From colonizer to colonized: Early postwar Japan and the concept of freedom

During the Fifteen Year War (1931--1945), the Japanese state employed the exigencies of war as a pretext for assimilating local communities, integrating them into the politico-economic structure of the state and suppressing expressions of subjectivity not conducive to state monopolization of power. Defeat, however, brought Japan's fifty-year colonial venture to devastating close. Even as the Japanese struggled to survive, they began to take seriously the prospect of freedom and democracy promised by the victors. Hopes arose of reclaiming formerly suppressed subjectivities and of rebuilding communities fragmented through invasive central control. Basing their work on explicit and implicit critiques of Japanese colonialism, Japanese intellectuals sought to construct a theoretical foundation for a democratic society predicated on a revised understanding of the relationship of the subject to the state. Writing from a variety of perspectives, they engaged in a vigorous discussion that examined fundamental questions concerning human existence in the hopes of ascertaining a stable foundation for freedom. This intellectual efflorescence occurred, however, amid a growing awareness of Japan's own colonization status in the postwar as an occupied, even colonized state. Disparities between the conceptions of freedom and the practices of the Occupation gradually became apparent to them. My analysis of these disparities reveals not only the complexity of Japanese intellectuals' relationships to the Occupation's ideals and practices, but also illuminates important ethical and political issues pertaining to freedom and community, exposing the apparent contradiction of liberal democracy and the logic of empire that formed the backdrop of postwar investigations into freedom.