Inventing and Re-Inventing Japan: Notes on Buruma's History of Modern Japan
Inventing and Re-Inventing Japan: Reading Notes on Buruma
Two Acts of Invention
Ian Buruma's Inventing Japan is really a study of two "inventions" separated by roughly eighty years. The first is the Meiji Restoration (from 1868), in which a small group of oligarchs, the Genro, engineered a modern nationalist identity for a fractured, feudal society. They wrote the 1889 Meiji Constitution, promulgated the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, and elevated the Emperor from a secluded Kyoto figure into a living god at the center of a new civic religion, Kokutai (the "national polity" or "national essence"). The second invention is the American occupation under General Douglas MacArthur after 1945, which Buruma treats as an equally radical, top-down re-engineering of the same country. MacArthur's administration rewrote the constitution, imposed Article 9's renunciation of war, stripped Hirohito of formal divinity while preserving him as a symbolic figurehead, and tried to remake Japanese popular culture wholesale, famously through the "3 S's" (Screen, Sport, Sex), a real occupation-era strategy of flooding the culture with Hollywood films, baseball, and looser social mores to dissolve wartime militarism. Both projects shared a common feature: elites imposing a "new" Japan from above to answer the crisis of their moment, while claiming continuity with an ancient, organic tradition that was in fact freshly manufactured.
A Constitution "Sickly from the Beginning"
It would be a mistake to read the Meiji order of 1889–1931 as a period of settled stability that later collapsed into chaos in the 1930s. Buruma himself calls Meiji democracy "a sickly child from the beginning," and the diagnosis matters: the 1889 constitution was, in his description, a building whose facade mimicked German (and by extension, "civilized" Western) constitutionalism while its interior housed an invented, quasi-religious mythology of unbroken imperial descent. The Genro who drafted it were confident they could manage the whole apparatus from the backrooms of the Privy Council, deliberately keeping the elected Diet weak. The greatest long-term danger, as Buruma frames it, lay in the document's vagueness: the Emperor was formally sovereign and supreme commander of the armed forces, yet also expected to remain above ordinary politics, meaning an unelected bureaucratic and military elite could make decisions "in his name" without ever needing his active, accountable participation. The armed services, crucially, swore loyalty to the throne alone, not to the civilian cabinet or the Diet, a structural loophole that let the military bypass elected government entirely once it chose to.
The Taisho era's liberalization was real but constrained by the same logic. Universal male suffrage, passed in 1925, arrived paired in the same legislative session with the Peace Preservation Law, which criminalized any attempt to "alter the Kokutai" and became the legal basis for "thought crime" prosecutions, ultimately more than 70,000 arrests before its repeal in 1945. A regime that grants the vote and criminalizes dissenting thought in the same breath was never constitutional in any sense recognizable to contemporary Western liberal democracies. What can fairly be said of the pre-1931 period is that Japanese imperialism, however brutal in Taiwan, Korea, and against Russia and China, remained comparatively focused and policy-directed, and civil society, the press, party politics, and intellectual life continued to develop in real, if constrained, ways. What changed after 1931 was not the underlying structure but the removal of any check on it: the Genro generation, which had cynically built Kokutai as a tool while privately understanding it as an invention, died off and was replaced by a generation that had been raised inside the Rescript on Education and conscript military service and had sincerely internalized emperor-worship as literal truth rather than useful fiction. The mutation described below did not arrive from outside the Meiji system; it was that system's own congenital vulnerability, finally unsupervised by anyone who remembered building it.
The Mutation of Kokutai into a Death Cult
Buruma's sharpest and darkest argument concerns what happened to the Kokutai concept by the 1930s and 1940s, and it is worth separating two claims that his own narrative tends to run together: whether there was a coordinated plan, and whether there was a coherent ideology. On the first question, Buruma's case is persuasive. The Meiji framework of civic duty to the Emperor was hijacked by a fractured, competitive military leadership, army against navy, bureaucrats against generals, with no single strategic architect and no coherent endpoint. Ishiwara's Manchuria fait accompli in 1931 was a unilateral field action the Emperor learned of only after the fact, not the execution of a general staff's design; Nanking and later atrocities likewise read as uncoordinated tactical brutality rather than the output of a planning apparatus. Buruma contrasts this with Nazi Germany, where Hitler had a specific ideological blueprint for conquest and extermination, while Japan's wartime elite had no comparable unified plan — though this contrast is itself a little overdrawn, since historians of Nazi Germany (notably Hans Mommsen and Ian Kershaw, with the latter's "working towards the Führer" model) have shown the Third Reich's own implementation was considerably more polycratic and improvisational than a tidy single-blueprint picture suggests. The sharper difference may not be presence versus absence of ideology on either side, but that Hitler had built a single-party apparatus capable of eventually imposing order on competing power centers, where Japan's competing loci — Army, Navy, court, cabinet — all invoked the same Kokutai without any one of them ever controlling it.
