New York: Routledge, 2022. 386 pp. (B&W photos.) US$38.65, e-book. ISBN 9780429273575.
This volume takes up life in Japan during Heisei, the era name for the reign of Emperor Akihito (1989–2019). It is animated by the goals outlined in Noriko Murai’s introduction: to present a “multidimensional overview of contemporary Japan within a single book” (xxii) without aiming for comprehensiveness, and to inquire into the meanings, uses, and implications of Heisei and other gengō (Japanese reign names). The book does not develop a central argument or framework, but rather presents intertwining and sometimes contrasting themes and ideas. It is divided into sections on Akihito as “Symbol emperor,” government and politics, civil society, economy and work, diversity, religion, “Cool Japan?” multivoiced narratives in literature and cinema, and history and memory. The foreword, introduction, and 25 chapters are all relatively short but individually and collectively they cover an impressive diversity of detail. The range no doubt results partly from the editors’ hailing from the disparate fields of art history (Murai), Asian studies (Jeff Kingston), and political science (Tina Burrett).
Heisei’s status and implications have varying degrees of focus in the different chapters, and these treatments and the introduction’s framing suggest four approaches. First, Heisei can refer to a simple chronological period, one that can (like a decade) be used for convenience’s sake in organizing a historical account. Second, it can be seen as an era with distinct dynamics that differentiate it meaningfully from Shōwa (1926–1989) and, potentially, Reiwa (2019–present). Some such arguments derive from Akihito’s own place in Japanese politics, society, and culture; others invoke the remarkable global, regional, and national transformations of Heisei’s early years, including the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Japan’s late-1980s economic bubble and onset of low economic growth, and the Liberal Democratic Party’s 1993 loss of power and subsequent electoral reform. Third, extensive attention is devoted to how Heisei has been experienced and narrated, primarily in Japan itself, and especially in contrast to Shōwa. The “lost decades” trope features prominently, but the contributors show that there is much more to narratives of Heisei. Fourth, some authors divide Heisei into sub-periods; Mari Miura’s chapter “Women’s Leadership and Gender Equality” does so most systematically, while other authors discuss “Late Heisei” (Tin Tin Htun) or the “Finale” years from 2009 to 2019 (Kingston).
Evaluating Heisei as an era has the great merit of encouraging the contributors to emphasize Akihito and the imperial system more than would most surveys of contemporary Japan. Chapters by Kenneth Ruoff and Maki Kaneko provide an excellent jumping-off point, and Kaneko’s analysis of artistic representations of Akihito is particularly fascinating. Akihito also features prominently in Alexis Dudden’s chapter on Okinawa, and one of the volume’s key concerns is what Koichi Nakano calls “the contradiction between the liberal democratic and pacifist emperor and the increasingly illiberal, antidemocratic, and hawkish government” (and the political right more generally) (34). The imperial focus also generates more unexpected connections, as in Murai’s discussion of “kawaii [cuteness] and imperial authority” and Alice Y. Tseng’s reflections on similarities between perceptions of Akihito’s reign and of Japanese high architecture.
The volume would have benefited, however, from more systematic consideration of Murai’s question about “the signficance of approaching Japan through the place-bound temporal framework of gengō”: “What gets foregrounded and gains visibility by adopting such a perspective, and what recedes into the background?” (xxiv). While the book appropriately eschews comprehensiveness, the lack of a general explanation of the choice of topics highlighted, soft-pedalled, and omitted leaves the reader to try to figure this out on their own. I would argue that the volume digs deepest in the areas of identity, historical memory, cultural production/consumption, and diversity and marginalization. The coverage of these themes is excellent and combines interest in more mainstream/popular and more critical/marginal culture. I did miss a discussion of music, however. The term “J-pop” does not appear, and the lack of reference to SMAP—the boy band/entertainment industrial complex whose years of operation (1988–2016) overlapped almost perfectly with Heisei and whose members were ubiquitous across music, TV, movies, advertising, and beyond—leaves a gap in the account of Heisei culture.
When one turns away from these themes, some absences stand out. One set is comprised of Japan’s transnational corporations, their workers, and their relationships with the state. Given the intensity of academic and public interest in these themes at the start of Heisei, it is striking that Japan’s globally known firms appear only occasionally, while the term “developmental state” is used only once, and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI, the former MITI) is effectively ignored. Another interrelated group of topics—those involving agriculture, food (including food safety), and the environment—were prominent throughout Heisei but are barely mentioned.
There is also a tension between the attention international connections and relationships receive in Franziska Seraphim’s foreword, Murai’s introduction, and Kingston’s concluding chapter, and their downplaying elsewhere. While chapters including Dudden’s on Okinawa, Tseng’s on architecture, Tin Tin Htun’s on laws and policies relating to ethnic and sexual minorities, and Gracia Liu-Farrer’s on immigration have substantial international content, the book has no section(s) organized around international themes. Relations with the United States, China, and North and South Korea come up often but do not receive sustained coverage; Asia as a region (including the rise of Asian regional institutions) is almost ignored, as are Japan’s place in the global financial system and international diplomacy. There are also few efforts to compare Japan’s late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century trajectory with those followed by other countries. The book’s answer to the intriguing question posed by Seraphim: “Where is Heisei?’ thus seems, somewhat disappointingly, to be “in Japan.” Asking why these and other themes got left out, and to what extent the volume’s sense of foreground and background derives from the gengō perspective, would have taken its shared project further.
Nonetheless, Japan in the Heisei Era is a terrific read. The quality of the contributions is very high; the writing is clear and engaging throughout; the balance between survey and detail is superb; and the book succeeds in providing the multidimensional but not all-encompassing overview of contemporary Japan it promises. Newcomers to and specialists in Japanese studies alike will learn much from it.
Derek Hall
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo