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Book Reviews, Northeast Asia

Volume 92 – No. 1

ENNOBLING JAPAN’S SAVAGE NORTHEAST: Tōhoku as Postwar Thought, 1945–2011 | By Nathan Hopson

Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 407. Cambridge, MA; London, UK: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2017. xii, 362 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-97700-6.


Nathan Hopson’s book, a “history of ideas, ideas about the idea of Tōhoku” (17), is a triumph of contemporary Japanese intellectual history. It is also a work of historical synthesis grounded in the regional, but national in scope with a focus on Tōhoku, an administrative region in the rural northeast of Honshu Island. Bringing together articulations of Tōhoku-as-idea over a half century—both popular and academic, obscure, and canonical—Hopson accomplishes a number of challenging feats. The most obvious intervention is historiographical. Over the course of the book, Hopson explains how various authors mobilized Tōhoku-as-idea in the post-war era, thereby illuminating the multiple retellings of the history of Japan’s northeast over a millennium along with hotly contested scholarly debates about the role of this region within the Japanese nation. With Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast, Hopson succeeds in integrating post-war Tōhoku studies into the intellectual history of contemporary Japan while also enriching the national history of Japan with a clear articulation of a multi-vocal, regional past of Tōhoku.

The disastrous earthquake and tsunami that captured the attention of the world on March 11, 2011 exposed the striking lacunae of English-language scholarship on the region. Before this tragedy thrust Tōhoku into the spotlight, all but a very small cohort of scholars viewed the region as a periphery of Japanese history, relegating its past to footnotes at best. Hopson, who began his research before 2011, has created a painstakingly well-researched book on Tōhoku-as-idea that can serve as a historical primer on this long-understudied region. Indeed, Hopson synthesizes a huge Japanese-language historiography on the region to demonstrate how Tōhoku emerged as an empty signifier that post-war intellectuals filled in the service of their various political and intellectual projects. Through this ambitious intellectual history, the book simultaneously provides a rough sketch of the region’s history from antiquity through the present and a compelling analysis of how these narratives of Tōhoku reflect broader shifts in post-war ideas of the Japanese nation writ large.

Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast includes five chronological chapters covering the post-war era from 1950 to just after the 2011 triple disaster. Hopson breaks this period in half at 1980 to delineate two categories of Tōhoku as post-war thought. The pre-1980 period, exemplified by the work of Takahashi Tomio, was a time when scholars sought to “ennoble the savage Northeast.” With the violence of pre-war imperial expansionism not yet a distant memory, Tōhoku came to represent Japan’s oldest colonized territory and its inhabitants the “noble savages” who developed cultures of resistance against avaricious elites in imperial Kyoto. Rescuing a twelfth-century city in the northeast, Hiraizumi, from the periphery of the Japanese state, these scholars proposed that Hiraizumi was a co-equal power to Kyoto, an alternative foundation for a new Japanese national history. This history served as a critique of Japan’s wartime aggressions and provided an indigenous source of “‘new’ values for a new age, the post-war” (7). As Hopson quotes, post-war intellectuals like Takahashi Tomio were looking to the historical antecedents of Tōhoku for “a Japan that we could be proud of and have hope for” (121).

Post-1980, however, Hopson demonstrates how this discourse shifted. Neoconservative think tanks like Umehara Takeshi’s Nichibunken and Akasaka Norio’s Tōbuken (Tōhoku Culture Research Center) moved away from redeeming wartime Japan and instead sought to transform Tōhoku into a metonym for Japan’s authentic past, “the fount and storehouse of Japan’s national identity” (210), that could become a leader in a new global future. This era featured an interdisciplinary subfield called Tōhokugaku (Tōhoku-ology) that proposed Japan was the key to a new civilizational paradigm that could save the world from the problems created by Western civilization.  According to these scholars Tōhoku, and thus Japan, was home to a uniquely hybrid culture that merged Jōmon-era (ca. 14500 BCE–300B CE) hunter-gathering with Yayoi era (300 BCE–300 CE) wet rice agriculture. This hybrid could form the basis of a new “civilization founded on the environmentally friendly, peaceful, animistic roots of Japanese culture” (202). In other words, Japanist Tōhokugaku scholars saw Tōhoku as the true heartland for contemporary Japanese identity and a panacea for the ills of global modernity.

While it is beyond the scope of Hopson’s research, I would caution readers to remember this project is intended as a historiographic analysis of post-war academic narratives and not as an overarching survey of the region’s past. Hopson provides a compelling explanation of how the idea of Tōhoku provided post-1945 era intellectuals with a malleable vehicle for reimagining their nation, thus making an important contribution to post-war Japanese intellectual history. However, Tōhoku had a history before 1945 and many of the individuals Hopson features cherry-picked their evidence to fit Tōhoku within their own agendas. Other pre-war voices within Tōhoku itself viewed the region as an integral component of imperial Japan prior to 1945.

This minor point aside, Hopson offers a well-constructed and eminently readable monograph that does more than provide a seemingly straightforward intellectual history. While his book may assert that between 1945 and 2011 “Tōhoku was a kind of floating or empty signifier in Japanese discourses of national reinvention” (1), through the process of systematically elucidating those agendas Hopson gives hitherto unrealized form to the concept of “Tōhoku.” Hopson brings together disparate threads from archaeology, anthropology, art history, sociology, folklore studies, linguistics, paleoecology, traditional national histories, and popular culture into a coherent narrative of Tōhoku-as-idea. Through this powerful synthesis, Hopson convincingly proves his fundamental argument that to understand post-war Japan, one must understand the history of Tōhoku as post-war thought. Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast thus comprises a watershed work of English-language scholarship on Tōhoku, offering a monumental overview of post-war Tōhoku thought, and through it, an important contribution to the intellectual history of contemporary Japan.


Anne Giblin Gedacht

Seton Hall University, South Orange, USA


Last Revised: May 31, 2019
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