That absence of a controlling center is what lets each commander and official carry what Buruma calls a "portable shrine" of the Emperor, a personal, unaccountable justification that let anyone sanctify almost any action, brutal or otherwise, in his name. Because the Emperor was a remote, divine symbol whose actual will was infinitely interpretable, responsibility diffused into nothing: everyone acted "for" him, so no one bore individual moral weight.
But the second question — was there a coherent ideology — should be answered yes, and answered clearly, because Buruma's own material supports it even where his framing (following Maruyama Masao's "politics of irresponsibility," which he largely endorses) risks obscuring it. What existed by the 1930s was something close to what Karl Mannheim called a "total ideology": not merely elite propaganda but a totalizing worldview, structuring perception for rulers and ruled alike — ethnonationalist and ethnoreligious, built on Kokutai absolutism, Yamato supremacism, and a revived Bushido cult, aimed at the domination of Asia and directed against the same targets Hitler named (liberalism, modernity, Western individualism), with "the Anglo-American" standing in for the role Hitler assigned the Jews as embodiment of the enemy. This ideology had its own high intellectual register, too: the Kyoto School of philosophy — figures like Nishitani, still read seriously by some philosophers today — supplied philosophical justification for the Co-Prosperity project and the Kokutai under banners like "Overcoming Modernity" and "Overcoming the West," phrases Buruma quotes without naming their source. Kyoto was only one manifestation of a total ideology that had by then coalesced well beyond any single school or text. And like Orwell's later thought police, this total ideology had its own real enforcement mechanism years before Orwell wrote about such things: the Peace Preservation Law's criminalization of any attempt to "alter the Kokutai," backing the propaganda with prosecutable force.
By the war's final years this ideology had curdled into something closer to a nihilistic death cult than a rational war effort. Propaganda escalated well beyond the 1890 Rescript's language of loyal service into instructions on how to die correctly for the Kokutai. Textbooks and drills conditioned children and civilians to slit their own throats rather than be captured, to serve as human shields for retreating soldiers, and, in Okinawa, to leap from cliffs. The state was no longer fighting to win; it was staging a ritual of collective self-annihilation meant to prove that Japan's "spiritual essence" could survive even total physical destruction.
The Shrine, Not the Bomb: How the War Actually Ended
One of the most startling claims Buruma makes, and one corroborated by historians who have examined the imperial court's internal records (notably Herbert Bix), is that the decision to surrender in August 1945 did not primarily turn on human casualties, even the atomic bombings. On July 25 and 31, 1945, Hirohito expressed alarm to Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kōichi Kido not about the firebombing of Tokyo or mass starvation, but about intelligence suggesting Allied landings might threaten the Ise and Atsuta shrines, home to two of the three Imperial Regalia (the Sacred Mirror and the Sacred Sword). Hirohito reportedly said he was prepared to share the regalia's fate rather than see them lost, believing that if the sacred treasures fell into enemy hands, the Kokutai itself, and with it the imperial line, could not endure. When the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War finally deadlocked in August 1945, the central argument was not about minimizing further deaths but about how to guarantee the preservation of the Kokutai as a condition of surrender. Even Hirohito's surrender broadcast emphasized that he had "been able to safeguard and maintain the Kokutai," not that the killing would stop. Buruma calls this a mystical, almost cultic logic, in which the survival of a sacred abstraction outweighed the survival of millions of actual Japanese subjects.
The Tokyo Trials and the Manufactured Alibi
The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, modeled on Nuremberg, required a workable legal fiction to spare Hirohito: that he was a peaceful figure manipulated by a fanatical military clique, chiefly General Hideki Tojo. This fiction nearly collapsed during the trial itself. When Tojo took the stand, he stated plainly that no subject would ever have disobeyed the Emperor's will, an admission that, taken at face value, implicated Hirohito directly in every major wartime decision. The trial recessed; roughly a week later, Tojo returned with a revised account restoring the official script, that the militarists had misled a passive Emperor. Buruma treats this moment as the clearest evidence that the "innocent puppet" narrative was a constructed alibi rather than a factual finding, an interpretation strongly supported by later historical research, including Bix's demonstration that Hirohito was an active, informed participant in military decision-making rather than a bystander.
