After the Occupation: The “Reverse Course” as Conservative Decolonization Movement

Following defeat in the war, Japan underwent a moment of drastic transformation. Wartime morals were negated, armaments renounced, and anti-war movements on the rise. Likewise, conventional norms and established religions were denied, while new social values gained momentum. Less well known are how and why such radical changes were eventually checked, weakened, or even canceled out in the late- and post-occupation periods. When this backlash is discussed, it is commonly viewed through a Cold War lens and described as part of the "Reverse Course"—resulting from Washington’s reversal from reforming and democratizing Japanese society to rehabilitating and restoring Japan in order to use it as a fortress against communist expansion in Asia. As such, very little research has attempted to re-interpret the meanings of the backlash from different angles.

My paper re-examines postwar Japan's social, political, and cultural backlash. While scholars generally consider issues of colonialism and decolonization irrelevant to the history of postwar Japan, this paper suggests that there were striking similarities in dynamics between occupier and occupied in postwar Japan and colonizer and colonized in other parts of the world. Viewed in this way, postwar Japan's backlash can be seen not simply as a Cold War episode, but part of a wave of conservative and nationalist movements—a "decolonization" process developed simultaneously with the progress of the new "colonizing" project in postwar Japan. This paper asks: What can we see when we remove the conventional Cold War lens? What was the "Reverse Course"? What was the nature of decolonization, when we examine not only its political aspects but social and cultural issues, such as gender, labor, and ethnic conflicts? Through exploring these questions, my study challenges the common narrative of the "Reverse Course," and makes a significant contribution to broadening our understanding of decolonization in the postwar world.