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THE POWER OF MEMORY IN MODERN JAPAN
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THE POWER OF MEMORY
IN
MODERN JAPAN
Edited by
Sven Saaler
andWolfgang Schwentker
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THE POWER OF MEMORY IN MODERN JAPAN
Edited by Sven Saaler and Wolfgang Schwentker
First published 2008 by
GLOBAL ORIENTAL LTD
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© Global Oriental Ltd 2008 ISBN 978-1-905246-38-0 All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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the publishers.
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A CIP catalogue entry for this book is available
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Set in Stone Serif 9.5 on 10.5 by IDSUK (DataConnection) L:td
Printed and bound in England by Athenaeum Press, Tyne and wear
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List of Contributors viii
Note on Transliteration xi
INTRODUCTION
1. The Realms of Memory: Japan and Beyond
SVEN SAALER and WOLFGANG SCHWENTKER 1
Part 1: Memory in Politics and International Relations
2. For the Nation or for the People? History and Memory of
the Nanjing Massacre in Japan
TAKASHI YOSHIDA 17
3. Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’ and Historical Memory:
The Neo-nationalist Counter-attack
YONSON AHN 32
4. Tokko
–
Zaidan: A Case Study of Institutional Japanese
War Memorialization
M.G. SHEFTALL 54
5. Remembering the War Crimes Trial: The Tokyo Trial View
of History
YUKI TAKATORI 78
Contents
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6. Historical Memory and Shiba Ryo
–
taro
–
: Remembering Russia,
Creating Japan
ALEXANDER BUKH 96
7. Developing Memories: Alumni Newsletters in Japanese
Development Assistance
ANNETTE SKOVSTED HANSEN 116
Part 2 : Institutions of Memory: Memorials, Museums,
National Heroes
8. Remodelling Public Space: The Fate of War Monuments,
1945–48
MICHAEL LUCKEN 135
9. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and its
Exhibition
STEFANIE SCHÄFER 155
10. A Usable Past? Historical Museums of the Self-Defence
Forces and the Construction of Continuities
ANDRÉ HERTRICH 171
11. The New Image of Childhood in Japan During the Years
1945–49 and the Construction of a Japanese Collective
Memory
CHRISTIAN GALAN 189
12. Sato
–
Eisaku, Yasuoka Masahiro and the Re-establishment of
11 February as National Day: The Political Use of National
Memory in Post-war Japan
EDDY DUFOURMONT 204
13. How Did Saigo
–
Takamori Become a National Hero After
His Death? The Political Uses of Saigo
–
’s Figure and the
Interpretation of seikanron
NORIKO BERLINGUEZ-KO
–
NO 222
Part 3 : Popular and Intellectual Representations
of Memory
14. Literary Memories of the Paciﬁc War – Fiction or
Non-ﬁction? Some Criteria for Further Research on
Japanese War Literature
HARALD MEYER 243
15. The Nokorimono Mode: Remembering the Atomic Bomb
in The Diary of Moriwaki Yo
–
ko
ADAM LEBOWITZ 257
vi Contents
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16. Becoming Insects: Imamura Sho
–
hei and the Entomology
of Modernity
BILL MIHALOPOULOS 277
17. Memories of a Liberal, Liberalism of Memory: Tsuda
So
–
kichi and a Few Things He Forgot to Mention
JOËL JOOS 291
Part 4: Realms of Memory – Centre and Periphery
18. New Dimensions in Sino-Japanese Relations and the
Memory of the Sino-Japanese War, 1894–95
VALDO FERRETTI 311
19. Development for Preservation: Localizing Collective
Memory in 1960s Kanazawa
PETER SIEGENTHALER 319
20. The Remembrance of the 1871 Nakano Uprising in
Takayama Village as a Contemporary Trauma in Village
Life Today
SELÇUK ESENBEL 337
21. History and the Construction of Collective Memory:
Positivist Historiography in the Age of the Imperial
Rescript on Education
ALISTAIR SWALE 360
Index 375
Contents vii
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List of Contributors
Yonson Ahn is a research fellow at the East Asian Institute, the
University of Leipzig, Germany. She has been conducting research on
Korean ‘comfort women’ and Japanese soldiers during the Asia-Paciﬁc
War as well as on historical debates in Korea and Japan since the 1980s.
Noriko Berlinguez-Ko
–
nois Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at
the Université de Lille III, France, and an associate member of the
Centre de Recherches sur le Japon at the Ecole de Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales (EHESS) where she obtained her PhD in historical soci-
ology. Among her articles which focus on the perception of foreigners
in modern and contemporary Japan is ‘Debates on Naichi Zakkyo
(1879–1899): Spencerian Inﬂuence of Social Evolutionism on the
Perception of the West’, in: Bert Edström (ed.), The Japanese and Europe:
Images and Perceptions(2000).
Alexander Bukh holds a PhD in International Relations and is cur-
rently a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo. His
research focuses on the place of Russia in modern Japan’s identity con-
struction. He is the author of the forthcoming Japan’s National Identity
and Foreign Policy: Russia as Japan’s ‘Other’.
Eddy Dufourmont is a PhD candidate at The University of Tokyo and
at INALCO (France). His research focuses on Yasuoka Masahiro and
Confucianism in Japanese politics in the twentieth century.
Selçuk Esenbelis Professor of History in the Department of History,
Bogazici University in Istanbul. She is the author of Even the Gods Rebel:
Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising(1998) and co-editor of
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The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on Japanese-
Turkish Relations(2003). In 2007, she was awarded the Japan Foundation
Special Prize for Japanese Studies.
Valdo Ferrettiis an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Oriental
Studies at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and a member of the
Italian Institute for Africa and the East. Among his books is Da
Portsmouth a Sarajevo: la politica estera giapponese e l’equilibri o europeo
(1905–1914)(1989).
Christian Galanis an Associate Professor at the Department for Foreign
Languages, Japanese Section, at the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail in
France, author of L’Enseignement de la lecture au Japon – Politique et éduca-
tion(2002) and co-editor of Langue, lecture et école au Japan (2006).
Annette Skovsted Hansen is an Associate Professor at the University
of Aarhus, Denmark. Her research focuses on the history of Japanese
development assistance. She co-edited Aid Relationships in Asia: Exploring
Ownership in Japanese and Nordic Aid in Asia(2007).
André Hertrichis a PhD candidate in Japanese History and a gradu-
ate student in Peace and Conﬂict Studies at the Centre for Conﬂict
Studies in Marburg, Germany. He has been conducting research on the
civil-military relations in post-war Japan and the build-up of the Self
Defence Forces.
Joël Joosreceived his PhD at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and is
currently a JSPS Fellow at the University of Okayama. Recent publications
include ‘A Stinking Tradition: Tsuda So
–
kichi’s View of China,’ in East
Asian History28 (December 2004), and ‘The Insigniﬁcant Siniﬁcation:
Tsuda So
–
kichi’s (1873–1961) Views on the Fate of Chinese Thought in
Japan’, in Japanizing – The Structure and Culture of Thinking in Japan(2006).