Why the Prewar "Liberals" Fought to Save the Throne
A genuine puzzle in the book is why men like Shigeru Yoshida and Kijūrō Shidehara, prewar internationalists who had opposed the drift toward war with the United States and who understood perfectly well that the Kokutai was an invented, Meiji-era political tool rather than an ancient truth, nonetheless fought hardest to keep Hirohito on the throne after 1945. Three explanations are worth weighing against each other to clarify the elite mindset:
- Paternalist "anchor" theory. The elite viewed ordinary Japanese as needing a sacred unifying figure to prevent social collapse. This explanation strains against the obvious fact that the same "anchor" had just produced total civilizational catastrophe rather than order, undermining its own premise.
- Fear of communism. Yoshida and Shidehara worried that removing the Emperor would open the door to a leftist or Soviet-aligned revolution amid mass starvation and unrest. This fear was real, but the timeline shows it cannot be the original motive: the elite lobbied MacArthur to protect Hirohito from the earliest weeks of occupation in 1945, well before the Cold War's containment logic crystallized in Washington around 1947.
- Class self-preservation. The most convincing explanation is structural rather than psychological. The legitimacy of the entire prewar elite class, the aristocracy, the bureaucracy, and the Zaibatsu conglomerates, was derived from the same imperial constitutional order. If the Emperor were formally condemned as a war criminal, the whole edifice of elite authority built on that order would be delegitimized alongside him. Protecting Hirohito meant protecting themselves and their institutions, not defending an abstract principle.
A refinement matters here: the Zaibatsu leaders and corporatist politicians were not chiefly afraid of criminal prosecution (their wartime compliance under a totalitarian command economy gave them a workable legal defense), but of a different threat entirely, the New Deal wing of the occupation's actual stated plan to dissolve the Zaibatsu conglomerates, break up family trusts, and restructure Japan's economy along more democratic, decentralized, labor-friendly lines. Losing wealth, corporate control, and social dominance, not the gallows, was their real fear.
The Republican Sweep and the "Reverse Course"
Buruma frames the occupation as internally divided between a New Deal faction, which favored antitrust action against the Zaibatsu, strong labor unions, and thoroughgoing social reform, and a conservative faction that prioritized stability and, not coincidentally, tended to favor keeping the Emperor. The balance tipped decisively in November 1946, when the Republican Party won control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1930, taking office in the 80th Congress in January 1947. The new Congress was hostile to funding what it saw as costly social experimentation abroad and pushed to make Japan economically self-sufficient quickly. Combined with the rapidly accelerating Cold War, especially the looming Communist victory in China, this shift produced the so-called "Reverse Course": the occupation abandoned aggressive Zaibatsu dissolution and labor empowerment in favor of rapid re-industrialization under the very corporate and bureaucratic elites the New Dealers had wanted to dismantle. Shigeru Yoshida, twice prime minister (1946–47 and 1948–54), became the chief architect of this settlement, formalized as the "Yoshida Doctrine": Japan would outsource its military defense to the United States and pour all national energy into economic growth. This doctrine, and the political coalition behind it, became the direct institutional ancestor of the Liberal Democratic Party, founded in 1955.
The Unfinished Reckoning
Buruma's deeper argument is that because Hirohito was never held accountable, Japan as a whole was structurally excused from a genuine reckoning with its wartime conduct, in sharp contrast to Germany's Nuremberg-driven confrontation with Nazism. The postwar narrative, "the militarists misled the Emperor, and the militarists misled us," let ordinary citizens adopt a stance of passive victimhood centered on Japanese suffering (firebombing, starvation, the atomic bombings) rather than collective responsibility for continental atrocities. This has produced durable asymmetries in regional memory: Japanese textbooks and public consciousness remain comparatively thin on wartime atrocities, while Chinese state media and education keep wartime grievance vivid and present. The imperial household itself split from this legacy over time: Hirohito's 1978 boycott of Yasukuni Shrine, prompted by the shrine's secret 1978 enshrinement of fourteen Class-A war criminals (confirmed by the 2006 discovery of the Tomita memorandum), was a self-protective move to preserve his "innocent puppet" narrative, not an act of repentance. But his son Akihito and grandson Naruhito inherited the boycott and transformed its meaning into genuine, repeatedly expressed "deep remorse," placing the modern imperial family in tacit opposition to the revisionist nationalism still cultivated by factions within the Liberal Democratic Party and allied groups such as Nippon Kaigi. The result is a state whose formal head is estranged from the very nationalist mythology built in his family's name, while the underlying structure, an unaccountable throne, a dominant conservative party descended from the old elite, and shrines that keep prewar symbols alive just outside formal state control, remains fully intact beneath a peaceful, democratic, prosperous surface.
