War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005

Recently I have read the following book. The main points in the final chapters are:

Book title: Seraphim, Franziska. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.

Main points:

-Ch. 8. - one of the enduring ironies of Japan’s politics of memory lay in the government’s refusal to take an explicit, representative, ‘official’ stance on the meaning of the war. (226)

- Yasukuni problem was one of the two specific issues that had been at the center of struggles over war memory throughout the postwar decades. The other was the state screening of history textbooks and their coverage of the war years. (227)

- after the war, SCAP singled out the education system and the institutionalized religion as the two key area of Japanese public life that had perpetuated wartime militarism and need to be transform.(229)

- the real thrust of the opposition to Shinto’s infringement on other religion’s right and interest centered on its wider social implication, namely, infringement on civil rights. Democracy, defined as the protection of individual right and civil liberty from state intrusion, was at stake. The passing of the Yasukuni Shine Bill would overturn occupation reforms. (240)

- a national opinion poll about attitudes toward the Yasukuni Shrine taken by an advertising company revealed that there was an overwhelming popular support for the state-sponsored ceremony for the war dead.(252)

- conservative’s special interest was to put Yasukuni shrine in the political agenda in the early 1950s. Yet during the second half of the 1960s and into the 1970s, a progressive opposition movement had successfully resisted the legalization of a state-dominate official memory. (257)

-Ch. 9.- a shift in international relations, changes in domestic politics, and an increasing global public culture in the late 1980s provided the context in which war memory and postwar responsibility changed from a special interest to a broad public debate. One important catalyst of his process was the forces of globalization. (261)

- relationship between and among Asian countries became the critical space for building connection, and global circuits of production and consumption. The dominant culture flow no longer connected Japan first and foremost to the US, instead in circled within Asia. (261)

-what made the eventual emergence of a lively national, cross-national, and international debate was the recognition of the changed bonds between victims of past crimes and their victimizers. This process depended on greater political and economic stability in China, Korea, and Taiwan. It provided individual and social groups with international connections. (262)

-as the politics of memory became a phenomenon of global public culture, Japan’s reassessment of its postwar in relation to its wartime past was increasingly guided by comparison. The more other Asian nations made war responsibility an issue in their relation with Japan, the more public discourse within Japan looked to West Germany in an effort to see what was politically and conceptually at stake.(263)

- in the mid-1990s, many foreign observers of contemporary Japanese affairs were fascinated with the apparent inability, or at least the unwillingness of Japan to remember WWII except in terms of their own victimhood. (270)

- two major summits emerging in Tokyo in 1998 provided historic opportunities for reconciliation and redefinition of relations between Japan and it neighbors: Communist China and South Korea. Circumstance in China forced its Chairman Jian Zemin to postpone his trip to Japan so that the Japan-South Korea summit (with Korea’s Kim Dae Jung) could took place first. The ferocity of anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea had been well known. Contrary to expectations the talk turned out to be an unprecedented success. The talks with Jian Zemin in the following month failed to produce mutual agreement. (281) Talks with China bogged down over Chinese demand that an apology be given not only orally but also in a written form. China’s and Korea’s respective domestic political objective played a huge role in this process. (282)

- there was no doubt that Japan’s push for a seat on the UN security council, and LDP’s proposal for a constitutional revision of Article 9 had played a role in provoking Chinese concerns about regional secure. But the popular outrage among ordinary Chinese and Korean had other roots as well. It arose in a democratic civil society that had only recently begun to reckon with its own postwar history. The combination of militarily and economically powerful China and a more robust civil society had set the stage for the kinds of internal political conflict that Japan had encountered for over 50 years. (283) In 2005 PM Koizumi offered a speech to clearly portrayed Japan’s postwar history and to indicate a remorse for the war. (285)

Ch. 10 - by the end of the century, the fascination with history memory had become part of a global public culture. (287) In the case of Japanese memory at the turn of the millennium the political demand inaugurated by the end of the Cold War, together with the economic and cultural challenges known as globalization had opened up unprecedented possibility for reforms.(314)

Conclusion: the salience of memory as a lens through which to interpret the post-Cold War ‘present’ in light of the postwar ‘past’ was symptomatic of a more general quest for political reorientation in the late 20^th century. (315)

-the question was: why war responsibility did not become more explicitly a matter of state policy in Japan as it was in Germany. A broadly comparative look at the key historical factors that influenced the place of war memory in postwar politics in Japan and Germany provided some answers. One important fact for Japan lay in the striking continuities between the wartime and postwar political elites, despite the new democratic constitution. Hirohito weathered the transition. (317)

-in Japan the different interpretation of the Asia-pacific war became the tools for ideologically charged domestic conflict. The discourse espoused by the Japanese left was not state-sanctioned. (319)

- in Japan, different and incompatible memories of war and defeat competed for public space as important tools of domestic politics. (321)

- the fact that Japan’s historical injustice were still hotly debated today spoke less to the severity of the atrocities or the ‘silence’ of some ‘Japanese memory’, but more to the complex process by which the past was absorbed into the even-changing present as experienced by the people.(323)