SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Morito Tatsuo’s “Bunka Kokka-ron”: The State, the Citizen, and Democratic Culture in Early Postwar Japan

Peter Siegenthaler

Abstract

Following the 1945 surrender, the Japanese people embarked on a protracted period of national self-criticism. Promoted by the Allied Occupation, fundamental structural change — new civil institutions, realignment of land ownership, and reforms to the educational system, among other examples — followed. Throughout the Occupation period, however, questions about the role of culture in the rebuilding of Japanese society were never far from the center of attention. In the view of many Japanese, the country’s future depended on its redefinition as a “nation of culture” (bunka kokka) and that phrase appeared widely in postwar journalism, scholarship, and oratory. The structural and the cultural met in the 1950 revision of the national Cultural Properties Protection Law, which promoted a new system of designation targeted at what came to be called the “democratization of cultural assets.” This presentation investigates the path that led from relatively abstract readings of the phrase “cultural nation” in the immediate postwar era to its tangible, structural application via the 1950 law by building from one early postwar source, “Essay on the Cultural Nation” (Bunka kokka-ron), a 1946 publication by educator, scholar, and politician Morito Tatsuo (1888–1984). Through a reading of Morito’s text, set alongside other visions of the roles of culture, citizens, and the state in the rebuilding of the country, this presentation clarifies the phrase’s relevance to our study of the social and political dynamics of the early postwar period and highlights its role in the formation of the system for cultural preservation that is still in effect in Japan today.

Speaker Biography

A senior lecturer in the Department of History at Texas State University, San Marcos, Peter Siegenthaler focuses his research on historic preservation and collective memory in postwar East Asia. His doctoral dissertation, completed in the Department of Asian Studies of the University of Texas in 2004, looked at three sites of townscape preservation (machinami hozon) in Japan between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s. His current project seeks to fill out the narrative suggested in that work by tracing the contours of Japanese townscape preservation from the development of the postwar Cultural Properties Protection Law (Bunkazai Hogo-hô), put into effect in 1950, to the first designation at the national level of township preservation districts (the denken chiku) in 1975. In addition to the many facets of Japanese modernity, his teaching interests include the relationship of cinema to history in East Asia, the evolution of local identities in Central Asia, and the role of memoir in our understanding of the collective past.