Book Review

Asia

Japanese scholars have long tended to view World War II as a "dark valley" in their nation's past, a discrete, tortured period discontinuous with either prewar or postwar historical narratives. Over the past twenty years, historians have increasingly come to revise this view, stressing "transwar" continuities and demonstrating pervasive linkages between Japan's wartime order and its postwar democratic system. As J. Victor Koschmann notes in the introduction to this volume, the essays all question the tendency of mainstream Japanese historiography to label Japan's postwar democracy "modern" (and thus good) while condemning the wartime system as "premodern" (and thus bad). Japan's contemporary political and economic institutions, the contributors here agree, "owe their basic character to the system-integration and homogenization carried out during the era of World War II" (p. vii).

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The twelve essays revolve around two central arguments. First, the authors maintain that Japan's wartime mobilization was not atavistic but fundamentally modernizing in character, stressing organizational and technological rationalization, systemic efficiency, and high levels of social integration and control. In this way, the wartime order was profoundly continuous with Japan's post-1945 "system society" and democratic welfare state. Second, the essays suggest that the phenomenon of wartime modernization was not limited to Japan but was transnational: despite significant cultural differences, Germany and the United States shared much of Japan's experience during and after World War II. As Koschmann stresses, the goal of this collection is not to rehabilitate or redeem wartime mobilization, but rather to show that much of the world remains in a "total-war system." "The contributors feel that the ills of the postwar era are . . . predominantly modern rather than residually premodern, and that they result . . . from tendencies that are in greater or lesser degree common to all 'advanced' capitalist nations" (pp. xii-xiii).

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