The End of Pax Americana: The Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism by Naoki Sakai (review)

Reviewed by: The End of Pax Americana: The Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism by Naoki Sakai Ken C. Kawashima (bio) The End of Pax Americana: The Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism. By Naoki Sakai. Duke University Press, 2022. xii, 350 pages. $107.95, cloth; $29.95, paper; $29.95, E-book. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, there is really only one kind of history that is worth writing, and that is the history of the present. Naoki Sakai's book, The End of Pax Americana: The Loss of Empire and Hikikomori Nationalism, is a historical (and philosophical) narrative of our present conjuncture from the combined perspective of two world-historically massive "ends": (the sense of) the "end" of Pax Americana today, and the "end" or loss of Japan's empire in 1945. We could say that the book's principal object of analysis is the changing historical relationship between these two phenomena, which have been bound to each other, for over 70 years, either in senseless imperialist warfare or in capitalist collaboration and transpacific complicity. It is an inconsolable book that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for readers to sustain the pious wishes, rosy images, and children's stories that have shaped our deepest drives and desires whenever we think and [End Page 481] speak of the intertwined histories of what we could call the "transpacific co-prosperity sphere" shared uneasily and unevenly by the United States of America and Japan since 1945. Sakai's book can help readers to prepare for the inevitable geopolitical chaos of the end of Pax Americana. "[H]ow should we prepare ourselves for the end of Pax Americana, for the end of the geopolitical order that has been accepted in the last several decades?" (p. 1). The book teaches us that we must prepare for it, not only in order to survive it, but to finally grasp who we have become as subjects of capital and state under Pax Americana. (See chapters 3 and 4.) This self-critical examination that Sakai's book demands—which will surely subvert the certainties of Asian essentialists, proponents of "alternative modernities," and Eurocentric eclectics alike—cannot be done by oneself. Rather, it requires a third-party position to guide us through a mortifying and shameful process that is a precondition to changing ourselves and inventing new modes of thought and research, new knowledge production, new forms of sociality, new behaviors, and new forms of political action. Sakai's book gives us this kind of third-party perspective. It is like the perspective of a pure stranger telling you the truth about yourself, which is enlightening, unfamiliar, and unsettling all at once, precisely because these truths have been repressed for over 70 years. In this sense, Sakai's book is an irrepressible and extremely generous book. The End of Pax Americana analyzes Japan's loss of empire to the postwar empire of the United States of America and gives us several cutting-edge and critical perspectives on the history of the international system, such as: "transpacific complicity" (pp. 24–30, 171–81), "empire under subcontract" (pp. 197–204), "civilizational transference" (pp. 107–11), "anthropological difference" (pp. 13, 18–20, 117–25), and the deconstruction of "The West and the Rest" or "the West and Asia" (pp. 20–24, 91–93, 100–107). Moreover, insofar as one of the book's most important theoretical interventions is to rethink the theory of the nation-form and state sovereignty within the interstate system, Sakai's book gives us a historical account of the radical transformation of Japanese nationalism that took place within the crucible of the U.S. and Allied occupation of Japan in 1945. At the epicenter of this analysis is Sakai's reading and discussion of an incredible document from 1942 penned by Edwin O. Reischauer, the Ivy League missionary to Japan, "godfather" of postwar Japan studies, and liberal-minded ambassador to Japan under the John F. Kennedy administration. Already in 1942, three full years before the Allied occupation and the loss of empire in Japan, Reischauer wrote "Memorandum on Policy towards Japan," a document discovered in the archives by University of Toronto historian Takashi Fujitani. Reischauer's...

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