Eighty Years After War – What It Truly Means

Preserved Wartime Structures and the Coming Resurgence

Eighty years from the day marking the end of World War II, which Japan will reach the day after tomorrow, can we truly say that something significant has changed compared to that time? Certainly, there was the great postwar reconstruction, and Japan’s population reached the scale of 100 million, achieving by the 1980s the dream of elevating the entire population into the middle class, in effect becoming a “practically socialist nation.” Yet, can we simply say these were the results of the existing system being fundamentally transformed by the great event of wartime defeat?

I have always been skeptical of such simplistic, one-sided evaluations that fail to understand Japan, and I feel rather that it was precisely because the wartime system was skillfully preserved that this so-called miracle of history occurred. Japan, which realized the ideal of a practically socialist state earlier than the Soviet Union, was unable to change this system (or ideology) after the collapse of the bubble economy in the 1990s and after the Soviet Union’s fall. Over roughly thirty years, the entire population fell from the middle class into poverty, and today the nation has reached a future where decline cannot be stopped and everyone is exhausted. This is because the greatest driving force behind Japan’s postwar recovery was, above all, the total war system established during wartime. I believe this total war system will re-emerge in an unexpected form in the future.