ABSTRACT
T he present has changed in Japan, and with it the past. For an important group of Japanese historians, the postwar period came to an end early in the last decade. In the aftermath of the Security Treaty Crisis of i960, it seemed to them that the contradictions in postwar politics and society demanded both a new present and a new grasp of the past. Inevitably drawn to the period that most closely preceded, produced and vexed their own, they concentrated on the century before the Pacific War. They set out to reexamine Japan's modern experience and to do so in their own way. Rejecting Marx and modernization theory as useful methodological guides, these scholars began a search for what they call an internal—or indigenous—approach to modern Japanese history. They work largely outside the confines of the more conventional subjects of political, diplomatic and institutional history; for them, the locus of historical interest is “the people” (minshū), and the history they hope to write, “people's history” (minshūshi). Although their notion of the people is sometimes vague, even visionary, their history-writing is for the most part solid and vital—in many ways the most interesting work in the field in Japan today.