Closing Note
Buruma's title deserves amending: Inventing and Re-Inventing Japan captures the book's argument better than the original. The book's real subject is not a single national identity but the recurring pattern by which Japanese and, later, American elites manufactured "tradition" to serve immediate political needs, then treated the result as timeless and sacred. Understanding this pattern is essential to understanding why postwar Japan's democracy, genuine in many respects, including its progressive constitutional provisions on gender and labor drafted in haste by idealistic young occupation officials, still rests on a foundation never fully rebuilt from the ground up.
Inventing and Re-Inventing Japan: Reading Notes on Buruma
Two Acts of Invention
Ian Buruma's Inventing Japan is really a study of two "inventions" separated by roughly eighty years. The first is the Meiji Restoration (from 1868), in which a small group of oligarchs, the Genro, engineered a modern nationalist identity for a fractured, feudal society. They wrote the 1889 Meiji Constitution, promulgated the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, and elevated the Emperor from a secluded Kyoto figure into a living god at the center of a new civic religion, Kokutai (the "national polity" or "national essence"). The second invention is the American occupation under General Douglas MacArthur after 1945, which Buruma treats as an equally radical, top-down re-engineering of the same country. MacArthur's administration rewrote the constitution, imposed Article 9's renunciation of war, stripped Hirohito of formal divinity while preserving him as a symbolic figurehead, and tried to remake Japanese popular culture wholesale, famously through the "3 S's" (Screen, Sport, Sex), a real occupation-era strategy of flooding the culture with Hollywood films, baseball, and looser social mores to dissolve wartime militarism. Both projects shared a common feature: elites imposing a "new" Japan from above to answer the crisis of their moment, while claiming continuity with an ancient, organic tradition that was in fact freshly manufactured.
A Constitution "Sickly from the Beginning"
It would be a mistake to read the Meiji order of 1889–1931 as a period of settled stability that later collapsed into chaos in the 1930s. Buruma himself calls Meiji democracy "a sickly child from the beginning," and the diagnosis matters: the 1889 constitution was, in his description, a building whose facade mimicked German (and by extension, "civilized" Western) constitutionalism while its interior housed an invented, quasi-religious mythology of unbroken imperial descent. The Genro who drafted it were confident they could manage the whole apparatus from the backrooms of the Privy Council, deliberately keeping the elected Diet weak. The greatest long-term danger, as Buruma frames it, lay in the document's vagueness: the Emperor was formally sovereign and supreme commander of the armed forces, yet also expected to remain above ordinary politics, meaning an unelected bureaucratic and military elite could make decisions "in his name" without ever needing his active, accountable participation. The armed services, crucially, swore loyalty to the throne alone, not to the civilian cabinet or the Diet, a structural loophole that let the military bypass elected government entirely once it chose to.
The Taisho era's liberalization was real but constrained by the same logic. Universal male suffrage, passed in 1925, arrived paired in the same legislative session with the Peace Preservation Law, which criminalized any attempt to "alter the Kokutai" and became the legal basis for "thought crime" prosecutions, ultimately more than 70,000 arrests before its repeal in 1945. A regime that grants the vote and criminalizes dissenting thought in the same breath was never constitutional in any sense recognizable to contemporary Western liberal democracies. What can fairly be said of the pre-1931 period is that Japanese imperialism, however brutal in Taiwan, Korea, and against Russia and China, remained comparatively focused and policy-directed, and civil society, the press, party politics, and intellectual life continued to develop in real, if constrained, ways. What changed after 1931 was not the underlying structure but the removal of any check on it: the Genro generation, which had cynically built Kokutai as a tool while privately understanding it as an invention, died off and was replaced by a generation that had been raised inside the Rescript on Education and conscript military service and had sincerely internalized emperor-worship as literal truth rather than useful fiction. The mutation described below did not arrive from outside the Meiji system; it was that system's own congenital vulnerability, finally unsupervised by anyone who remembered building it.
