showa seemed postwar. World War I, humanity’s mass suicide attempt, was over, 20 million dead. Japan, untouched by actual fighting, had done well, its economy thriving, its international status of secondary but rising rank. How would it rise? As a trading nation or a conquering one? Here in embryo, explains political thinker and law professor Morihide Katayama, Sato’s dialogue partner, was a dilemma still very much alive today, though in a different form: globalism, or nationalism?

The global prosperity of the mid-1920s favored globalism but proved a bubble, soon to burst. Sato and Katayama walk us through early Showa history. A 1927 banking crisis spawned a depression in Japan two years before the global Great Depression of 1929. Poverty descended, swift and terrible. Who was to blame? The capitalists and the nascent democratic government treacherously in league with them, said junior army officers as they took the law into their own hands. In the name of justice, righteousness and their emperor-god they rampaged against the rot and corruption in high places, assassinating key figures in government and finance. The wave climaxed in a spree of killing whose date, February 26, 1936, is permanently etched in history.

Emperor Hirohito, posthumously Emperor Showa, was having none of it. He declared the perpetrators rebels. Martial law was proclaimed. Democracy was dead in Japan and dying if not dead elsewhere. Globalism withered. Nationalism bloomed. Japan’s army, defying the League of Nations, advanced deep into China, withdrawing in 1933 from the League and what it symbolized: the hope that world peace would rise from the ashes of world war.

It was not to be. Resource-poor Japan would fight to secure resources, and if that meant all-out war with the U.S., so be it. “Japanese spirit” – yamatodamashii – would prevail. America was strong but only materially. It did not know what spirit was. It would learn. Japan would teach it.

World War I, “the war to end all wars,” didn’t. It wasn’t horrible enough. If World War II wasn’t either, one might well despair of humanity’s prospects. The United Nations replaced the League, and lessons learned at such appalling cost did seem at last to be sinking in.

Japan at any rate was pacified. It “renounce(d) war as a sovereign right of the nation” and settled into its new role as America’s “junior partner.” The Cold War threatened nuclear holocaust but – miraculously, at times just barely – caution prevailed. History sped on. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union two years later. Democracy, socially-conscious capitalism, free trade, ever-rising prosperity and above all peace were triumphant, flourishing where rooted and pursued where not. The American scholar Francis Fukuyama coined the phrase “the end of history.” So, very briefly, it almost seemed.

The shadows were there for those who saw them. “There’s a story going around that a lot of people believe,” says Sato, “that Japan, reflecting on World War II, saw the error of its ways and embraced democracy and human rights. That’s mere façade. The truth is, Japan allied with America so as not to have to fight it again. Anglo-Saxons love war, and are strong and cruel, as Japan now knew. Prewar Japanese failed to understand how far America in its cruelty would go.”

It went very far – incinerating Tokyo and other cities, atom-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Americans thus accused remind Japan of its own atrocities. Which side’s atrocities were worse, which justifiable and which not? It’s playground name-calling on the grand stage of world history. It may be remarked in passing that no race or nation that allied itself with Adolf Hitler, as Japan did in 1940, has the right to call another race or nation cruel. And there let the matter rest. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

As then, so now. “The end of history” is clearly over. What’s ahead – new history, or old history? Democracy’s post-Berlin Wall flowering was transient – whether because of rot at its core or resurgent strength or purpose or appeal or evil or “spirit” in dictatorship. In 2014 Russia under President Vladimir Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine. Eight years later a full-scale invasion began a war considered the deadliest conflict since World War II – the opening skirmish of World War III? Nuclear-bound on a scale that Hiroshima and Nagasaki but dimly foreshadowed? Will “junior partner” Japan (the phrase is Sato’s) get sucked into it by demands for more military and financial support by its senior partner’s irascible, erratic and unpredictable president-elect, Donald Trump, in the event, say, of autocratic China’s invasion of democratic Taiwan?

Sato and Katayama stop short of prediction, as well they might, but their joint summation of how matters stand at present, though not hopeless, hardly conduces to optimism. Old history or new? Both at once. The new restraining the old? Inflaming it? We watch and wait, those of us who are not history-makers, and hold our collective breath.

Michael Hoffman is the author of “Arimasen.”

© Japan Today