History of Japan (Inoue)

The non-fiction book History of Japan by Kiyoshi Inoue was published in 1963, 1965 and 1966 in three paperback volumes under the original title Nihon no Rekishi ( 日本 の 歴 史 ) by Iwanami Shoten , Tokyo. It was translated into German by Manfred Hubricht and published by Campus Verlag . In 1995 a revision by Eva-Maria Meyer was published.

Inoue's work is the first modern comprehensive survey of Japanese history to be written by a Japanese person and not by an outsider. To date, the work is one of the best-selling history books in Japan. It is politically left-wing and shaped by historical materialism and Max Weber's sociology of religion , but also by an enlightened humanism .

content

The Marxist character is expressed, among other things, in the fact that the book describes the “story from below”, in which not only court nobles and samurai are acting actors, but also the common people. For Japan, Inoue also works out the historical sequence of historical materialism from primitive society through slave-holding society , feudal society and capitalist society , a sequence that is controversial for Japanese history. However, Japanese history as a “special path” and Japan as a “unique” culture, as represented by many Nihonjinron authors , cannot be found with him.

Historical classification

The book is shaped by the spirit of the Japanese "post-war democracy" of the 1950s. After the defeat in World War II, Japan was democratized by the Allied occupation government, against the passive resistance of the more conservative elites. Liberals and left-wing intellectuals, on the other hand, welcomed the reforms of the Americans, even if they did not agree with the occupation itself, and coined the call for further democratization of Japanese society and the implementation of the peace constitution under the term post-war democracy .

In particular, they turned against the reorientation of history teaching from 1953, after regaining sovereignty. The Ministry of Education used the schoolbook admission procedure to suppress facts that stood in the way of the formation of patriotism and a positive attitude towards the newly formed Self-Defense Forces . In particular, terms with negative connotations were relativized, such as the “invasion” in China, which was weakened to an “advance”. Critical topics such as the Comfort Women and Unit 731 have been removed from the books. In addition to these main points of contention, there were also fundamental differences, such as the question of whether the Meiji Restoration was already a bourgeois revolution, as conservative historians argued, or whether this bourgeois revolution was only brought about by post-war democracy.

However, while the school books were controlled by conservative forces in the ministry, the constitutional prohibition on censorship allowed left intellectuals to take countermeasures for the free market in academic works and history books. As early as the Taishō period and up to the 1960s, the Marxist philosophy of history , historical materialism , and Max Weber's sociology of religion had a strong influence on Japanese historians, including Inoue. Inoue belonged to a reflective direction that tried to incorporate the cultural peculiarities of Japan.

literature

• Kiyoshi Inoue: History of Japan , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-88059-994-7
• Kiyoshi Inoue: 日本 の 歴 史 , Vol. 1–3, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo 1963, 1965 and 1966