New Books In East Asian Studies

Ken Ruoff’s Japan’s Imperial House in the Postwar Era, 1945-2019 (Harvard UP, 2020), is a revised and expanded version of the author’s The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945-1995 (2003). The book is an extensive and detailed treatment of the Japanese imperial institution as it enters a new era, Reiwa, with the abdication of the Heisei emperor (Akihito) in 2019. In addition to The People’s Emperor’s discussions of the creation of the postwar imperial institution as a “constitutional symbolic monarchy,” the continued (clandestine) role of Hirohito in politics, the postwar emperors’ approach to Japan’s war responsibility, the “massification” of the imperial family as a kind of model “middle-class” household for the postwar, and various forms of resistance from conservatives, Japan’s Imperial House adds two new chapters and an extensive and important addendum to one other. The two new chapters, respectively, provide a retrospective on the Heisei era (1989-2019) and an overview of the chal