Japan studies old and new at the end of the eighties

Abstract

During the first two decades of the Cold War era, many historians of Japan in American universities sought to rise above the hatreds of the war era and develop a brighter, more positive image of Japan's recent past. Concentrating on the rational nature of the state-building process (but downplaying the ways in which irrationality was also institutionalized), they described how the Meiji oligarchs constructed a modern state that led Japan at the end of the nineteenth century into the worlds of capitalist industry, great-power politics, and colonial empire. This explicitly anti-Marxist phase of American historiography is known as the modernization perspective.