The Mutation of Kokutai into a Death Cult
Buruma's sharpest and darkest argument concerns what happened to the Kokutai concept by the 1930s and 1940s. The Meiji framework of civic duty to the Emperor was hijacked by a fractured, competitive military leadership, army against navy, bureaucrats against generals, with no single strategic architect and no coherent endpoint. Buruma contrasts this explicitly with Nazi Germany: Hitler had a specific ideological blueprint for conquest and extermination, but Japan's wartime elite had no comparable unified plan. Instead, each commander and official carried what Buruma calls a "portable shrine" of the Emperor, a personal, unaccountable justification that let anyone sanctify almost any action, brutal or otherwise, in his name. Because the Emperor was a remote, divine symbol whose actual will was infinitely interpretable, responsibility diffused into nothing: everyone acted "for" him, so no one bore individual moral weight.
By the war's final years this arrangement had curdled into something closer to a nihilistic death cult than a rational war effort. Propaganda escalated well beyond the 1890 Rescript's language of loyal service into instructions on how to die correctly for the Kokutai. Textbooks and drills conditioned children and civilians to slit their own throats rather than be captured, to serve as human shields for retreating soldiers, and, in Okinawa, to leap from cliffs. The state was no longer fighting to win; it was staging a ritual of collective self-annihilation meant to prove that Japan's "spiritual essence" could survive even total physical destruction.
The Shrine, Not the Bomb: How the War Actually Ended
One of the most startling claims Buruma makes, and one corroborated by historians who have examined the imperial court's internal records (notably Herbert Bix), is that the decision to surrender in August 1945 did not primarily turn on human casualties, even the atomic bombings. On July 25 and 31, 1945, Hirohito expressed alarm to Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kōichi Kido not about the firebombing of Tokyo or mass starvation, but about intelligence suggesting Allied landings might threaten the Ise and Atsuta shrines, home to two of the three Imperial Regalia (the Sacred Mirror and the Sacred Sword). Hirohito reportedly said he was prepared to share the regalia's fate rather than see them lost, believing that if the sacred treasures fell into enemy hands, the Kokutai itself, and with it the imperial line, could not endure. When the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War finally deadlocked in August 1945, the central argument was not about minimizing further deaths but about how to guarantee the preservation of the Kokutai as a condition of surrender. Even Hirohito's surrender broadcast emphasized that he had "been able to safeguard and maintain the Kokutai," not that the killing would stop. Buruma calls this a mystical, almost cultic logic, in which the survival of a sacred abstraction outweighed the survival of millions of actual Japanese subjects.
The Tokyo Trials and the Manufactured Alibi
The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, modeled on Nuremberg, required a workable legal fiction to spare Hirohito: that he was a peaceful figure manipulated by a fanatical military clique, chiefly General Hideki Tojo. This fiction nearly collapsed during the trial itself. When Tojo took the stand, he stated plainly that no subject would ever have disobeyed the Emperor's will, an admission that, taken at face value, implicated Hirohito directly in every major wartime decision. The trial recessed; roughly a week later, Tojo returned with a revised account restoring the official script, that the militarists had misled a passive Emperor. Buruma treats this moment as the clearest evidence that the "innocent puppet" narrative was a constructed alibi rather than a factual finding, an interpretation strongly supported by later historical research, including Bix's demonstration that Hirohito was an active, informed participant in military decision-making rather than a bystander.
Why the Prewar "Liberals" Fought to Save the Throne
A genuine puzzle in the book is why men like Shigeru Yoshida and Kijūrō Shidehara, prewar internationalists who had opposed the drift toward war with the United States and who understood perfectly well that the Kokutai was an invented, Meiji-era political tool rather than an ancient truth, nonetheless fought hardest to keep Hirohito on the throne after 1945. Three explanations are worth weighing against each other to clarify the elite mindset:
Paternalist "anchor" theory. The elite viewed ordinary Japanese as needing a sacred unifying figure to prevent social collapse. This explanation strains against the obvious fact that the same "anchor" had just produced total civilizational catastrophe rather than order, undermining its own premise.
