A Super Mario Jamboree of Japanese History. A review of The Shortest History of Japan.

The Japanese archipelago, a diverse collection of islands first unified as a single nation in the late nineteenth century, is a place of enormous historical interest. Any understanding of the global twentieth century certainly needs to consider Japan—its precocious industrialisation, its violent acquisition of an extensive empire in East Asia and the Pacific, and its military defeat in 1945 followed by rapid regeneration as a Cold War ally of the United States. Earlier periods of Japanese history also hold great fascination for global historians. The sedentary settlements and elaborate material culture of the Jōmon period (14,500 – 1000 BC) force us to re-consider the nature of social complexity before agriculture. The very late dispersal of cereal farming to Japan goes against the grain of the prehistory of most of Eurasia for reasons that are still poorly understood. The long-term consequences of the first direct contacts between Iberia and Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have been played down by American historians keen to insist that the ‘opening’ of Japan was the result of the enlightened policies of a modern (and Protestant) United States. Yet the period sometimes called the ‘Christian Century’ marked a rich and remarkable era of cultural interaction between Japan and Europe.
 
Given the importance of Japan for world history, an overview of that country’s past in the popular Shortest History series should be a welcome addition. Unfortunately, The Shortest History of Japan by Lesley Downer follows the worn trope of Japan as a mystical land of tradition and custom, one best portrayed—explained would be the wrong word since the author is not interested in historical explanation—by a team of gods and superheroes that includes the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, the emperor, and prime minister Abe Shinzō and his avatar Super Mario. Readers under the impression that the ‘Great Men’ approach to history had long passed its best-by date will be in for a surprise. Any sort of Annales-inspired ‘history from below’ is missing here, despite the influence of that very approach on numerous Japanese historians, most famously the medievalist Amino Yoshihiko. Instead, we have a ‘history from above’, one which sometimes reaches very far up into the mystical ether of the gods, confusing—or at least giving the impression of confusing, deliberately or not—fact and fiction regarding the early emperors.
 
Downer starts and ends with the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. The very last sentence of the book makes the cryptic claim that ‘Far from being a historical relic, she [Amaterasu] is as alive today as she was before time began’ (p. 235). This image of Amaterasu recalls the unfortunate Chinese emperor Puyi who, in 1940, underwent a ceremony during which he was transformed from the last ruler of the Qing dynasty into a half-brother of the Japanese emperor Hirohito and a descendant of the Sun Goddess as a ‘Living Amaterasu’ (iki-Amaterasu) (McCormack 1996a: 272). Chapter 1, titled ‘Children of the Sun’, then kicks off with Jimmu, a mythological ‘first emperor’ who supposedly ascended the throne in 660 BC. One of the most controversial aspects of ancient Japanese history has been the question of invasions and conquests on the Korean peninsula. The claim made in the eighth-century Nihon shoki that Japan controlled an enclave named Mimana in southern Korea is now discounted by most historians. This is a topic that continues to ignite acrimony between Korea and Japan, yet Downer reduces it to a ‘Korean adventure’, one which was destined to failure with the death of Empress Saimei in AD 661: ‘Without the inspiration of their empress’, Downer intones, ‘the Japanese were doomed.’ Downer’s attraction to the Japanese imperial family continues into modern times. We are treated to lachrymose accounts of the dating behaviour of Emperors Akihito and Naruhito, as well as a wedding photo of the latter. It would be an understatement to say that all of this does little to reflect the recent intellectual landscape of Japanese history.
 
