Japanese modern historiography is the product of absorbing European and American historiography ideas and transforming traditional historiography. During the Meiji Restoration, while introducing capitalist civilization in Europe and America, it also vigorously introduced bourgeois historiography in Europe and America. The history of civilization, the first historical school in modern Japan, was produced under the influence of the British and French schools of civilization history. His representative works include Fukuzawa Yukichi's Outline of Civilization (1875) and Taguchi's A Brief History of Japanese Civilization (1877 ~ 1882). The history of civilization criticizes feudalism, advocates developing people's wisdom, advocates material civilization, and tries to explore the laws of historical development, which is enlightening. Originated from the people, it was popular in/kloc-0 in the 1970s and 1980s, echoing the freedom and civil rights movement. At the same time, some scholars try to combine the history of civilization with sociology and regard improvement as an empirical science. Jimmy Miyake's Summary of Japanese History (1886) is his masterpiece. The History Museum of Taisheng Official History Bureau also began to compile the Chronicle of Great Japan in 1882. This book is the official history after The History of Great Japan. It adopts China style, flaunts objectivism and rejects the Confucian view of justice and benefit. 1887, the Meiji government hired the German historian L. Liss to teach at the University of Tokyo (then known as Imperial University) and introduced the positivism of the German historiography school. At the same time, foreign students were sent to Europe to study western historiography, which was combined with traditional historiography to establish a semi-official academic empirical historiography centered on universities. So, centering on the historical materials compilation institute of Tokyo University, I extensively collected historical materials and verified their authenticity, and edited and published Historical Materials of Great Japan (288 volumes published in 190 1 ~ 1979) and Ancient Books of Great Japan (190/kloc-0). Empirical historiography takes textual research of historical materials as its sole purpose and all contents. In the 1990s, when it was just formed, folk historiography opposed it. Folk historiography inherits and develops the tradition of civilized historiography, and holds that studying historical materials and finding out historical facts are not history. The fundamental purpose of history is to explore principles through facts. The New Japanese History (189 1) written by its representatives Wu Yue and Saburo is the first book to discuss the Meiji Restoration from the economic reasons.

Around the First World War, Japanese monopoly capitalism was established, social contradictions intensified, and the democratic movement rose. Under this background, the new scholars returning from studying in Europe and America are not satisfied with burying themselves in trivial empirical historiography, trying to open up new research fields and create new schools of historiography. The main factions are: ① cultural history. Broaden our horizons to social and cultural fields, and think that the development of human society is the result of the development of human spirit and thought, and we should explore the law of human social development from the development of spirit and thought. There are many schools of cultural history: Tsuda Zuo Ji You criticized the traditional concept of regarding the myth of Japan's founding as a historical fact, and his New Studies on the History of God (19 13), Studies on the History of God (1924) and Studies on Ancient Stories and Japanese Calligraphy (1924). He also wrote Preface to Japanese Cultural History (655 Survey of Japanese Cultural History by Paul Nishimura (1933), which is the first work to study history with the method of cultural anthropology. ② Social and economic history. Taking economic phenomenon as the research object, this paper tries to use the viewpoint of economics, take economy as the center and foundation, clarify the development of history, and acknowledge the existence of classes and the struggle between classes. His representative works are General Economic History by Yinzang Uchida (19 12) and Social and Economic History of Japan by Hidjiro Benzhuang (1928). (3) Yanagita Kunio founded folklore, devoted himself to the study of folklore such as legends, proverbs, folk songs, harmony and taboos, trying to discover the essence of history from people's daily life. In addition, Harakatsuro, Kaoru Nakata, San Pu Zhou Xing and Toranosuke Nishioka have opened up new fields such as legal history and manor history. Hirai Kumazo, Jing Daole Shin, Imai Junshu, etc. He has made some achievements in the discussion of historical theory.