Adam Lebowitz teaches English as a Foreign Language at the
University of Tsukuba. His recent political essays and translations have
appeared on the website Japan Focus. His Japanese poetry has been pub-
lished in the literary monthly Shi to Shiso
–
.
Michael Luckenis an Associate Professor at the Institut Nationale des
Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris, and author of Grenades et
amertume: les peintres japonais a l’epreuve de la guerre, 1935–1952(2005).
Harald Meyeris an Associate Professor at the East Asian Seminar at
the University of Zurich and author of Die ‘Taisho
–
-Demokratie’.
Begriffsgeschichtliche Studien zur Demokratierezeption in Japan von 1900 bis
1920(2005)
Bill Mihalopoulosis Assistant Professor in the Department of History
at Northern Michigan University. He has published articles in Economy
and Societyand Postcolonial Studies. An unabashed, long time admirer
List of Contributors ix
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of Imamura Sho
–
hei, he hopes to publish a longer study of his ﬁlms in
the future.
Sven Saaleris an Associate Professor at The University of Tokyo,
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He is author of Politics, Memory
and Public Opinion. The History Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society
(2005), co-editor of Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History(2007) and
co-author of Japanische Impressionen eines Kaiserlichen Gesandten. Karl
von Eisendecher im Japan der Meiji-Zeit(2007).
Stefanie Schäferis a PhD candidate in Japanese Postwar History at
Cornell University. She studied Japanese Studies and Comparative
Literature at the University of Tübingen (Germany) where she received
a MA with a thesis on the history of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Museum.
Wolfgang Schwentker is Professor at the Graduate School of Human
Sciences at Osaka University where he teaches comparative social and
intellectual history. Among his books are Max Weber in Japan(1998) and
Die Samurai(2003). He co-edited Erinnerungskulturen. Deutschland, Italien
und Japan seit 1945(2002).
M.G. Sheftallis an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at
the Faculty of Informatics of Shizuoka University and author of
Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze(2005).
Peter Siegenthaleris an Assistant Professor at the Department of
History at Texas State University. His dissertation followed the architec-
tural preservation, public memory and localization of political control
in Japan from 1950–65.
Alistair Swaleis a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social
Sciences at The University of Waikato in New Zealand and author of The
Political Thought of Mori Arinori: A Study in Meiji Conservatism(2000). He
has recently completed a second work entitled The Meiji Restoration:
Monarchism, the Popular Press and Conservative Revolution.
Yuki Takatoriis an Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern
and Classical Languages at Georgia State University.
Takashi Yoshida is an Assistant Professor at the Department of
History at Western Michigan University and author of The Making of the
‘Rape of Nanking’: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United
States(2006).
x List of Contributors
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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
Japanese, Korean and Chinese names appear in the East Asian order,
with family name ﬁrst. Names of contributors to this volume and
authors of works in English and other European languages, however,
follow the order given in the publication. Macrons have been omitted
from common place-names such as Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto.
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1
INTRODUCTION
The Realms of Memory:
Japan and Beyond
SVEN SAALER ANDWOLFGANG SCHWENTKER
W
e all live with memories that have a ﬁrm place in our life: our
birthplace, our parents’ house, school and university, our ﬁrst
workplace, stations on a journey. These personal memories have widely
differing emotional qualities; both positive and negative memories
form the topography of our individual memory in very private ways.
Researchers in cultural and social studies are well advised to consider
these personal dimensions of memory when thinking about those
forms of memory which transcend the private dimension and assume
an ofﬁcial character which can have a signiﬁcant social impact. These
so-called ‘collective’ or ‘social’ memories are no longer exclusive to our-
selves. We share them with other members of society, making them the
product of complex forms of social communication.
These forms of ‘collective memory’ – just as with personal or private
memories – are mainly focused on real ‘places’ such as historical sites and
signiﬁcant landscapes or events which mark an important moment in
the history of a nation, a region, a social group or an ethnic minority.
Beyond that, ‘collective memories’ also focus on ‘places’ in a metaphor-
ical sense – what Pierre Nora has called the realms of memory: these also
incorporate symbols, mythical ﬁgures or events, rituals and festivals,
books and artworks – even meals, beverages or clothing which are special
to a speciﬁc social organism (nation, social class, political party, religious
community, sports club, etc.). Due to their symbolic and iconographic
meanings, these expressions of ‘collective memory’ constitute the men-
tal topography of a society and make a powerful contribution to its
cultural, political and social identity.
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JAPANESE MEMORIES
From the mid-1980s, the study of particular ‘realms of memory’ has cre-
ated a new paradigm in international cultural studies. Within the context
of this paradigm, and with reference to the dimensions of time and space,
the focus of interest has shifted from a clearly structured surface descrip-
tion of a society or a systematic arrangement of empirical data to the
mental-historical or sociopsychological analysis of the structure of society
and its social and political implications. This approach has recently been
adopted by Japanese studies and has led to a multitude of new, albeit frag-
mented, ﬁndings, especially in the ﬁelds of history, society and politics.
The editors of this volume are committed to the discussion of these new
approaches to Japanese studies within an international framework. The
11th International Conference of the European Association for Japanese
Studies (EAJS), which took place from 31 August to 3 September 2005 at
the University of Vienna, provided a suitable forum for this task. The sec-
tion ‘History, Politics and International Relations’ was dedicated to the
topic ‘The Power of Memory’. The present volume summarizes the con-
tributions from this section, insofar as they are concerned with modern
Japan.
1
In Japan, the subject of ‘memory’ has prompted a huge response over
the last few years. The reasons behind this phenomenon have recently
been summarized by Tsu Yun Hui, Jan van Bremen and Eyal Ben-Ari
in their introduction to a volume published in 2005 and entitled
Perspectives on Social Memory in Japan.
2
The authors focus on six, closely
interconnected, factors which they consider responsible for the upsurge
of historical memory and debates about memory in Japan in recent
decades. These are: an awareness of a general social crisis brought about
by the country’s accelerated economic modernization after 1945 and
a resulting emotional return to the ‘hometown’ or ‘home village’
(furusato); the quest for a particular cultural identity for Japan against the
background of accelerating globalization and internationalization; the
provision of material, temporal and professional resources, without
which the ‘memory boom’ would have not been possible; the death of
Emperor Sh
–
o
–
wa in 1989, which marked the end of an era; conscious
reﬂection on the external inﬂuences on Japanese identity; and, last but
not least, in the academic context, the inﬂuence of cultural studies on
Japanese studies.
Several other factors contributing to the development of a burgeon-
ing ‘memory industry’ can readily be added to this list. While historical
in character, they are also connected to geographical factors, living and
climatic conditions, and some are the product of scientiﬁc develop-
ments. Within this context, the beginning of the new millennium is a
signiﬁcant factor, irrespective of the fact that Japan simultaneously
maintains the traditional calendar tied to the era names of successive
emperors. In 2000 and 2001, the Japanese book market offered a series
2 The Power of Memory in Modern Japan
2357_02_Intro 5/10/08 1:10 PM Page 2

of publications dealing with the ‘memory’ of the twentieth century.
