포스트점령기의 일본, ‘착한 민주주의로’의 이행 - 1960년대 미제 ‘근대화’론의 냉전 지형(知形)

Abstract

This paper reframes the Japanese modernization theory in the 1960s as the beginning of the estrangement between postwar modern values and democracy, and investigates the Cold War roots thereof. Modernization theory gained prominence in Japan in the 1960s. At the Hakone Conference (1960), the de facto starting point, a conflict arose between Western scholars and Japanese scholars regarding the conditions of modernization. The Japanese academic specified restoration from the deviation from modernity (militarism and aggression) and democratization as the primary goals of the postwar modern. Conversely, there was no fixed seat for democracy within the American academic’s new modernization theory. This was because the process of modernization was congruent to fascism given the experience of World War II. But in reality, this modernization theory was but a Cold War intellectual mushroom cloud aimed to hinder democratization protests following the forced adoption of the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty on May, 1960. Reischauer, who was at the forefront of the modernization theory, was injured after being stabbed by a 19 year old boy in March, 1964, when the interest in the modernization theory was at its height. Newspapers immediately construed it as an act committed by a psychopath. This was similar to how Reischauer defined the assassination of President Kennedy (November 1963) not as an act of terrorism, but of a psychopath. Moreover, the attack on Reischauer turned out to be favorable in exhibiting solidarity in Japan-United States relations, and the normalization of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan took place later that year backed by popular support. Japan’s democracy thus experienced repeated frustrations even at the point of post war restructuring of autonomous relationships with its nearest countries in East Asia. In addition, democracy in 1965 failed to heat up that summer as it did in 1960.