Recently I have read the following book. The main points in chapters 6 and 7 are:
Book
title: Seraphim, Franziska. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan Cambridge , Mass. :
Harvard
University Asia
Center
Main
points:
-Ch. 6 -
changes in the generational makeup of interest groups’ constituents represented
the first perceived challenge to the war memory operated in the politics in the
second postwar decade. (159)
All the five organizations knew that memories
of the war needed to be transmitted to a younger cohort of members who had no
personal war experience. The impact of generational changed on war memory was
especially strong in the war bereaved. (159)
- it was well known that Japanese society
underwent changes in the first postwar decade, especially with the onset of
high economic growth. For postwar memory, not only the ‘present’ was changing,
but the ‘past’ itself had also changed. The definition of the past grew more
complex as time passed. War memory and postwar responsibility became closely
intertwined. Because interest groups had constructed a specific war memory,
this memory was in need of an update once the context and changed. This dynamic
became an integral part of how memory functioned in postwar politics. (161)
- many conservative bureaucrats and politicians
had war time career, when they returned to political prominence in the early
1950s they promoted policy designed to avoid too radical a break with the
wartime structure. But on the other hand, the intellectuals and political left
intended to widen the break with the past. This political polarization gave war
memory an important role. (162)
- civic groups on the political left, as those
on the right, sensed an increasing public indifference to the special interest
formulated around a particular war memory. Many argued that in the 1960s the
economic miracle had eclipsed the discourse on war responsibility. (165)
- by the late 1950s, the once-promising younger
generation presented a ‘social problem’ to the Isokukai (the conservative/right wing), and Wadatsumikai even broke up over the politics of the student
movement. (169)
- no explicit ‘postwar’ conceptualization of
memory that was independent of direct war experience could gain significant
currency at this time. The politics and intellectual climate of the second half
of the 1960s favored a different and newly prominent aspect of memory – namely
Japan’s national memory of the world war was a history to be shared with most
of the Asia people. Efforts to refocus war memory away from the obvious
fragmentation of domestic politics and toward an imagined national unity thus
expanded the parameter of ‘memory’ in important ways. (188)
-Ch. 7.
– the idea that each nation involved in WWII produced its own specific national
memory which was part of a shared history emerged in the course of 1960s. A
national memory of the war was certainly ‘imagined’ in the sense that it was
constructed discursively and according to one’s political standpoint. The
liberal left regarded national memory as the state’s efforts to revive prewar
nationalism. The conservative right defined national memory as a series of
masochistic reiteration of Japanese failures at the hands of foreign
imperialists. By the mid-1960s, the legacy of Japan’s war involvement in Asia
certainly began to shape public discourses. (189) Japan’s normalization of
relations with South Korea in 1965 and with the PRC in 1972 signified two
important makers of this development. (189)
- in the basic treaty signed in 1965, Japan
declared void all treaties with Korea before its annexation in 1910 and agreed
to pay South Korea a grant in the form of goods and service, plus low-interest
loans to promote economic development. South Korea in return renounced its
right to demand reparations and refrained from pressing for a formal apology
for Japanese atrocities during the colonial period. The treaty contained no
hint of remorse on the Japanese side. Japan insisted that the grants and loans
were regard as economic cooperation rather than as compensation. (204) Nationalist sentiment in Japan, as in other
former colonies, cut in various direction and revealed competing memories of a
shared history against the equally shared background of the US military
presence in the region.(205)
- the association of Shinto Shrines strongly
criticized Korea’s resistance to normalize relation with Japan as a
continuation of its fierce nationalism, and to use memories of earlier
conflicts to drum up anti-Japanese feeling which should be directed toward the
US as the real culprit of the postwar order in Asia. (205)
- China renounced demands for reparations. It
declared that in the interest of the friendship between the Chinese and the
Japanese people, it renounced its demand for war reparation from Japan. In
striking contrast to the Japan-South Korea peace treaty seven years before,
Tanaka’s China diplomacy elicited no significant protest in either country. The
treaty ushered in a China boom in Japan in the 1970s. The popular criticism of
Japan appeared only in the 1980s and 1990s when China developed a market
economy that gave rise to an increasingly vibrant civil society and less
controlled local press. (212)
- CCP national memory constructed a ‘victor
narrative’: they were the heroic communist survivors who liberated their
country. This narrative had little room for Chinese victims of Japanese
aggression. Furthermore, it was noted that in China more peasant had died
during the great famine in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution than in the
hands of the Japanese during the anti-Japanese war. (213)
-the complexity of war memory within the
framework of the postwar Japanese nation-state appeared greater in the late
1960s than ever before. Questions of national identity, diplomatic relations
with other Asian countries, and even nation’s territory issues became important
anchors for negotiating conflicting lessons and legacies of the past, in
addition to the perennial contention concerning the war dead, Shinto shines,
and the contents of history education. (222)
- in the following two decades, the most intense
battles over war memory centered on ‘official memory’ and its default
custodian, the state, in the highly public controversies about the state of
Yasukuni Shrine and the contents of history textbooks.(225)
(to be continued)
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