Herbert P Bix
Biographic Data
| ID | 251000 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Herbert P Bix |
| GIVEN NAMES | Herbert P |
| FAMILY NAME | Bix |
| SIGNATURE | BIX H P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Whither Japan? Seven Decades After Defeat
The hard-won lessons of Japan's wartime defeat are enshrined in its National Constitution and Article 9 in particular.... For the past seventy years, Article 9 remained a fundamental principle of Japanese diplomacy, undergirded by memories of the Asia-Pacific War and the U.S. occupation, buttressed by important revisionist histories of Japanese imperialism. A politically recovered, economically restored Japanese populace still appreciates the Con…
Showa History, Rising Nationalism, and the Abe Government
On September 9, 2014, the Imperial Household Agency released to the public its carefully vetted Authentic Account of the Showa Emperor's Life and Reign (Showa Tenno Jitsuroku). This was the long-awaited official version of nearly every aspect of Emperor Hirohito's long life and reign. Compilers, researchers, and outside scholars of the Agency's Archives and Mausoleum Department-including a few specialists in modern Japanese history-started on the…
Remembering the Konoe Memorial: The Battle of Okinawa and Its Aftermath
I first visited Okinawa in 1961 as a junior officer aboard the USS Pollux (AKS 4), a part of the service squadron of the Seventh Fleet. When it sailed into "Buckner" (Nakagusuku) Bay, on the southern part of the island, I had not begun the study of Japanese language, and had no chance to meet local residents. Several years later while in graduate school I came to realize the importance of the relationship between secret U.S. military base constru…
Abe Shinzo and the U.S.-Japan Relationship in a Global Context
Victory for Abe Shinzo and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in two consecutive general elections opened the way for Japan to move closer to the policies of the United States and, at the same time, throw off some of the restraints imposed by the postwar peace constitution and the San Francisco Treaty system
Japan Under Neonationalist, Neoliberal Rule: Moving Toward an Abyss
It is widely assumed that the Japan-U.S. military alliance plays a key role in securing peace in Northeast Asia. It not only shores up procedural democracy in Japan and South Korea but also assures Japan's neighbors, China in particular, of Japan's commitment to pacifism. Close analysis of the current stage of neonationalism and neoliberal austerity economics in Japan, as exemplified by the government that recently took over in Tokyo, conveys a d…
Hirohito: String Puller, Not Puppet
Much can be learned from revisiting the life and times of imperial leaders of the twentieth-century, particularly those who were one thing in name and another in practice, or who combined power and authority but were neither dictators nor warmongers. The Showa Emperor Hirohito, who reigned from December 25, 1926, to his death on January 7, 1989, was such a person
The Middle East Revolutions in Historical Perspective: Egypt, Occupied Palestine, and the United States
From the early 1880s down to the end of World War II, British and French colonial rulers, among others, held the Arab peoples of the Middle East in subjugation. Weakened by the war against Hitlerism, the European imperialists retreated under pressure from the United States, which stepped in to take their place. The creation of Israel as the last "colonial-settler state" (1948) and Israel's expulsion of the indigenous population of Palestine from …
The Israeli-U.S. Gaza War and Its Aftermath: The Hobbesian Test
In July 2004 Israeli jurists on the High Court of Justice (HCJ) deliberated on Israel's separation wall in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague had just determined, by a vote of 13 to 2, that the 30-foot-high wall was part of Israel's policy of building settlements on stolen or confiscated Palestinian land, and had condemned it as an illegal land grab, which other states should not recognize. T…
The Global Minute Interrupted ‐ Fall 2001
The Tamogami Debacle: Dismissal of a Japanese General and the Danger of Indignation
By early November 2008, every major newspaper and mainstream television station in Japan had reported on the events surrounding Air Self-Defense Force Chief of Staff Gen. Tamogami Toshio: his dismissal from the Defense Ministry for provocatively contradicting national policy on the Asia-Pacific War and his later unrepentant testimony before a committee of the National Diet
Tamogami's World: Japan's Top Soldier Reignites Conflict Over the Past [Japanese, Korean and Czech translations available]
On October 31, 2008, General Tamogami Toshio, Japan's Air Self-Defense Force [ASDF] Chief of Staff was abruptly dismissed from his post in the Defense Ministry, but allowed to retire with his full pension rather than be summarily fired. At a press conference several months earlier, Tamogami, who had also been the superintendent of the SDF Joint Staff College, publicly expressed contempt for a ruling by the Nagoya High Court that the Japanese mili…
The Russo-Georgia War and the Challenge to American Global Dominance
The five-day Russo-Georgian War in the Caucasus brought into sharp focus many conflicts rooted in the region's history and in aggressive US-NATO policies since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Notable among these were the military encirclement of Russia and attempts to control energy resources in areas long dominated by the Soviet Union. The net effect was to hasten a dangerous new era of rivalry between the world's two most powerful nuclear wea…
War Responsibility and Historical Memory: Hirohito's Apparition