In the second half of the 1920s, in order to meet the needs of the Japanese proletarian revolutionary struggle, there appeared works on Japanese capitalism using historical materialism. Subsequently, the "orators" and the "old peasants" launched a debate on Japanese capitalism. The "Lecture School" represented by Noroi Eitaro, Yugoro, Sheikh Hattori and Yamada Moritaro published the Lecture on the History of Japanese Capitalism on 1932 ~ 1933, hence its name. The "Old Peasant School" takes the magazine "Old Peasant" as its position, and its main members are Shanchuan Jun, Chang Nao, Tuwu Qiaoxiong and Sakisaka Itsuro. This debate puts the history centered on rulers and mixed with various idealistic historical views on the scientific basis of historical materialism, and initially forms a Marxist historical system. After Japanese imperialism launched the war of aggression against China, Marxist historiography was strangled by the forces of fascist militarism, and the slightly progressive school of historiography was known to be suppressed. Only the Emperor's historical view, represented by Hiraizumi, colluded with fascist militaristic forces, monopolized the historical stage, and enthusiastically advocated the theory of racial superiority of "one system for all generations" and "Japan first". Create public opinion for imperialist and fascist dictatorship and war of aggression.

After World War II, in the early post-war period, reactionary historiography advocating imperialist history and aggression disappeared. Academic empirical historiography also retired to the study, concentrated on research and passively faced Marxist historiography; Marxist historiography with the "Lecture School" as the core and modernist historiography represented by Jiuxiong Osaka and Masao Maruyama, which were suppressed before the war, closely cooperated with the democratic movement and became two major trends in the field of historiography. Marxist historians such as Yugoro, Kiyoshi Inoue and Ishimu Tanaka stood on the people's side, criticized the imperial system and the view of imperial history, exposed the aggression crime of Japanese militarism, studied Japanese history with Marxist methods, and restored the distorted true colors of Japanese history, which made contributions to the abolition of old historiography and the establishment of science history. Influenced by M. Weber's sociology, Kuo Otsuka, who studies European economic history, and Mako Maruyama Sakurai, who studies Japanese ideological history, analyze Japanese society with Western Europe as a model and expose its morbidity, which also has great influence on historians.

Since the second half of 1950s, the rapid development of Japanese economy and the modernization of social life have caused great changes in ideology, and history has also been deeply influenced. 1955 The debate on the reconstruction of Showa history reveals the defects of "lecture school" Marxist historiography, such as taking western Europe as the model, mechanical economic determinism and conceptualization of class struggle. After the 1960s, a new generation of researchers broke through the established framework of Marxist historiography of "Lecture School" and put forward new theories and methods: the theory of Asian mode of production re-studies Japanese history according to Marx's judgment on Asian mode of production; East Asian historiography examines Japanese history in the whole history of East Asia, and studies the transformation of external factors into internal factors, thus affecting the development of Japanese history; The history of the people's struggle studies the people's struggle including all classes and strata; Replace the study of the history of class struggle; People-oriented ideological historiography has got rid of the traditional method of only studying representative thinkers and emphasized the modernization factors contained in people and their ideology. Marxist historiography has lost its unified guiding ideology and its leading position in the field of historiography. On the other hand, in order to adapt to the recovery and development of Japanese monopoly capital, various bourgeois and non-Marxist historical views and theories came into being. In 1950s, there was a kind of mass society theory who declared that Marxism was outdated and an ecological view of history which explained human history with ecological theory model. In 1960s, there was a modernization theory that advocated imitating Europe and America. In the 1970s, there appeared the quantitative economic history that used statistical analysis in historical research and the social history that advocated the study of static daily life and mass psychology. These new ideas and theories are either influenced by European and American historical trends of thought or directly transplanted from European and American new trends of thought. In addition, due to the improvement of people's living standards and cultural level, ordinary people also care about and study history, forming their own view of history, thus breaking the monopoly of experts and scholars on history. In a word, Japanese historiography, including Marxist historiography and non-Marxist historiography, is at a great turning point, and its basic trend is from studying universality to studying particularity, from comparing Japanese history with western Europe as a model to breaking western European centralism, so as to explore the historical traditions and characteristics of the Japanese nation itself.