The introduction and first chapter of the book, which cover prehistory and the ancient era, contain numerous basic mistakes and outdated information. The Japanese Islands were not connected by land bridges to the Asian mainland when the first humans reached the archipelago; like Australia, human settlement required boats. The map facing page 1 incorrectly demarcates the ‘Northernmost extent of Jōmon culture’ at the Ishikari Plain. Jōmon pottery might sometimes have been used to boil ‘vegetables, acorns and horse chestnuts’ (p. 3), but research published in Nature over a decade ago has shown that marine foods were one of the most common resources processed in pots (Craig et al. 2013). (Horse chestnuts require extensive processing before human consumption and it was the edible chestnut that was more central to Jōmon foodways). The spread of farming to Japan is explained quite misleadingly as a process by which poor Korean peasants ‘scratching a living from the soil’ were attracted to a more fertile Japan. Cereal farming (of millets) had in fact reached Korea around 3500 BC but did not spread to Japan for over 2500 years. If Japan was a more attractive environment for farming, we would expect a much earlier transmission.
 
The chronology of the Yayoi period adopted by Downer does not reflect recent scholarship. Instead of 400 BC, most archaeologists now begin the Yayoi around 900 BC. After arrival in the archipelago, agriculture and Yayoi culture spread rapidly but it took several centuries before they reached eastern Japan. Hokkaido and Okinawa never became part of the Yayoi culture zone. Yayoi people did not live in ‘wood and stone houses on stilts’ (p. 15). Raised floor buildings were used to store cereals in order to prevent rodents from eating the grain. Most people continued to live in pit houses, although large, multi-storey buildings were constructed for chiefs. Downer accepts that immigration from Korea occurred in the Yayoi, but makes only a brief mention of the new arrivals who were ‘taller, more lightly built and with slenderer faces than the Jōmon [people]’ (p. 15). New research in ancient DNA—which has revolutionised our understanding of the population history of Japan in recent years—seems to have completely escaped the author’s attention.
 
The end of the Yayoi period is linked with Himiko, the queen mentioned in the Wei zhi and other Chinese histories. According to Downer, ‘The Chinese records say that she came from a long dynasty of female rulers and was a virgin’ and that she ‘ruled for sixty years and died in 248 CE, when she was eighty’ (pp. 18-19). In fact, the Wei zhi specifically states that ‘Before [Himiko] the polity had a male ruler.’ The same text claims that ‘Although well along in years, she remained unmarried’ (Kidder, 2007: 16), but her virginity must surely remain open to question. We do not know when Himiko was born (or exactly when she died). The suggestion of eighty years of age apparently derives from Downer’s confusion over the Wei zhi’s account of civil war prior to the ascension of Himiko as queen. Archaeologists generally accept that Himiko was buried in one of the first kofun, the mounded tombs that give their name to the following Kofun period (AD 250-700). Downer writes that some 20,000 tomb mounds are known in Japan (p. 20). The real number is over 160,000 burial mounds from the Kofun period as a whole, of which around 5000 are of the keyhole shape (Knopf et al. 2018).
 
Following these brief and problematic comments on archaeology, The Shortest History of Japan’s account of the premodern era is essentially one of emperors and shoguns. Ordinary people are rarely granted an appearance. From time to time, we are reminded that ‘For them life was frankly terrible’, or that ‘Out in the countryside, life was hard to bear’ (p. 39). But there is little interest in or empathy with the common folk. Instead, Downer offers a court-centred narrative, heavy with silk robes, poetry, and intrigue. Moreover, Downer hardly ever steps back to take stock of the history she relates, and there are precious few comparative comments: Japan is seen strictly on its own terms.
 