Since the appearance of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan in 2000, the unearthing in Japan of new information on the Asia-Pacific war has proceeded apace. Historical war narratives using new documentary evidence and drawing on the insights of various disciplines continue to appear. Oral history, women's history, studies of war prisoners and international law, even theories of postwar "reconciliation," have widened the perspectives of Japane…
The Immunity of Non-Combatants and the Myth of Good Intentions: Sixty-One Years After Hiroshima and Nagasaki
In late 1945, in a context of restored peace, American leaders set about constructing the postwar international order. Among the issues they confronted were the establishment of the United Nations and the reaction of U.S. citizens to the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The latter especially provoked a short-lived mood of uncertainty about the future of humankind in the nuclear age.The questions on American minds at the time were: W…
The Emperor, Modern Japan and the U.S.-Japan Relationship
The foremost Western authority on the life and times of Emperor Hirohito – known posthumously as the Emperor Showa – talked to The Japan Times about the role of Japan's former “living god” and his place in history in comparison with other powerful twentieth century leaders including Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt and George W. Bush. In 2000, historian Herbert P. Bix shattered the image of Emperor Hirohito as a mere figurehead who was detached from …
Hirohito and History: Japanese and American Perspectives on the Emperor and World War II in Asia
For nearly 60 years many Japanese have been struggling honorably to come to terms with the China War and the Pacific War, and indeed their entire imperialist past. But their struggles never take place in a vacuum. Trends in history, politics, international relations, and even culture, shape them. During the occupation years (1945 to 1952) neonationalists who rejected the Tokyo Trial and justified the lost war seldom spoke out. At that time, Japan…
Japan's Surrender Decision and the Monarchy: Staying the Course in an Unwinnable War
A producer for the Korean Broadcasting System, which is doing a special program commemorating August 15, 1945, recently asked me why Japan's ruling elites rejected the Potsdam Declaration. "What issue most impeded their decision to surrender?" he inquired. "Shouldn't they have cared more for the safety of their own people after the war had long been irrevocably lost? Wasn't the U.S. nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the real reason th…
Emperor, Shinto, Democracy: Japan s Unresolved Questions of Historical Consciousness
Japanese archaeologists and historians have long rejected the government's claim that Japan has had 124 emperors from the mythical Jimmu, descendant of the Sun Goddess, to the controversial Showa Emperor Hirohito, whose pre-World War II reign brought havoc to Asian and Japanese people. The scholars recognize that most sites of ancient imperial tombs should be treated as objects of scientific inquiry rather than as religious remnants of discredite…
The Faith that Supports U.S. Violence: Comparative Reflections on the Arrogance of Empire
In the second year of the U.S. occupation of Iraq many people in the U.S. still cling to a political tradition that confuses actually existing American society “with the ideal society that would fulfill human destiny.”1 They tend to think of the United States not as the polyarchy and global empire that it is, but as the incarnation of “freedom and democracy,” or at least the closest approximation to the democratic ideal that exists. Whatever thei…
Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing . Li , Robert Sabella , David Liu
Trouble at the Top: Japan's Imperial Family in Crisis
In June this year I had the opportunity to visit the inside of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo when I covered the official visit to Japan of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern as a correspondent for the Irish Times newspaper.On a sunny morning, I arrived with a small party of photographers and journalists inside the Palace ground, set in 300 sprawling acres of greenery in the very heart of Tokyo, much of it off limits to the public that pays for it. …
From Nanjing 1937 to Fallujah 2004: War Crimes in Perspective
The roots of the Japan-China War (1937-45) can be traced back to the surprise attack that Japanese army officers launched, in September 1931, on Chinese forces in Manchuria. Their premeditated coup led to Japan's seizure of the vast, resource-rich region. Initially carried out in the name of self-defense and national security, the Manchurian takeover was later justified as a step toward establishing a new status quo in Asia. A long series of clas…
Remembering the Nanking Massacre
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Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Though one of the most hated World War II leaders, together with Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, no one has ever written a full-length biography of Emperor Hirohito. Mostly due to the secrecy of Japanese society, where responsibility for war atrocities has still not been acknowledged, it is in large part a consequence of US spin-control after the armistice. Fearful of a civil war, General MacArthur invented the fiction of Hirohito as a peaceful emp…
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
The Showa Emperor's "Monologue" and the Problem of War Responsibility
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Inventing the "Symbol Monarchy" in Japan, 1945-52
Class conflict in rural Japan: On historical methodology
