ABSTRACT
Chapter six explores the postwar changes in American and East Asian thought. John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer dominated the academic firmament of East Asian studies after World War II, creating an narrative that constructed East Asia as a traditional society and an East Asian civilization dominated by Confucianism. They contrasted this with a modern West. They informally used the assumptions of modernization theory, which had become very popular in academia in the 1950s and 1960s to describe the wave of change that crashed upon the shores of East Asia. This was especially true of the American occupation of Japan between 1945-1952 which had attempted to reshape Japan and gain a dominant position in East Asia. American dominance worldwide encouraged American historians to reconceptualize westernization which had been badly damaged in two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century as an American led project. A new generation of Japanese postwar intellectuals reflected on their nation’s involvement in World War II and it horrid atrocities committed against other Asians and looked for answers in Japan’s failed quest for modernity in the prewar period. Maruyama Masao looked back to Fukuzawa Yukichi and across the Pacific to western civilization for models to utilize in the development of Japanese democracy. Finally, the civil war in China resulted in the expulsion of the Guomindang and the triumph of the Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party. Mao’s conceptualization of socialist modernity created intellectual and political ruptures in China that led to the forcible creation of modern China in the postwar period, although with the terror of Maoism as the leading ideology.