Chapter 6 shifts from the imperial family to the three ‘great unifiers’ (Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu). Japan’s encounter with Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries receives a short and unrelentingly negative treatment, one which checks all the boxes of the anti-Catholic ‘Black Legend’ that has held such a dominant sway over Anglophone historians of Japan since the late nineteenth century. The Portuguese are introduced as ‘strange-looking men with big noses, black hair and spindly legs, wearing voluminous trousers’ (p. 108). The Japanese may indeed have regarded Europeans as having large noses but I am unsure of any evidence that their legs were thought to be ‘spindly’. (The baggy trousers sported by Iberian sailors across southern Asia at this time were designed to prevent mosquito bites). Downer brings in the Treaty of Tordesillas to insist that ‘As far as the Portuguese were concerned, Japan belonged to them’ (p. 108), a claim pictured in dramatic fashion in the recent television drama Shōgun. The limits to Iberian power in Japan were, however, well recognised at the time. Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), Visitor for Jesuit activities east of Africa, reported that ‘Japan is not a place which can be controlled by foreigners, for the Japanese are neither so weak nor so stupid a race as to permit this, and the King of Spain neither had nor ever could have any power of jurisdiction here.’ According to Downer (p. 110), the Jesuits nevertheless ‘insinuated’ themselves into power by manipulating the daimyō against each other. Japanese leaders such as Hideyoshi were prepared to be ‘cordial’ but were duped by the ‘troublesome’ Spanish and Portuguese (p. 116). Ieyasu preferred ‘the company of the straight-talking Englishman [William Adams] to the fanatical Jesuits.’ Downer’s anti-Catholic approach even rears its head again in the early twentieth century with respect to Hara Takashi, prime minister from 1918 until his assassination in 1921, who is described as ‘a Catholic and a canny operator’ (p. 176) as if the two were necessarily related. All of this has the effect of playing down the complex impacts of Europe and Christianity on Japanese society at the time. An apposite example is the discussion of Izumo-no-Okuni, said to be the foundress of kabuki. An illustration on p. 123 shows Okuni performing a comic skit ‘in which she crossed-dressed as a samurai complete with two swords’. She also wears a rosary and crucifix around her neck, a visual reminder that there are more interesting stories to be told here.
 
Downer’s chapter on the early modern Tokugawa period emphasises what art historian Haga Tōru (2021) called the ‘Pax Tokugawana’. Strengthened by its isolation, Downer insists, Japan ‘didn’t need the west for trade or culture. Finally people could settle down to make a good life for themselves’ (p. 120). After famine followed the eruption of Mount Asama in 1783, peasant protests spread across the country. The government of the eleventh shogun Ienari (reigned 1787-1837) then ‘built work-houses for the homeless and tried to send farmers back to their lands, but it did not occur to them to increase the national wealth by permitting foreign trade’ (p. 132, emphasis added). The message here is clear: however dire the circumstances, a nation is always better off by excluding foreigners. Downer unfortunately makes no attempt to explore the real issues surrounding the ‘closed country’ policies of the Tokugawa.
 
Downer’s narrative style gains confidence in Chapter 8 with the Bakumatsu era of the mid-nineteenth century. There are more named individuals and exciting episodes she can bring into the story. Downer imagines the encounter with an industrial and imperialist West from the Japanese perspective, not a bad thing in itself, but one which leads to over-simplistic generalisation. The Westerners are portrayed as ‘arrogant’, ‘drunken sailors’ and of course ‘barbarians’, while the Japanese who responded to their threat were ‘brilliant’, even ‘swashbuckling’. Downer’s usual frenetic style of writing slows down and even stops long enough for an ekphrastic description of the unexpected appearance of the imperial banner in an 1868 battle (p. 144).
 