This essay examines rural class conflict in the interwar decades in order to show how the past is studied, and to what end, in one recent but representative account of Japanese agrarian history, Richard J. Smethurst's Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870-1940. In this essay the discussion is divided into a sketch of the decline of the landlord system during the interwar period, followed by an examination of a utility-maxim…
Japan's New Vulnerability
It is said that neither oil shocks, global stagflation, nor chronic monetary instability wilted Japan's "fragile blossom" in the 1970s. And that is undoubtedly true: the nation's economic performance surpassed all rivals. But successful adjustment to conditions of global economic crisis has, by its own internal dialectic, altered the structure of Japan's economy and increased its vulnerability. Three major changes stand out.This article can also …
Rethinking “emperor-system fascism”: Ruptures and continuities in modern Japanese history
A full half century ago the Great Depression and an upsurge of national liberation struggles in China and Korea took only three years to shake the foundations of Japan's fragile political institutions, turning the question of reform into the major issue of the day. In the crisis of 1929–31, Japanese foreign policy underwent further militarization, authority at all levels become more coercive, dissent was suppressed, and disenchantment with the am…
The Pitfalls of Scholastic Criticism: A Reply to Norman's Critics
Imagistic historiography and the reinterpretation of Japanese imperialism
Nearly all recent American approaches to the study of modern Japanese history, economy and society have been built on the explicit rejection of the Marxian tradition in scholarship. In this field for the past quarter century a few established authorities have shaped the issues to be researched and debated, either in support of American foreign policy and of capitalism, or in covert reaction against the untranslated work and interpretations of Mar…
Regional integration: Japan and South Korea in America's Asian policy
Ever since the late 1940s, U.S. Asian policy sought to use the southern half of the Korean peninsula and Japan to create a configuration of military and economic power which would enable the United States to contain the might of both China and the Soviet Union, while simultaneously insuring its own hegemony over Pacific-Asia. This basic strategy, which may be termed the regional integration of U.S. imperialism, turned on making industrialized Jap…
The Security Treaty System and the Japanese Military-Industrial Complex
Recently much discussion has focused on the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, first signed in September, 1951, renewed in a more equitable form in 1960, and up for renewal again in 1970. Much less attention has been paid the U.S.-Japan military-economic relationship shaped largely by adminstrative agreements that followed in the wake of the first Security Treaty. This article deals with that military-economic relationship and other aspects of recent U.…
Some Long-term Effects of U.S. Control of the Philippines
To review some of the long term effects of American colonialism in the Philippines—the only Asian country that we ever directly subordinated to a formal colonial status—will enable us to gain a more vivid, personal appreciation of the record that we have made in another Southeast Asian country during this century
The Security Treaty System and the Japanese Military-Industrial Complex
Recently much discussion has focused on the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, first signed in September, 1951, renewed in a more equitable form in 1960, and up for renewal again in 1970. Much less attention has been paid the U.S.-Japan military-economic relationship shaped largely by adminstrative agreements that followed in the wake of the first Security Treaty. This article deals with that military-economic relationship and other aspects of recent U.…
Japanese Imperialism and the Manchurian Economy, 1900–31
What makes Manchuria a most promising industrial field ... is the fact that coal and labour are obtainable at an extraordinarily low cost. ... Although Manchuria possesses a population of forty millions, not a single piece of clothing worn by the inhabitants is manufactured in the province. All textiles required by the people are imported either from south China or from Japan. The starting of a spinning and weaving industry in Manchuria will be f…
Report from Japan 1972 — Part II
Since the Korean War in the early 1950’s, the strongest sustained impetus for altering the Japanese economy and constitution to serve militaristic ends has come not from military leaders, bureaucrats or conservative politicians but from the leaders of big business. Herein lies the crucial difference between prewar militarism and the still “non-ideological” variety emerging in Japan today
Report on Japan 1972
Nothing has more mystified discussions of Japanese military development than the innumerable simplistic conclusions drawn from percentage comparisons with Gross National Product (GNP) or with international levels of military spending. This is seriously misleading from two broad angles: (1) the actual size and growth of the military and the hidden expenses of the military budget; (2) the key role that Japan’s defense expenditures play in supportin…
Regional integration: Japan and South Korea in America's Asian policy
Ever since the late 1940s, U.S. Asian policy sought to use the southern half of the Korean peninsula and Japan to create a configuration of military and economic power which would enable the United States to contain the might of both China and the Soviet Union, while simultaneously insuring its own hegemony over Pacific-Asia. This basic strategy, which may be termed the regional integration of U.S. imperialism, turned on making industrialized Jap…
Imagistic historiography and the reinterpretation of Japanese imperialism
