Tohoku as postwar thought: Regionalism, nationalism and culturalism in Japan's Northeast

The most important regional studies and identity movement in postwar Japan not focused on racial or ethnic indices of difference has centered on the Tohoku region of northeast Honshu. Though both academically and popularly influential in Japan, discussion of Tohoku studies (Tohoku kenky u) has been absent in the Anglophone literature on Japan, regional histories, and discursive substate nationalism. This dissertation preliminarily redresses these professional lacunae by exploring the intellectual history of Tohoku studies from 1945 to the present. Additional consideration is given to historical interpretation of Tohoku studies' most important subfield, the study of Hiraizumi. The dissertation is framed around the career of the exemplary Tohoku historian of the period, Takahashi Tomio. Takahashi's work shaped mainstream postwar Tohoku studies 1950s-1980s, but like his subject he is almost unknown outside Japan.;Tohoku studies underwent two major transformations by the mid-1980s, and can be heuristically trifurcated. The most influential trends in Tohoku studies emerged in the 1950s from Takahashi's personal "postwar thought," an attempt to digest the wartime experience and find new values for the postwar era in the history and culture of the Northeast. Nascent discursive substate nationalism and enthusiasm for the manufactured pacifism and economic accomplishments of the postwar order mixed paradoxically in the 1960s; both sentiments are the result of success in making T ohoku a site of value for Japan's new era. The 1970s was a transitional decade, after which Tohoku was recast by reactionary neocultural discourse (Japanism) as integral to a revised core of Japanese identity. Nationalism and culturalism are protean; the quest to make T ohoku a source of postwar values was a victim of its own success. The historiography of Hiraizumi followed a similar arc, though it was concerted state rather than intellectual intervention that reclaimed Hiraizumi for Japan. I suggest that this cooption resulted from a fundamental weakness of the "T ohoku as postwar thought" project of Takahashi Tomio, et al. In this instance, "postwar thought" was always-already Japanese postwar thought and was inherently, predicated on, within, or against Japanese national history.