Japan’s ability to industrialise while simultaneously countering Western colonialism is a topic of enormous historical interest. Japan managed not only to repel the barbarians but to build her own empire using their very same methods. It is this period in Japanese history that Downer praises with a disturbing apologetic for imperialism. The following enthusiastic passage sets the tone: ‘Japanese look back on the men of the Meiji era as a race of heroes who engaged in epic struggles untrammelled by moral considerations, men who built empires, like the Victorians in Britain or the nineteenth-century oil and railway barons of the United States’ (p. 151). The section on Japanese imperialism begins with the announcement that ‘In July 1894, the Japanese were attacking Seonghwan Fort in Korea’ before launching into a laudatory story about a heroic bugler who sounded the attack with his last breath (p. 164). Readers wondering why the Japanese were attacking Korea in the first place have to wait for two more pages until it is explained how Korea had become a thorn in the side of Japan’s imperial ambitions: ‘The big worry was Korea, the Hermit Kingdom, which was simply too close for comfort.… For Japan, control of Korea was vital to national security. Only under “enlightened” Japanese influence rather than the patronage of a much-weakened China could Korea withstand the predatory threat of the western colonisers. Japan also needed a foothold on the continent to boost its economic prosperity’ (p. 166). Now, this may be how the Japanese government viewed the situation at the time and this passage inadvertently puts its finger on the ideological rationale of Japan’s empire—that it was Japan’s role to ‘save’ Asia from the West through its own mission civilisatrice. This is nevertheless one of several occasions where Downer accepts Japan’s justification for empire without critical comment. Another example relates to the stock market crash of 1929. ‘In times of hardship’, she explains, ‘western nations fell back on their colonies. Japan needed to do the same, to increase the amount of territory from which it could obtain raw materials. That meant tapping the resources of China’ (p. 185). Japan’s industrialisation and imperialism were combined together because, at the time, it was widely accepted that countries needed colonies and their raw materials in order to industrialise. Downer’s style, however, makes it difficult to determine whether she is simply chronicling the ideas discussed by Meiji imperialists or whether she is presenting her own conclusions.
 
In addition to empire, Downer writes in admiration of strong rulers and seems uncomfortable with the critical society of the left. Even the American Occupation after the Second World War is an unlikely target in this respect: ‘In encouraging Marxism, socialism, protest and unions to flourish, [General] MacArthur had let the genie out of the bottle. The question was, how to get it back in again’ (p. 198). Exactly what the term ‘genie’ means here is unclear, but Downer’s answer to the dangers of social protest is material wealth. As ‘standards of living shot up’ she claims, ‘material aspirations replaced the old political ideals’ (p. 201). A reading of Gavan McCormack’s The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (1996b) might have provided an alternative perspective here.
 
Downer has a particular affection for the controversial nationalist prime minister Abe Shinzō, who was assassinated in 2022. When Abe was elected to his second term ten years earlier, Downer claims that ‘The country heaved a collective sigh of relief. Finally, there was a strong hand on the tiller’ (p. 218). Abe’s strong hands came in part from his family history. He was a grandson of the earlier prime minister Kishi Nobosuke, who had been nicknamed the ‘Monster of the Showa era’ for his wartime activities in Manchuria and imprisoned as a Class A war criminal by the Allied Occupation. ‘Nevertheless’, explains Downer, ‘Kishi had been a strong prime minister and Abe’s pedigree gave people confidence that he knew what he was doing’ (p. 218). For Downer, however, Abe was not just a strongman but a superhero. In a section titled ‘Super Mario Saves Japan’, the author describes Abe’s appearance at the closing ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics dressed as Super Mario. Downer does mention several of Abe’s controversial policies, including school textbook revisions to play down wartime atrocities, his attempted re-writing of the ‘peace clause’ in Japan’s Constitution, and the ‘anti-terrorism’ law with sweeping powers including the criminalisation of sit-ins to protest against the construction of apartment buildings and picking mushrooms in conservation forests. As reported by the BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-40283730), Abe’s government argued that terrorism might be financed by selling illegally-picked mushrooms, but an editorial in the Mainichi newspaper asked why the poaching of seafood was not similarly listed in the legislation. The caption to the photo of Abe dressed as Super Mario on p. 239 simply notes that ‘he had flair and showmanship.’
 
Following its general imperial thrust, the last five chapters of The Shortest History of Japan are divided up by reign era: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa, Heisei, and Reiwa. This is not a style of periodisation employed by other books in the same series. The Shortest History of England (Hawes, 2023) does not have separate chapters on Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II and Charles III. In the case of Japan, it might be argued that the reign eras have an identity or even a personality that goes beyond the actual sovereign, but there are also significant transitions, notably in the Shōwa era with its 1945 caesura. The fact that the Heisei era began in the same year as the fall of the Soviet Union and was quickly followed by the collapse of the ‘bubble economy’ was a coincidence. Downer’s focus on the imperial reigns serves to naturalise the role of the emperor as the keel of the nation precisely because it veils actual historical change.
 