These included a richly illustrated series by Mainichi Shinbunsha,
Shirı
–
zu 20 seiki no kioku(Series: The Memory of the Twentieth Century) in –
naturally – twenty volumes (with an additional chronological volume),
and an important anthology by Yomiuri Shinbunsha with the title
20 seiki Nipponjin no kioku(The Memory of the Japanese in the Twentieth
Century).
3
This latter volume does not offer an encyclopaedic view of the
twentieth century, but is deliberately focused on those events and actors
which form the ‘collective memory’ of the Japanese in the twentieth
century. Chapters on the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 can be found
next to articles on Tanaka Kakuei, the establishment of the Japanese
konbini(convenience store) or the legendary wrestler Rikido
–
zan (actu-
ally a native Korean). However, no other volume has come as close to
depicting the ‘realms of memory’ of Japanese history in their entirety.
A look at recent Japanese publications which include the term ‘mem-
ory’ in their title reveals further areas that also claim an important role
in the constitution of Japanese society as a ‘memory community’. Thus,
for example, Japan’s signiﬁcant contributions to the so-called ‘world
cultural heritage’ are highlighted; after all, no other city has as many
acknowledged cultural heritage sites as the old capital Kyoto. Quasi-
ofﬁcial publications such as the 1995 Sekai isan – 469 no kioku (World
Heritage – 469 Memories)exhibit a two-fold pride, celebrating Japan’s
own cultural achievements while acknowledging its place in the world
community despite its insular remoteness.
4
Other social memories are
shaped by the special geographical and climatic conditions of the
Japanese islands, above all memories of the natural disasters (such as
earthquakes and typhoons) that continue to trouble Japan. The com-
memoration of the victims of these terrible events occupies an impor-
tant place in both private and public discourse. This is also reﬂected in
academic discussion of this particular aspect of Japanese memory cul-
ture. Thus, it is no coincidence that the volume Kioku (Memory)from
the series Gendai minzokushi no chihei(The Horizon of Modern Folk
Recollections) includes a preface acknowledging the ‘consolation of the
dead’ (irei) of the Ko
–
be earthquake in 1995.
5
Yet it is not only natural dis-
asters, but also radical changes in lifestyle which have created a feeling
of loss, and this threatened or real loss has become, in many ways, char-
acteristic of the Japanese approach to memory. In this context, loss
refers to the dramatic modernization of Japan’s economy and society
since the nineteenth century, a transformation which has led to deep
ruptures in traditional customs and conventions and has led to the dis-
appearance of many features of ‘old Japan’. This culture-pessimistic
view of modernity, which is by no means originally or even speciﬁcally
Japanese,
6
engages with ‘memory’ at the point where it advocates
the protection of speciﬁcally Japanese ways of living – as in the recent
book by the Japanese historian of architecture Nakagawa Takeshi, The
Japanese House: In Space, Memory, and Language.
7
Introduction 3
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THEORIES OF MEMORY
This cursory look at the multi-layered structure of Japanese ‘memory
culture’ suggests that ‘memory’ is also being debated in the different
dimensions of Japan’s political, social, economic and cultural life. In
this respect, Japan is no exception – we may compare European dis-
course on the ‘realms of memory’, and this commonality also applies to
a certain vagueness in the use of the term ‘memory’. The questions
which the subject raises in Japan are in many respects the same as else-
where: What exactly do we mean when we talk about ‘memory’ (kioku)?
Which forms of memory do we have to distinguish? What is the rele-
vance of ‘memory’ for cultural studies?
As far as these questions are concerned, Japanese cultural studies have
so far made only a few theoretical contributions to research on the sub-
ject. Rather, the ﬁeld has been dominated by the approaches of French
sociology and cultural history. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs
(1877–1945) deserves special attention in this context. His ground-
breaking study Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925)
8
has had a revival in
social and cultural studies since the 1980s, especially in English-speaking
countries but also in continental Europe.
9
A Japanese translation of
Halbwachs’s study by the sociologist Koseki To
–
ichir
–
o
–
was published in
1989 and appeared in a second edition in 1999.
10
Halbwachs’s distinc-
tions between individual and collective memory, historical and collective
memory, and the dimensions of memory articulated in time and space
have played an important role in memory studies related to the Japanese
context.
11
The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann and the cultural studies
scholar Aleida Assmann were responsible for introducing the term ‘cul-
tural memory’ into the debate.
12
Though this term is not widely used
in Japanese studies, it is relevant for the terminological distinctions
made in the contributions to this volume. Hence we should, following
Halbwachs and Assmann/Assmann, distinguish three major dimensions
of memory. The collective memory – as shown by Maurice Halbwachs –
emphasizes the basic social conditions of remembering. According to
Halbwachs, individual remembering is not possible without those cogni-
tive instruments formed by words and perceptions which the individual
has borrowed from his or her social environment. As a result, individual
and collective memory are held to be indistinguishable. According to
Halbwachs, past events are not transformed into memories automati-
cally; they become part of a process which results from the collective
desire for meaning-making and the traditions and means of perception
which arise from a given social environment.
By contrast, the communicative memory refers to the actual, most often
orally transmitted, experiences of individuals or groups. The ‘commu-
nicative memory’ can be perceived as a sort of ‘short-term memory’
which passes on information about experiences and events down
4 The Power of Memory in Modern Japan
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through at least three successive generations. This cohort – for example,
the ‘post-war generation’ – can form an ‘experience, remembrance and
telling community’.
Assmann and Assmann in particular have distinguished cultural mem-
oryfrom these other forms of memory – an inter-generational and trans-
era construction which is not sustained by psychological afﬁnities but
by external media and institutions. Among the media of cultural mem-
ory are artifacts like texts, pictures, and sculptures, architecture and
landscapes, but also festivals and rituals. Cultural memory thus func-
tions as a memorialized site for ‘objectiﬁed’ culture, which each gener-
ation must acquire anew.
These various dimensions of ‘memory’ and ‘realms of memory’ need
to be distinguished, despite the currency of the term ‘cultural memory’
as a comprehensive notion in international studies.
13
This term has come
to designate every conceivable form of conscious memory of historical
events, people and processes, whether aesthetic, political or cognitive in
character. Thus, besides forms of ahistorical or even antihistorical mem-
ory, the term also includes every form of historical representation. This
‘memory culture’ is supported at various levels by individuals, social
groups, nations, or states. They can share such memories or they can
ﬁght over them.
It is thanks to French cultural historian and publicist Pierre Nora
that memory studies did not remain in the realms of theory. The multi-
volume series Les lieux de mémoireon the ‘realms of memory’ of the
French nation was introduced to Japan in 2000. The work was the sub-
ject of a special edition of the journal Shiso
–
which included selected
translations and discussion by Tanigawa Minoru, Nora’s translator.
