ABSTRACT
This chapter explores historical challenges and scholarly analyses of the decade that witnessed Japan’s greatest crisis of modern times – and provoked its most radical responses. Beginning with a brief survey of the state of Japanese society at the beginning and the end of this tumultuous decade, it then turns to scholarly debates about what happened in between – and why. Focusing on the evolution of approaches to the Japanese civil society and its relationship to the state, the chapter reveals an early postwar field largely concerned with ‘top-down’, state-centred history, whose battle lines often reflected the political divisions of the Cold War, giving way since the 1980s to an increasingly ‘bottom-up’ focus on civil society, including cultural history, ideology, lived experience, and popular imperialism. Special attention is devoted to Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s seminal work Grassroots Fascism (1987, trans. 2015) as a pioneer of such recent trends.