Downer’s final chapter, on the contemporary Reiwa era, should have been a welcome addition but disappoints in its inability to engage deeply with the issues. The profound geopolitical and ecological crises of our age connect lives in Japan with global anxieties. As in the rest of her book, however, Downer does her best to isolate Japan from such shared experiences. While it is still too early for a full history of the Covid-19 pandemic, Downer does not even provide us with basic statistics from Japan. Her account of the Japanese response to the pandemic is misleading. While it may be true that people in Japan were accustomed to wearing surgical masks, the claim that ‘Japanese habits made the nation better fitted to deal with the pandemic’ because they ‘followed guidelines without resenting them and kept everything spotless’ (p. 226) is specious and flatly contradicted in the next paragraph: ‘First the cities, then the whole country was required to self-isolate. In reality, most people carried on going to work and restaurants, and entertainment venues remained open.… Initially the Japanese model seemed to work,… Nevertheless, there were protests against the government’s methods’ (pp. 226-227). Here, the genie is finally out of the bottle: the idea that the Japanese always work together in a group mentality is admitted to be a fiction. The Japanese government’s response to the pandemic differed substantially from many other countries. The extreme quarantine measures whereby foreign permanent residents were denied re-entry to join their families or to return to their jobs are not mentioned. Inside Japan, there were no mandatory lockdowns restricting freedom of movement. But the pandemic did significantly exacerbate existing problems of social and psychological isolation (Delakorda Kawashima 2022). For some Japanese workers, a reduction in the number of company drinking parties was regarded as a benefit. A 20% decline in beer consumption between 2019 and 2020 led to the National Tax Agency developing a campaign called Sake Viva! to encourage people to drink more (Neate 2022).
 
The Covid pandemic coincided with the Tokyo Olympic Games, originally planned for the summer of 2020 but postponed to 2021. The various debates over these Games within Japan are not discussed and the decision to go ahead is presented as a type of gaiatsu or ‘foreign pressure’ whereby the International Olympic Committee, ‘blatantly putting profits ahead of public health, announced that the Games would go ahead irrespective of public opinion’ (p. 227). This is also a topic where a more nuanced treatment would have been of great interest.
 
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is rightly discussed as a problem with major implications for Japan. In response to the invasion, Downer informs us that ‘Japan decided it was high time to move away from the peace clause in its constitution and rejoin the world as a military power’ (p. 222). ‘Japan’ has decided nothing of the sort. Certain elements in the government have continued to express their desire to amend the Constitution in this respect, but widespread opposition continues. Downer enthuses over how Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, in the aftermath of the invasion, ‘moved swiftly to establish Japan’s place as a major player on the world stage, freed from its post-war peace constitution and functioning in every way as a normal country’ (p. 230). The term ‘normal country’ is a well-known nationalistic codeword for the revitalisation of Japan’s military. A similar question of how to develop appropriate military strategies in a rapidly changing world without relying on the US ‘umbrella’ is faced by Europe. Downer reminds us of the threats made by an ‘unpredictable’ Donald Trump during his 2019 state visit to Japan, but avoids any broader geopolitical comparisons, while also failing fully to explain the unusual position that Japan currently faces with respect to potential military threats from Russia, China, and North Korea. The Ukraine war is being fought around 8000 km away from Japan, but Russia itself is Japan’s closest neighbour, only a few kilometres away in the disputed islands of the southern Kurils.
 
Another issue, long predating the crises of the early 2020s, is Japan’s falling birthrate. Japan has famously emphasised the role of robots in caring for the elderly, an approach that Downer accepts is ‘a work in progress’ (p. 232). Immigrant workers are mentioned as another solution, and Downer suggests that the ‘Japanese are getting used to being more diverse.’ As evidence she notes the success of foreign sumo wrestlers but—as a quick glance at most professional European football teams will quickly confirm—having a few foreigners playing sports is not the same as transforming immigration quotas to provide a sustainable solution to the care crisis.
 