14
In
greater detail and with more material on the Japanese approach to the
subject, Tanigawa explained the paradigmatic signiﬁcance of Nora’s
approach in his preface to the three-volume Japanese edition of Nora’s
oeuvre. This edition was published in 2002/2003 by Iwanami Shoten and
presents a selection of the hundred articles of the original French work
in Japanese translation.
15
Tanigawa pointed out that Japanese research
has concentrated on ‘remembrance’ and ‘memory’ with respect to the
Second World War (senso
–
no kioku) and within the framework of the
debate about the nation-state (kokumin kokka ron). Before the notion of
memorywas introduced into the discussion, Japanese research was more
inﬂuenced by the Anglo-Saxon approaches of the ‘invention of tradi-
tion’ (Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger) or ‘imagined communities’
(Benedict Anderson) rather than the discourse analysis of the French
social anthropologists.
16
The debate on memory in Japan was strongly
inﬂuenced by these two former approaches – especially the issue of seg-
regating ethnic minorities in the course of founding a nation-state. In
the controversies over the history textbooks to be used in Japanese
schools and the question of national symbols (national ﬂag and
anthem), these two approaches to questions of social memory actually
Introduction 5
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had already converged before Nora and his colleagues’ work had been
widely received in Japan.
THE ROLE OF ‘MEMORY’ IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN
This cursory discussion of the literature on social memory and its recep-
tion in Japan has shown that Japan is yet to develop a body of system-
atic research on the Japanese ‘realms of memory’ comparable with Nora’s
groundbreaking project – as compared to Italy, Denmark, Germany and
other European nations.
17
We can assume, however, that some of the
large-scale projects undertaken in recent years at the National Museum
of Japanese History (Kokuritsu Rekishi Minzoku Habubutsukan, abbrevi-
ated to Rekihaku) for the inventory, categorization and documentation
of the Japanese landscape of memory – such as cemeteries, monuments
and memorial sites
18
– have been inﬂuenced in various ways by European
studies on social memory.
While this volume is not intended as a substitute for a yet-to-be-
written Japanese version of Les lieux de mémoire, it constitutes one step
in the direction of this goal. For, as mentioned above, it seems to us –
and apparently also to a number of the authors represented in this
volume – that the paradigm of the ‘realms of memory’ could be very
illuminating in the Japanese context, helping explain the intensity of
discussion generated by various history-related issues within Japanese
society as well as Japan’s relations with her Asian neighbours. Above all,
however, while the Japanese experience is only rarely considered in
European research on memory, Japan is certainly one of the ‘major play-
ers’ in what Piere Nora has called ‘the age of commemoration’, with its
‘ardent, embattled, almost fetishistic “memorialism” ’.
19
The notion of memory (kioku), along with the closely related notion
of historical consciousness (rekishi ninshiki), has been the focus of
heated debates in Japan since the ﬁftieth anniversary of the end of the
Second World War in Asia (commemorated on 15 August 1995),
20
if not
earlier. Both terms are ﬁrmly established in academic research as well as
in media and political discourse. Shortly before the 1995 anniversary, a
committee set up by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the History
Examination Committee (Rekishi Kento
–
Iinkai), determined to bring
the Japanese debate about the nation’s war memory and ‘coming to
terms with the past’ to a ﬁnal end through the publication of its
Summary of the Greater East Asian War(Daito
–
a senso
–
no so
–
katsu).
21
On the
contrary, however, after 1995, debates on Japan’s war history and the
necessity for its remembrance rather escalated. As a result, studies of
the Japanese politics and culture of memory have continued to increase,
in Japan as well as in Japanese studies worldwide.
22
At the centre of this debate over cultural and social memory are the
quarrels about the contents of history textbooks for Japanese schools;
arguments over memorial sites and their signiﬁcance, especially the
6 The Power of Memory in Modern Japan
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Yasukuni Shrine;
23
and the closely related question of the place of his-
tory in Japan’s political and social life. At the end of the premiership of
Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro
–
(2000–2006), the ‘correct under-
standing of history’ (tadashii rekishi ninshiki) had become one of the key
issues in Japanese domestic politics, as well as foreign relations.
24
Several
Asian nations, victims of Japanese expansion and occupation in the ﬁrst
half of the twentieth century, have repeatedly lamented the lack of a
‘correct understanding of history’ by the Japanese – a lack of remorse
and – in the opinion of the victims – sincere apology for Japan’s wars of
aggression in East Asia. Corresponding debates broke out everywhere in
Japan – in the media, in politics and in society at large.
In the face of this escalating international debate, the largest Japanese
daily newspaper, the rather conservative Yomiuri Shinbun, dispatched
dozens of journalists to interview contemporaries and scholars in order
to answer the question: Who was responsible? The results were published
in a series of articles in the newspaper and in several other publications
put out by the Yomiuri Shinbun including an English edition.
25
The
country’s second biggest newspaper, the Asahi Shinbun, which is gener-
ally considered more liberal, has pulled even with a similar project.
26
Interestingly, both newspapers discovered that – contrary to the claims
of the LDP committee mentioned above – the majority of the Japanese
population was not at all interested in putting an end to debate over
their wartime past and its memorialization; on the contrary, the vast
majority held that the discussions had not gone far enough and should
be continued. Those interviewed also emphasized that Japan ‘had not
yet apologized sufﬁciently (mada fuju
–
bun) for its past aggression and
colonial rule’.
27
Furthermore, in the opening years of the new millennium, opposition
developed within society against the use of neo-nationalist textbooks
in history and social education in Japanese schools.
28
This opposition
escalated in connection with the debate over Koizumi’s visits to the
Yasukuni Shrine, a central but also very controversial site of Japanese
social memory.
29
Even academic studies of the ‘Yasukuni problem’
became bestsellers
30
and were discussed in neighbourhood reading
groups, sometimes under the guidance of professional historians from
the local area. Koizumi’s memory politics, which represented an indirect
challenge to the established ‘Murayama Statement’ (Murayama Danwa,
1995) regretting Japan’s wartime aggression and colonial rule in Asia,
31
while at the same time ofﬁcially pledging to uphold the ‘spirit of the
Murayama Statement’, faced strong societal, or ‘extra-parliamentary’,
opposition. In the long run, this opposition failed to deﬂect the Prime
Minister from his chosen course. However, it successfully challenged
the authorization of neo-nationalistic textbooks promoted by the right-
wing Association for the Creation of New History Textbooks (Atarashii
rekishi kyo
–
kasho o tsukuru-kai, abbreviated to Tsukuru-kai), which
had been heavily promoted by national, prefectural and local LDP
Introduction 7
2357_02_Intro 5/10/08 1:10 PM Page 7

politicians including then Foreign Minister Machimura Nobutaka in a
public TV appearance.