Fear of communism. Yoshida and Shidehara worried that removing the Emperor would open the door to a leftist or Soviet-aligned revolution amid mass starvation and unrest. This fear was real, but the timeline shows it cannot be the original motive: the elite lobbied MacArthur to protect Hirohito from the earliest weeks of occupation in 1945, well before the Cold War's containment logic crystallized in Washington around 1947.
Class self-preservation. The most convincing explanation is structural rather than psychological. The legitimacy of the entire prewar elite class, the aristocracy, the bureaucracy, and the Zaibatsu conglomerates, was derived from the same imperial constitutional order. If the Emperor were formally condemned as a war criminal, the whole edifice of elite authority built on that order would be delegitimized alongside him. Protecting Hirohito meant protecting themselves and their institutions, not defending an abstract principle.
A refinement matters here: the Zaibatsu leaders and corporatist politicians were not chiefly afraid of criminal prosecution (their wartime compliance under a totalitarian command economy gave them a workable legal defense), but of a different threat entirely, the New Deal wing of the occupation's actual stated plan to dissolve the Zaibatsu conglomerates, break up family trusts, and restructure Japan's economy along more democratic, decentralized, labor-friendly lines. Losing wealth, corporate control, and social dominance, not the gallows, was their real fear.
The Republican Sweep and the "Reverse Course"
Buruma frames the occupation as internally divided between a New Deal faction, which favored antitrust action against the Zaibatsu, strong labor unions, and thoroughgoing social reform, and a conservative faction that prioritized stability and, not coincidentally, tended to favor keeping the Emperor. The balance tipped decisively in November 1946, when the Republican Party won control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1930, taking office in the 80th Congress in January 1947. The new Congress was hostile to funding what it saw as costly social experimentation abroad and pushed to make Japan economically self-sufficient quickly. Combined with the rapidly accelerating Cold War, especially the looming Communist victory in China, this shift produced the so-called "Reverse Course": the occupation abandoned aggressive Zaibatsu dissolution and labor empowerment in favor of rapid re-industrialization under the very corporate and bureaucratic elites the New Dealers had wanted to dismantle. Shigeru Yoshida, twice prime minister (1946–47 and 1948–54), became the chief architect of this settlement, formalized as the "Yoshida Doctrine": Japan would outsource its military defense to the United States and pour all national energy into economic growth. This doctrine, and the political coalition behind it, became the direct institutional ancestor of the Liberal Democratic Party, founded in 1955.
The Unfinished Reckoning
Buruma's deeper argument is that because Hirohito was never held accountable, Japan as a whole was structurally excused from a genuine reckoning with its wartime conduct, in sharp contrast to Germany's Nuremberg-driven confrontation with Nazism. The postwar narrative, "the militarists misled the Emperor, and the militarists misled us," let ordinary citizens adopt a stance of passive victimhood centered on Japanese suffering (firebombing, starvation, the atomic bombings) rather than collective responsibility for continental atrocities. This has produced durable asymmetries in regional memory: Japanese textbooks and public consciousness remain comparatively thin on wartime atrocities, while Chinese state media and education keep wartime grievance vivid and present. The imperial household itself split from this legacy over time: Hirohito's 1978 boycott of Yasukuni Shrine, prompted by the shrine's secret 1978 enshrinement of fourteen Class-A war criminals (confirmed by the 2006 discovery of the Tomita memorandum), was a self-protective move to preserve his "innocent puppet" narrative, not an act of repentance. But his son Akihito and grandson Naruhito inherited the boycott and transformed its meaning into genuine, repeatedly expressed "deep remorse," placing the modern imperial family in tacit opposition to the revisionist nationalism still cultivated by factions within the Liberal Democratic Party and allied groups such as Nippon Kaigi. The result is a state whose formal head is estranged from the very nationalist mythology built in his family's name, while the underlying structure, an unaccountable throne, a dominant conservative party descended from the old elite, and shrines that keep prewar symbols alive just outside formal state control, remains fully intact beneath a peaceful, democratic, prosperous surface.
Closing Note
Buruma's title deserves amending: Inventing and Re-Inventing Japan captures the book's argument better than the original. The book's real subject is not a single national identity but the recurring pattern by which Japanese and, later, American elites manufactured "tradition" to serve immediate political needs, then treated the result as timeless and sacred. Understanding this pattern is essential to understanding why postwar Japan's democracy, genuine in many respects, including its progressive constitutional provisions on gender and labor drafted in haste by idealistic young occupation officials, still rests on a foundation never fully rebuilt from the ground up.