Nearly all recent American approaches to the study of modern Japanese history, economy and society have been built on the explicit rejection of the Marxian tradition in scholarship. In this field for the past quarter century a few established authorities have shaped the issues to be researched and debated, either in support of American foreign policy and of capitalism, or in covert reaction against the untranslated work and interpretations of Mar…
On Halliday's Contribution to Understanding Japan
Review of A Political History of Japanese Capitalism by Jon Halliday.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
On Jon Halliday's Contribution to Understanding Japan
Urban networks in Ch'ing China and Tokugawa Japan, by Gilbert Rozman
When urbanism is treated as a subordinate part of a larger totality-one that is inseparably interconnected with all the other features of a society and an epoch-then the approach taken is a genuinely historical one, almost sure to yield meaningful results. But scholarly inquiry focusing solely on the quantifiable aspects of an isolated urbanization process, without reference to its relationship to the politics, economics, social, and intellectual…
The Pitfalls of Scholastic Criticism: A Reply to Norman's Critics
Miura Meisuke, or peasant rebellion under the banner of “distress”
I don't think you realize how hard it is for the oppressed to become united. Their misery unites them—once they recognize who has caused it. “Our sufferance is a gain to them.” But otherwise their misery is liable to cut them off from one another, for they are forced to snatch the wretched crumbs from each other's mouths. Think how reluctantly men decide to revolt! It's an adventure for them: new paths have to be marked out and followed; moreover…
Japan at the end of the seventies; The treatment of the political in recent japanology
ExtractThe following discussion focuses on Ezra Vogel's Japan As Number One: Lessons for America (Harvard University Press, 1979), but only in order to see how it does or does not shed light on politics in Japan today. Although constructed in the form of a critique, its main object is less the criticism of a particular author's views than the direct consideration of two inter-related questions: a) how the Japanese state is conceptualized and pres…
Japan's New Vulnerability
It is said that neither oil shocks, global stagflation, nor chronic monetary instability wilted Japan's "fragile blossom" in the 1970s. And that is undoubtedly true: the nation's economic performance surpassed all rivals. But successful adjustment to conditions of global economic crisis has, by its own internal dialectic, altered the structure of Japan's economy and increased its vulnerability. Three major changes stand out.This article can also …
Rethinking “emperor-system fascism”: Ruptures and continuities in modern Japanese history
A full half century ago the Great Depression and an upsurge of national liberation struggles in China and Korea took only three years to shake the foundations of Japan's fragile political institutions, turning the question of reform into the major issue of the day. In the crisis of 1929–31, Japanese foreign policy underwent further militarization, authority at all levels become more coercive, dissent was suppressed, and disenchantment with the am…
The ‘Japanese challenge’: US-Japan relations at mid-decade
For nearly three decades following World War II Japan was officially considered to be America's newly befriended and unthreatening client in East Asia. Today that is no longer entirely true. A major change is underway in the justifying ideology and the imagery surrounding the US relationship with Japan. Bureaucrats, businessmen, journalists, and academics now portray Japan provocatively to the American public as a direct threat to the viability o…
Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590-1884
Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590-1884
Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590-1884
Class conflict in rural Japan: On historical methodology
This essay examines rural class conflict in the interwar decades in order to show how the past is studied, and to what end, in one recent but representative account of Japanese agrarian history, Richard J. Smethurst's Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870-1940. In this essay the discussion is divided into a sketch of the decline of the landlord system during the interwar period, followed by an examination of a utility-maxim…
Ōkubo Genji: A commitment to international understanding
I met Ōkubo Genji for the first time when he was sixty-two and approaching retirement from a long career in the Canadian Embassy. That was in 1977. Sharing many interests, we quickly became good friends. And over the next nine years I spent much time with Ōkubo-san, dining at his house in Jiyugaoka, enjoying the friendship of his family, attending academic gatherings together, and even on rare occasions traveling with him outside the city
The INF Treaty: An Interpretation
On December 8, 1987, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty eliminating medium- and shorter-range nuclear missiles. Immediately afterwards they entered into three days of discussions at the White House that yielded statements reflecting a significantly softer tone in their relationship. On the one hand, they promised to press ahead in negotiations at Geneva for a second treaty that would cut in half their long-ra…
Scholarly Discourse and Peasant Discontent: Four Studies of Popular Contention in the Tokugawa Period
Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590-1884
Japan studies old and new at the end of the eighties
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 e…
Political science (49 works) · History (44 works) · Japanese History and Culture (35 works) · Law (30 works) · History (23 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Economics (15 works)