32
On the political scene, these societal debates on the question of
wartime memories have not remained unheard. There has been increas-
ing discussion of the problem of ‘historical consciousness’ in the
Japanese Diet over the last ten years,
33
especially as a consequence of a
worsening of bilateral relations as a result of strongly-worded criticism of
Japanese ‘memory politics’ by its neighbours. Early in 2007, the new
Prime Minister Abe Shinzo
–
caused an international uproar when he
criticized the statement of former Foreign Minister Ko
–
no Yo
–
hei regarding
‘comfort women’ – ‘forced prostitutes’ in the Japanese military during
the war
34
– stating that it was unclear how much ‘force’ (kyo
–
sei) had
really been used and that it was surely legitimate ‘to question the deﬁni-
tion of force’.
35
Abe, a member of the LDP committee Rekishi kento
–
iinkai
in the early 1990s, is the grandson of Kishi Nobusuke, a pre-war politi-
cian charged as a war criminal at the International Military Tribunal for
the Far East (IMTFE, also known as the Tokyo Trials), but released in 1948
to attain the position of Prime Minister in February 1957. His family
background has considerably inﬂuenced Abe’s view of politics, history,
and memory – as set out in his book, Utsukushii kuni e (Towards a Beautiful
Country), published in 2006.
36
Such examples show that questions of collective memory and com-
memoration, especially in relation to Japan’s wartime past, play an
important role in contemporary Japanese society, politics and the
media.
37
Mass media such as the now notorious comics (manga) of
Kobayashi Yoshinori, websites and war movies – such as the two 2007
movies on the battle for the Paciﬁc island of Iwojima,
38
the ﬁlm on the
sinking of the Japanese battleship Yamato in the ﬁnal days of the war
(Yamato no otoko-tachi / The Men of the Yamato, 2005),
39
and the recently
released movie dealing with the Japanese kamikaze units (tokko
–
tai) (Ore
wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku / I Go to Die only for You, 2007)
40
– all
helped include signiﬁcant portions of the population in the debates
over memory, albeit rarely as active participants. There can be no doubt
that contemporary Japan is currently experiencing a pervasive ‘memory
boom’. The increase in commemorative events, as well as the number of
historical museums founded in the 1980s and the 1990s – among them
the Rekihaku – hardly suggest that Japan is falling behind other coun-
tries on this issue.
THE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THIS VOLUME
This book deals with the current debates over these issues of cultural
memory and commemoration; many contributions are concerned with
the cultural construction of Japan’s wartime past. Conservative voices
within Japan argue that an ‘exaggerated concern’ with the war years
within the context of ‘2000 years of Japan’s history’ (sometimes
8 The Power of Memory in Modern Japan
2357_02_Intro 5/10/08 1:10 PM Page 8

extended to ‘2600 years of history’) could lead to a ‘masochistic’
(jigyaku) mentality (or, conversely, could be the result of such a mental-
ity). However, it cannot be denied that the experience of violencemakes
a powerful impact on the memory of the individual as well as on the col-
lective memory of a whole society. It was Nietzsche who, as early as in
1887, pointed to this mutual relation between memory on the one hand
and violence and pain on the other, when he wrote in The Genealogy of
Morals(Die Genealogie der Moral): ‘Whenever man has thought it neces-
sary to create a memory for himself, his effort has been attended with
torture, blood, sacriﬁce.’
41
Nietzsche’s powerful insight may help explain why Part 1 of this vol-
ume consists of contributions which focus on the current debate over
various facets of Japan’s wartime past, such as the massacre of Nanjing
(1937/38) during the Sino-Japanese War, the issue of the ‘comfort
women’, and the Tokko
–
tai or kamikaze units – but also the role of col-
lective memory in Japan’s relations with formerly occupied countries,
and the role such memory plays in the process of identity formation in
modern Japan. Part 2 of this volume deals with institutions that
embody collective memory. The various contributions analyse muse-
ums, memorial sites, but also textbooks, commemoration days, and
national heroes as ‘realms of memory’. Part 3 takes up issues of popular
representations of memory in literature, ﬁlm and other media. Part 4
examines the tensions between centre and periphery in the cultural
struggle over the interpretation of collective memory. One contribution
examines conﬂicting views of civil disturbances in rural parts of Japan
after the Meiji Restoration (1868) and how they were remembered.
Here, a subaltern historical narrative – which differs from the national
master narrative – has survived and gradually re-emerged – as a matter
of fact as the result of the research activities of the author of the article
in question. Memory, as this case shows, is never a one-dimensional and
absolute category, but evolves through time as a result of the activities
of a broad range of actors, some of whom may not ﬁt easily into con-
ventional reconstructions of historical memory.
The contributions in Part 4, however, also suggest that it would be
unwise to restrict the paradigm of the ‘realms of memory’ to war and
violence. By using cultural-historical or anthropological approaches, it
would surely be possible to detect Japanese ‘realms of memory’ which
are wholly unrelated to war or violence; we only need to think of the
differences in regional lifestyles (Kanto
–
vs. Kansai), of clothing styles, of
local vs. ‘national’ cuisine, religious cult sites, classics of Japanese liter-
ature, landscapes and so on. These elements all contribute to a more
comprehensive landscape of Japanese memory which is not only part of
collective, but also of cultural memory.
A few years ago, in a comparative study of the ‘realms of memory’
in France and Germany, Pierre Nora advanced the thesis that the two coun-
tries embody ‘two different types of memory culture’: in Germany’s case,
Introduction 9
2357_02_Intro 5/10/08 1:10 PM Page 9

he argued, the whole debate on memory was overshadowed by the expe-
rience of National Socialism; in France, however, the discourse on memory
was ‘much more diffuse, more covert, more effective and less strident’, sup-
posedly reﬂecting a ‘transition from an awareness of national history to an
awareness of social history’.
42
Nora does not dispute that the French dis-
course of memory occurs – in a positive as well as a negative sense – within
the framework of the nation as a cultural entity or, in his words, as a ‘cul-
tural nation’ (Kulturnation). If Nora’s two types of memory culture are
applied to the Japanese case, it is interesting to speculate the direction in
which academic research and political discussion about social memory are
going to develop over the next few years. Will war remain the prevalent
topic of a strongly politicized debate in Japan – and beyond – or will we
witness the widening of the paradigm to include ‘cultural memory’ in a
broader sense, in which war will ﬁgure as only one important issue among
others? If the contributions in this volume are able to stimulate further
investigation and a deepening understanding of collective memory in
Japan, they will have fulﬁlled their purpose.
NOTES
1
A separate volume on social memory in Okinawa is under consideration,
which will also include contributions from the Vienna conference.
2
Eyal Ben-Ari, Jan van Bremen and Tsu Yun Hui, ‘Memory, Scholarship
and the Study of Japan’, in Tsu Yun Hui, Jan van Bremen and Eyal Ben-
Ari (eds), Perspectives on Social Memory in Japan (Folkestone: Global
Oriental, 2005), pp. 2–4.
3
Mainichi Shinbunsha (ed.), Shirîzu 20 seiki no kioku(Tokyo: Mainichi
Shinbunsha, 2000); Yomiuri Shinbunsha (ed.), 20 seiki Nipponjin no kioku
(Tokyo: Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 2000).
