Event Details:

"Democracy, Stunted: The U.S. Liberal Hegemonic Projection and the Making of Japanese Conservative One-Party Dominance in Cold War Asia"

The interplay of conflicting forces in the US Occupation and in Japan set the basic parameters within which postwar Japanese politics unfolded -captured by the contradiction of a puppet democracy. The United States, on the other hand, as a liberal hegemon, preferred the new Japan to embody a liberal, anti-communist variety of democracy, ideally based on a pluralist competition of the ruling elites, but as a hegemon, it could live with the emergence of a unified hegemonic party of these conservative elites, if that was what it took to block the leftist parties that stirred up the untamed Japanese masses with a call for an anti-imperialist democratic action from coming to power. By mastering the American language of democracy, the Japanese conservative elites were able to reconsolidate their hegemonic position within Japanese domestic politics against the leftist proponents of egalitarian and participatory democracy. The fact that the eftist parties have never jettisoned their pacifism and chose instead to give up the chance to win power has often been criticized as irresponsible and hypocritical by the trans-Pacific political and academic elites, but by doing so, the leftist parties saved Japanese democracy and peace from the diktats of the American hegemon.