In the troubled world we face in 2025, many of the dangers and problems facing Japan resonate with global concerns. Can Japan help us understand the sweeping changes associated with the disintegration of the old order? No answers are given here and the book ends enigmatically with the classic trope of a Japan that is modern yet also still ancient. The key to this balance, we are told, is the emperor, who forms ‘perhaps Japan’s most potent link with the past’ (p. 234). The implication seems to be that stability in a changing world is best found in embracing the old order in modern incarnation.
 
Downer displays a brisk enthusiasm for Japan as a materially wealthy country. ‘It’s a well-ordered, efficient place’, she informs us, ‘where skyscrapers continue to mushroom and the bullet trains run strictly on time’ (p. 234). While punctual trains are indeed to be admired, I am personally less enamoured of mushrooming skyscrapers, especially as the author had already mentioned the criminalisation of protests against building construction under Abe’s ‘anti-terrorism’ law. It is hard to escape the feeling of a certain condescension here, of a type not uncommon among Westerners in Japan—the desire that the Japanese should be purely Japanese and reject being ‘corrupted by foreign manners’ as Samuel Johnson had it in another context. Writing of Meiji, Downer describes how ‘Men headed to the newfangled barber shops to have their topknots chopped off… They tried out western fashions—trousers, capes, horribly uncomfortable leather boots… mixing and matching Japanese and western styles with glorious abandon and showing off their new clothes at the beef restaurant, the haunt of the truly fashionable’ (p. 155). Downer does not seem to entertain the idea that the Japanese might have enjoyed dressing in this way and eating beef. We never know because the book contains almost no actual voices from the Japanese themselves.
 
The thirteen chapters of the book are supplemented by a series of text boxes on topics ranging from food to geisha to yakuza. These hint at the variety of the Japanese historical experience while simultaneously making the reader wonder about the long list of topics not mentioned. A wish-list would be pedantic but the absence of any explanation regarding the history of the Japanese language and the minimal treatment of the Ainu and of Okinawa are obvious omissions. The Ryukyu Islands are excluded from all the maps in the book. The remit of the Shortest History series is presumably to provide an accessible overview of the country or topic involved. While this must necessarily involve difficult decisions over what to include, the book reviewed here limits itself to an eccentric jamboree of emperors, aristocrats, and super heroes. At the same time, it reproduces the Nihonjinron algorithm of Japanese identity politics to such a faithful extent that it makes for a disturbing read.

 

References

Craig, O.E., H. Saul, A. Lucquin et al. (2013). Earliest evidence for the use of pottery. Nature 496: 351-354.
 
Delakorda Kawashima, T. (2022). The relationless Japanese society and the practices of belonging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Azijske študije/Asian Studies 26(1): 45-68.
 
Haga, T. (2021). Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853. Tokyo: Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture.
 
Hawes, J. (2023). The Shortest History of England. Updated paperback edition. Exeter: Old Street Publishing.
 
Kidder, J.E. (2007). Himiko and Japan’s Elusive Chiefdom of Yamatai: Archaeology, History and Mythology. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
 
Knopf, T., W. Steinhaus and S. Fukunaga (Eds.) (2018). Burial Mounds in Europe and Japan: Comparative and Contextual Perspectives. Oxford: Archaeopress.
 
McCormack, G. (1996a). Kokusaika: impediments in Japan’s deep structure. In D. Denoon, M. Hudson, G. McCormack and T. Morris-Suzuki (Eds.), Multicultural Japan: Palaeolithic to Postmodern, pp. 265-286. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
 
McCormack, G. (1996b). The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence. New York: M.E. Sharpe.
 
Neate, R. (2022). Japan launches nationwide competition to boost alcohol consumption. The Guardian, August 17 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/17/japan-government-launches-competition-to-get-people-drinking-alcohol-drinks-tax-revenue).

Article copyright Mark Hudson

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