4
Nihon Unesuko [UNESCO] Kyo
–
kai Renmei (ed.), The World Heritage:
Unesuko Sekai Isan – 469 no kioku(Tokyo: Nihon Unesuko Kyo
–
kai Renmei,
1996). Modern mass media frequently present world cultural heritage
sites in the form of wrap-ups, for example as multimedia software such as
the CD-ROM Nihon no sekai isan published by SynForest (2000) or in the
form of TV programmes such as the lavish series Sekai isan broadcast by
NHK (cf. the NHK homepage http://www.nhk.or.jp/sekaiisan/), which
however is not restricted to the Japanese world heritage sites.
5
Sori Takeshi, ‘Hanshin-Awaji daishinsai to irei’, in Iwamoto Michiya
(ed.), Gendai minzokushi no chihei, Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Asakura Shoten, 2003),
pp. 14–40.
6
Cf. the stimulating article by Pierre Nora, ‘The Reasons for the Current
Upsurge in Memory’ in Tr@nsit online,no. 22/2002, Internet: http://
www.iwm.at/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=285&Itemi
d=463 (last accessed 1 July 2007).
7
Nakagawa Takeshi, The Japanese House: In Space, Memory, and Language
(Tokyo: International House of Japan, 2005).
10 The Power of Memory in Modern Japan
2357_02_Intro 5/10/08 1:10 PM Page 10

8
Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Alcan,
1925).
9
Vgl. Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama (eds),
Perilous Memories: the Asia-Paciﬁc War(s)(Durham: Duke University Press,
2001), p. 16; Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung
und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen(Munich: C.H. Beck, 1992).
10
M. Arupuwakkusu, Shu
–
go
–
teki kioku(Tokyo: Gyo
–
ro
–
sha, 1999).
11
Mizuno Haruko, for example, describes the Yasukuni Shrine as a ‘realm
of memory’, with explicit reference to Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre
Nora. Mizuno Haruko, ‘ “Seisen” no kioku – “Kioku no ba” toshite no
Yasukuni Jinja o chu
–
shin ni,’ in O
–
saka Daigaku Gengo Bunkabu (ed.),
‘Bunka’ no kaidoku 2 – ‘Bunka ku
–
kan’ no seijigaku(O
–
saka: O
–
saka Daigaku
Gengo Bunkabu, 2002), pp. 1–15. Another example is Ishida Takeshi,
Kioku to bo
–
kyaku no seijigaku – Do
–
kaseisaku, senso
–
sekinin, shu
–
goteki kioku
(Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2000). To what extent the term ‘literary memory’,
recently suggested by O
–
hara Yu
–
ji, will become accepted in Japan and else-
where is yet to be seen; cf. his book Bungakuteki kioku – 1940nen zengo:
Sho
–
waki bungaku to senso
–
no kioku(Tokyo: Kanrin Shobo
–
, 2006).
12
Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press 2006); originally published as Assmann, Das kulturelle
Gedächtnis(op. cit.); Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und
Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses(Munich: C.H. Beck, 1999).
13
Cf. Christoph Corneliβen, ‘Was heiβ t Erinnerungskultur? Begriff –
Methoden – Perspektiven,’ in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht10,
2003, pp. 548–63, and Christoph Corneliβen, Lutz Klinkhammer, Wolfgang
Schwentker (eds), Erinnerungskulturen. Deutschland, Italien und Japan nach
1945(Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2003).
14
Cf. Shiso
–
No. 911 (May 2005), ‘Kioku no ba;’ this issue also includes
Tanigawa Minoru, ‘Shakaishi no bankakyo
–
– “Kioku no ba” no yomikata/
yomarekata,’ pp. 4–12, and Pie
–
ru Nora, ‘Kioku to rekishi no hazama
ni – Kioku no ba no kenkyu
–
ni mukete,’ pp. 13–37.
15
Piêru Nora (ed.), Kioku no ba – Furansu kokumin ishiki no bunka/shakaishi,
3 Vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002/03). Cf. in Vol. 1 especially Tanigawa
Minoru, ‘ “Kioku no ba” no hazama ni – Nihongo-han jobun ni kaete’,
pp. 1–13. Cf. also Wolfgang Schwentker, ‘Shu
–
go
–
teki kioku to nashonaru
aidentiti. “Kioku no ba” o meguro Furansu to Doitsu no kenkyu
–
do
–
ko
–
,’
Shakai Shiso
–
shi Kenkyu
–
, Vol. 28 (2004), pp. 171–8.
16
Yamamuro Shin’ichi, ‘Kokumin kokka keisei-ki no genron to media,’ in
Matsumoto Sannosuke and Yamamuro Shin’ichi (eds), Genron to media
(Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990), pp. 477–540; here p. 486; Mitani Hiroshi,
Meiji ishin to nashonarizumu – Bakumatsu no gaiko
–
to seiji hendo
–
(Tokyo:
Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1997); Stephen Vlastos (ed.), Mirror of Modernity:
Invented Traditions of Modern Japan(Berkeley: University of California
Press 1998).
17
Cf. Mario Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria. 3 vols. (Rome: Laterza
1996/97); Ole Feldbaek (ed.), Dansk Identitetshistorie, 4 vols. (Copenhagen:
Introduction 11
2357_02_Intro 5/10/08 1:10 PM Page 11

Reitzel 1991/92); Francois Etienne and Hagen Schulze (eds), Deutsche
Erinnerungsorte. 3 vols. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001).
18
This refers not only to the Asian-Paciﬁc War of 1931–45, but also to
the wars fought by Japan in the modern period – from the Taiwan expe-
dition of 1874 or, at least, the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894/95. Arai
Katsuhiro and Ichinose Toshiya (eds), Irei to haka (= Bulletin of the National
Museum of Japanese History, No. 102 (2003): Memorial Service and
Cemeteries); Kokuritsu Rekishi Minzoku Hakubutsukan, Senso
–
taiken no
kiroku to katari ni kan-suru shiryo
–
cho
–
sa, 4 vols. (Kokuritsu Rekishi
Minzoku Hakubutsukan shiryo
–
cho
–
sa ho
–
kokusho, no. 14) (Sakura:
Kokuritsu Minzoku Hakubutsukan, 2004–2005).
19
Nora, ‘The Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory’. Cf. also
Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 315.
20
As Sato
–
Takumi has recently pointed out, however, the date 15 August
refers only tangentially to the ‘end of the war’. While Japan accepted
the Potsdam Declaration and announced the cessation of hostilities to
the world on 14 August (an announcement reported in anticipation
by European newspapers several days earlier), Japanese troops surren-
dered to enemy forces throughout the second half of August; while in
the north, ﬁghting against Soviet troops in Sakhalin continued until
the beginning of September. The surrender of Japan was signed on
2 Septemberon board the USS Missouri, as is well known. It is true that, on
15 August, the Japanese Emperor in a radio address announced the ‘end
of the war’ to the Japanese population, but this had little relevance to the
actual ending of hostilities. However, in the post-war period, 15 August
was determined as the ‘Day for the Commemoration of the End of the
War’ in order to emphasize the subjectivity of the Japanese decision to
end(shu
–
sen) the war – implying that the war had not actually been lost
(haisen). See Sato
–
Takumi, Hachigatsu ju
–
go nichi no shinwa – Shu
–
sen kinenbi
no mediagaku(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo
–
, 2005); Kawashima Shin et al.
