The Colonial Ties are Liquidated

Modernization Theory, Post-War Japan and the Global Cold War

Bibliographic Data

ID4162014
AuthorsSebastian Conrad (0000-0002-8366-4210, Freie Universität Berlin, corresponding author), Conrad
Year2012
Volume216
Issue1
Pages181-214
Publication date2012-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePast & Present (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pastj/gts007
OpenAlexW2318270545
LanguageEN
Citations received12

From 29 August to 2 September 1960, thirty-one eminent scholars congregated for the ‘Conference on Modern Japan’ in Hakone, a small hot-springs resort town just outside Tokyo, in the vicinity of Mount Fuji. The event was organized by the University of Michigan historian John W. Hall and others, and it included many prominent names in the contemporary Japanese humanities and social sciences, and their counterparts from other countries, mainly the United States. On the agenda were three days of intensive discussion on the issue of ‘modernization’ in general and, more specifically, in the Japanese context. The conference was to be, in hindsight and owing to the major and influential publications issuing from five following meetings, a foundational moment for the introduction of modernization theory to Japan. Moreover, the conference was staged as a political project, as part of the active promotion and dissemination of a new developmental ideology. The conference coincided with the arrival of the new American ambassador to Japan, Edwin O. Reischauer. Reischauer was a noted scholar of Japanese studies at Harvard University, and he took part in the conference, using the communications machine provided by his position to popularize and spread the new ideas. The export of modernization theory was part of a larger US strategy in the global Cold War. Both the Hakone meeting and the subsequent summer seminars were funded by the Ford Foundation, whose area-studies programme was designed only after intense negotiations with various government bodies, among them the Central Intelligence Agency.1

Agency (philosophy) · Context (archaeology) · Economic history · Ideology · Media studies · Modernization theory · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Public Administration

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