Heisei Period

Heisei Period

  

 Tokyo skyline

 

Heisei (平成?) is the current era name in Japan. The Heisei era started on January 8, 1989, the first day after the death of the reigning Emperor, Hirohito. His son, Akihito, succeeded to the throne. In accordance with Japanese customs, Hirohito was posthumously renamed "Emperor Shōwa" on January 31, just as were Mutsuhito (Emperor Meiji) and Yoshihito (Emperor Taishō).

Thus 1989 corresponds to Shōwa 64 up to the 7th day of the first month (January 7) and to Heisei 1 (平成元年, Heisei gannen?, gannen means "first year") since the 8th day of the first month (January 8). 2010 is Heisei 22. A quick way to convert the current year to Heisei is to take the last two digits and add 12. Example for 2010: 10+12 = Heisei 22.

 

History and meaning
On January 7, 1989, at 7:55 AM, the grand steward of Japan's Imperial Household Agency, Shōichi Fujimori, officially announced Emperor Shōwa's death, and revealed details about his cancer for the first time. Shortly after the death of the Emperor, Keizō Obuchi, then Chief Cabinet Secretary and later Prime Minister of Japan, publicly announced the end of the Shōwa era, and heralded the new era name "Heisei" for the new incoming Emperor, and explained the meaning of the name.

 

According to Obuchi, the name "Heisei" was taken from two Chinese history and philosophy books, namely Records of the Grand Historian (史記 Shiji) and the Classic of History (書経 Shujing). In the Shiji, the sentence "内平外成" (peace inside and prosperity outward) appears in a section honoring the wise rule of the legendary Chinese Emperor Shun. In the Shujing, the sentence "地平天成" (the land is peaceful and the sky is clear) appears. By combining both meanings, Heisei is intended to mean "peace everywhere". The Heisei era went into effect immediately after the announcement of the new emperor on January 8, 1989.

 

Events
1989 marked the culmination of one of the most rapid economic growth spurts in Japanese history. With a strong yen and a favorable exchange rate with the US Dollar, the Bank of Japan kept interest rates low, sparking an investment boom that drove Tokyo property values up sixty percent within the year. Shortly before New Year's Day, the Nikkei 225 reached its record high of 39,000. By 1991, it had fallen to 15,000, signifying the end of Japan's famed "bubble economy". Subsequently, Japan experienced the "Great Slump in Heisei", which consisted of more than a decade of price deflation and largely stagnant GDP as Japan's banks struggled to resolve their bad debts and companies in other sectors struggled to restructure. Some analysts blame the extended slump on the Japanese government's continued application of Neo-Keynesian economic principles to its solution. Recently, however, commentators are pointing to signs that Japan's economy is emerging from the slump.

 

The Recruit scandal of 1988 had already eroded public confidence in the Liberal Democratic Party, which had controlled the Japanese government for 38 years. In 1993, the LDP was ousted by a coalition led by Morihiro Hosokawa. However, the coalition collapsed as parties had gathered to simply overthrow LDP and lacked a unified position on almost every social issue. The LDP returned to the government in 1994, when it helped to elect Japan Socialist (later Social Democrat) Tomiichi Murayama as prime minister.

 

In 1995, there was a large earthquake in Kobe. The same year, there was a sarin gas terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway system by the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. Failure of the Japanese government to react to these events promptly led to the formation of NGOs which have been playing an increasingly important role in Japanese politics since.

 

The Heisei period also marked Japan's cautious reemergence on the world stage as a world military power. In 1991, Japan pledged billions of dollars to support the Gulf War but constitutional arguments prevented a participation in or support of actual war. Iran criticised Japan for just pledging money and didn't appreciate the way Japan co-operated in the Gulf War. Minesweepers were sent after the war as a part of the reconstruction effort. Following the Iraq War, in 2003, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Cabinet approved a plan to send a total of about 1,000 soldiers of the Japan Self-Defense Forces to help in Iraq's reconstruction, the biggest overseas troop deployment since World War II without the sanction of the United Nations. These troops were deployed in 2004.

 

On October 23, 2004, the Heisei 16 Niigata Prefecture Earthquakes rocked the Hokuriku region, killing 52 and injuring hundreds (see 2004 Chūetsu earthquake).

 

In Autumn 2007 Yasuo Fukuda became Prime Minister after the sudden resignation of Shinzō Abe, following his election defeat earlier in the year. Fukuda in turn resigned on September the following year citing political failings, and Taro Aso was selected by his party to take his place.

 

In August of 2009, for the first time, the Democratic Party of Japan won 308 seats in the lower house election, which ended fifty years of political domination by the Liberal Democratic Party. As a result of the election, Taro Aso resigned as leader of the LDP, and Yukio Hatoyama, president of DPJ became Prime Minister on 16 September 2009. However, Minshuto soon became mired in party financing scandals, particularly involving aides close to Ichiro Ozawa.

 

Heisei Art (Contemporary)

After World War II, painters, calligraphers, and printmakers flourished in the big cities, particularly Tokyo, and became preoccupied with the mechanisms of urban life, reflected in the flickering lights, neon colors, and frenetic pace of their abstractions. All the "isms" of the New York-Paris art world were fervently embraced. After the abstractions of the 1960s, the 1970s saw a return to realism strongly flavored by the "op" and "pop" art movements, embodied in the 1980s in the explosive works of Ushio Shinohara. Many such outstanding avant-garde artists worked both in Japan and abroad, winning international prizes. These artists felt that there was "nothing Japanese" about their works, and indeed they belonged to the international school. By the late 1970s, the search for Japanese qualities and a national style caused many artists to reevaluate their artistic ideology and turn away from what some felt were the empty formulas of the West. Contemporary paintings within the modern idiom began to make conscious use of traditional Japanese art forms, devices, and ideologies. A number of mono-ha artists turned to painting to recapture traditional nuances in spatial arrangements, color harmonies, and lyricism.

 

Japanese-style painting (nihonga) continues in a modern fashion, updating traditional ｅxpressions while retaining their intrinsic character. Some artists within this style still paint on silk or paper with traditional colors and ink, while others used new materials, such as acrylics. Many of the older schools of art, most notably those of the Tokugawa period, were still practiced. For example, the decorative naturalism of the rimpa school, characterized by brilliant, pure colors and bleeding washes, was reflected in the work of many postwar artists and in the 1980s art of Hikosaka Naoyoshi. The realism of Maruyama Ōkyo's school and the calligraphic and spontaneous Japanese style of the gentlemen-scholars were both widely practiced in the 1980s. Sometimes all of these schools, as well as older ones, such as the Kano school ink traditions, were drawn on by contemporary artists in the Japanese style and in the modern idiom. Many Japanese-style painters were honored with awards and prizes as a result of renewed popular demand for Japanese-style art beginning in the 1970s. More and more, the international modern painters also drew on the Japanese schools as they turned away from Western styles in the 1980s. The tendency had been to synthesize East and West. Some artists had already leapt the gap between the two, as did the outstanding painter Shinoda Toko. Her bold sumi ink abstractions were inspired by traditional calligraphy but realized as lyrical ｅxpressions of modern abstraction.

 

There are also a number of contemporary painters in Japan whose work is largely inspired by anime sub-cultures and other aspects of popular and youth culture. Takashi Murakami is perhaps among the most famous and popular of these, along with and the other artists in his Kaikai Kiki studio collective. His work centers on expressing issues and concerns of postwar Japanese society through what are usually seemingly innocuous forms. He draws heavily from anime and related styles, but produces paintings and sculptures in media more traditionally associated with fine arts, intentionally blurring the lines between commercial and popular art and fine arts.