(eds), Shiryo
–
de yomu Ajia no hachigatsu ju
–
gonichi(Tokyo: Yamakawa
Shuppansha, 2008).
21
Rekishi Kento
–
Iinkai (ed.), Daito
–
a senso
–
no so
–
katsu(Tokyo: Tentensha,
1995); see also Sven Saaler, Politics, Memory and Public Opinion. The History
Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society(Munich: Iudicium, 2005),
chapter 1.5.1.
22
Tsuboi Hideto, Senso
–
no kioku o sakanoboru(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo
–
,
2005); Sato
–
Takumi, Hachigatsu ju
–
go nichi no shinwa – Shu
–
sen kinenbi no
mediagaku(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo
–
, 2005); Seraphim, War Memory and
Social Politics in Japan; Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the ‘Rape of
Nanking’: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States(New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (ed.), The
Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38: Complicating the Picture(New York: Berghahn
Books, 2007); Carol Gluck, Rekishi de kangaeru (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
2007); Philip Seaton, Japan’s Contested War Memories: The “Memory Rifts”
12 The Power of Memory in Modern Japan
2357_02_Intro 5/10/08 1:10 PM Page 12

in Historical Consciousness of World War II(London and New York:
Routledge, 2007); Saaler, Politics, Memory and Public Opinion.
23
Concerning the discussions on the Yasukuni Shrine see John Nelson,
‘Social Memory as Ritual Practice: Commemorating Spirits of the Military
Dead at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine,’ in Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 62:2
(2003), pp. 443–67; Saaler, Politics, Memory and Public Opinion, chapter 2.
24
The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) lists eight topics in a box
with the title ‘issues’ on its homepage (http://www.mofa.go.jp/ as
accessed on 15 July 2007), in four rows with two topics apiece. The issue
listed ‘ﬁrst’ (if we ‘read’ the list from left to right and top to bottom) – and
therefore apparently the top priority for MOFA – is ‘Historical Issues’. In
the third row we ﬁnd ‘Sea of Japan’ (a link button plus an additional link
guiding the visitor to a PR video), a topic that is also primarily a histori-
cal issue.
25
Yomiuri Shinbun War Responsibility Reexamination Committee (ed.),
From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who was Responsible?(Tokyo:
Yomiuri Shimbun, 2006).
26
Asahi Shinbun Shuzaihan, Rekishi to mukiau, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Asahi
Shinbunsha, 2006/2007). Vol. 1 is entitled Senso
–
sekinin to tsuito
–
(War
responsibility and mourning [for the war dead]), Vol. 2 is entitled ‘Kako no
kokufuku’ to aikokushin(‘Coming to terms with the past’ and Patriotism).
27
Yomiuri Shinbun Senso
–
Sekinin Kensho
–
Iinkai (ed.), Kensho
–
senso
–
sekinin,
Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chu
–
o
–
Ko
–
ronsha, 2006), p. 208; AIR 21 – Asahi So
–
ken Ripo
–
to,
No. 193 (June 2006), p. 189 (question 33) and 190 (question 27).
28
See Saaler, Politics, Memory and Public Opinion, chapter 1.
29
Ibid., chapter 2.
30
For example Takahashi Tetsuya, Yasukuni mondai(Tokyo: Chikuma
Shobo
–
, 2005).
31
MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Statement by Prime Minister
Tomiichi Murayama ‘On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the war’s
end’. Internet: http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/press/pm/murayama/
9508.html (last accessed on 3 May 2007).
32
See Saaler, Politics, Memory and Public Opinion, chapter 1. Due to the small
number of copies sold (and thus the poor proﬁt ratio), the Fuso
–
sha pub-
lishing house announced in May 2007 that it would discontinue distribu-
tion of the Tsukuru-kai textbook after 2008. See Asahi.com, Internet:
http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0531/TKY200705310255.html
(accessed 1 June 2007).
33
A search of the minutes of the National Diet produced sixteen occur-
rences of the term ‘historical consciousness’ in Diet and Diet Committee
sessions in 1997, twenty-six in 1998, thirty-nine in 1999, twenty-six in
2000, thirty-seven in 2001, twenty-one in 2002, twenty-four in 2003,
twelve in 2004, seventy-two in 2005 and forty-six in 2006. See
http://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/.
34
On the ‘comfort women,’ see the contribution of Yonson Ahn in chapter 3
of this volume.
Introduction 13
2357_02_Intro 5/10/08 1:10 PM Page 13

35
For an excellent summary of the debate over Abe’s remarks, see Tessa
Morris-Suzuki, ‘Japan’s “Comfort Women”: It’s time for the truth (in
the ordinary, everyday sense of the word)’, in Japan Focus, Internet:
http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2373 (last accessed 3 May
2007).
36
Abe Shinzo
–
, Utsukushii kuni e(Tokyo: Bungei Shunju
–
, 2006), particularly
pp. 18, 69–74, 107. English translation: Towards a Beautiful Country: My
Vision For Japan(New York: Vertical, 2007).
37
See also Fujitani, White, and Yoneyama (eds), Perilous Memories: the Asia-
Paciﬁc War(s).
38
See the ofﬁcial movie website, http://wwws.warnerbros.co.jp/iwojima-
movies/.
39
See the ofﬁcial movie website, http://www.yamato-movie.jp/; just before
the movie opened, a new Yamato Memorial was opened in the city of
Kure. See http://yamato.kure-city.jp/.
40
See the ofﬁcial movie website, http://www.chiran1945.jp/. On the memo-
rialization of the tokko
–
tai, see the contribution of M.G. Sheftall in this
volume and M.G. Sheftall, Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the
Kamikaze(New York: NAL Caliber, 2005), Japanese translation Tokyo:
Bungei Shunju
–
, 2007.
41
Quoted from the English translation in Hayden White, Metahistory: The
Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe(Baltimore and London:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 361.
42
Pierre Nora, Nachwort, in François/Schulze (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte ,
Vol. 3, p. 684f.
14 The Power of Memory in Modern Japan
2357_02_Intro 5/10/08 1:10 PM Page 14

PART 1
Memory in Politics and
International Relations
2357_03_Part1 5/10/08 1:11 PM Page 15

2357_03_Part1 5/10/08 1:11 PM Page 16

2
For the Nation or for
the People? History and Memory
of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan
TAKASHI YOSHIDA
INTRODUCTION
I
n 1995, a group of scholars led by Fujioka Nobukatsu, then a profes-
sor of education at Tokyo University, founded the Association for
the Advancement of a Liberalist View of History (Jiyu
–
shugi shikan
kenkyu
–
kai). Since the organization’s inception, both national and inter-
national media have paid substantial attention to the Association, its
academic supporters and its views on the ‘Daito
–
-A senso
–
’ (Greater East
Asian War), commonly known as the Paciﬁc War. Dedicated to defend-
ing or, at least, rationalizing many wartime incidents that, in other cir-
cles, have been treated as war crimes and atrocities, the Association has
engaged in such activities as establishing a de factobranch organization,
the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii rekishi
kyo
–
kasho o tsukuru-kai). Because of the Association’s extremely contro-
versial opinions, its work is probably better known to experts and non-
experts both inside and outside Japan than publications and seminars
organized by the academics and activists whom the members of the
Association have striven to refute.
As the views of the Association are often disturbing to many individu-
als, it is understandable that the media have published detailed articles
on the Association. Nonetheless, many constituents of the non-Japanese
media often fail to explain why the Association was founded in the mid-
1990s and why its members were so outraged by the existing junior high
school textbooks. Moreover, such outside observers frequently fail to
grasp the ultimate political goals of the Association. The Japanese histo-
riography of the Nanjing Atrocities, discussed in this article, offers a clue
2357_03_Part1 5/10/08 1:11 PM Page 17

to understanding these questions. Contrary to what many non-Japanese
critics tend to assume, the history of the Nanjing Massacre has been
incorporated into Japan’s national history, and the very reason that the
Association came to existence was, I argue, to revise the history of the
atrocities in Nanjing, as they are remembered today.
1
THE NANJING MASSACRE IN WARTIME JAPAN
During the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), the atrocities in Nanjing were
never reported in the authorized news accounts, nor were they recorded
in ofﬁcial Japanese history. Newspaper articles that escaped censorship
uniformly praised the righteousness of Japan and its soldiers, while
accusing the Chinese government of committing atrocities against
Japanese civilians and disturbing peace in East Asia.
2
Killings of Chinese
soldiers in these news reports were regarded as distinguished achieve-
ments that the nation should applaud. Slaying dozens of the enemy sol-
diers with the steel of one’s sword became an archetypal image of
heroism. For example, on 2 September 1937, the Tokyo Nichi Nichi
Shinbun, a daily newspaper, printed a report of a unit commander who
had killed more than forty enemies with his sword. The article included
a photograph of his smiling wife, who was thrilled to learn the news and
expressed delight in what he had achieved for the Japanese Empire.
3
Not only Japanese adults, but also children were exposed to the narra-
tive that Japan was ﬁghting a righteous war. This message was expressed
in various ways. In the 1930s, for example, a favourite cartoon among
Japanese children was Tagawa Suiho
–
’s ‘Stray Dog, Norakuro’ (Norakuro).
The cartoon was serialized in the monthly boy’s magazine Boy’s Club
(Sho
–
nen Kurabu) in 1931, the year when Japan invaded the North-east
of China, or Manchuria. The protagonist Norakuro, a black homeless
orphaned dog, joined the military as a cook and is later promoted to pri-
vate second class. He ﬁghts against mountain monkeys, pirates, gorillas,
chimpanzees, monsters, pigs and frogs. By 1937, Norakuro has become
a lieutenant, ﬁghting against a country of pigs and their ally, a country
of bears.
4
Seemingly, the cartoon reﬂected Japan’s international affairs of
the time: Dogs (Japanese) are ﬁghting against pigs (Chinese) and being
assisted by bears (Americans). Through these stories, the cartoon encour-
aged boys to be loyal and brave soldiers like Norakuro.
5
In school, textbooks endorsed the nation, its military and its war efforts.
In geography and history, the textbooks underscored the legitimacy of
Japan’s crusade to punish Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek and to establish
eternal peace in Asia.
6
In ethics and national language classes, military
heroes were often presented as role models, and elementary students were
expected to follow them.
7
In these classes, students also read about new
advanced military technologies, including airplanes, battleships and sub-
marines.
8
Intentionally or unintentionally, these stories gloriﬁed the
military and fostered admiration of the military among children.
18 Memory in Politics and International Relations
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The national culture of militarism was also reﬂected in museum
exhibits. The National Defence Hall (Kokubo
–
kan) of the Yasukuni
Shrine was more like a present-day amusement park, where visitors were
invited to engage in acts of simulated warfare, such as shooting air riﬂes,
selecting targets for aerial bombing, operating a miniature tank by radio
control, and even wearing gas masks in a room ﬁlled with tear gas.
9
According to one statistic, more than 900,000 people visited the
museum during 1937, and children particularly liked the hands-on
exhibits at the Defence Hall.
10
After all, these exhibits transformed
organized homicide into a type of play, divorcing the violent aspects of
war from the misery and suffering that they inevitably cause. Guns,
bombs, and tanks were represented as fun and exciting.
Although the Japanese population largely supported the culture of
militarism and ignored the suffering of their supposed enemies in
China, wartime Japan was not entirely united. Always, there existed a
determined minority that challenged the Imperial agenda, ﬁghting for
the minds of the people through publication and persuasion. For exam-
ple, Kaji Wataru, who organized the Japanese People’s Antiwar Alliance
(Nihonjin hansen do
–
mei) in China and helped the Nationalist govern-
ment to ﬁght against the Japanese military, wrote an introduction to the
Japanese translation of Harold Timperley’s What War Means: Japanese
Terror in China(1938), a book that detailed the Japanese military’s atroc-
ities in Nanjing in December 1937. In this introduction, Kaji accused
the Japanese empire of waging an aggressive war in China and urged
that Japan must immediately end the war.
11
After being prosecuted under the Peace Preservation Law and serving
his sentence, Kaji escaped to China and succeeded in persuading the
Nationalist government to build a detention facility for captured Japanese
soldiers in July 1939. Kaji carefully selected eleven men with whom he
undertook subversive activities calculated to provoke anti-war sentiment
among the Japanese soldiers. They travelled to battleﬁelds and spoke to
them through a megaphone, exhorting them to lay down their arms and
abstain from the meaningless slaughter.
12
Kaji’s initiative was not unique.
Similar anti-war activities by Japanese, Chinese and Korean communists
were conducted in north China, as well.
13
Whereas anti-war efforts existed both inside and outside Japan, the
majority of the Japanese were sucked into a war fever, and they were
generally unsympathetic towards the demonized enemy nationals dur-
ing the war. It was only after the war that the Nanjing Massacre received
signiﬁcant public attention within Japan.
THE NANJING MASSACRE IN OCCUPIED JAPAN
During the American occupation of Japan, the conqueror introduced a
new history of Imperial Japan to the conquered. The History of the Paciﬁc
War, written by Bradford Smith, a Japanologist who was working for the
For the Nation or for the People? 19
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Ofﬁce of War Information, was serialized for ten days in all national news-
papers throughout Japan. The ﬁrst instalment appeared on 8 December
1945, or the fourth anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
14
Smith’s history discussed Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the
attempted coup d’étatby the military on 26 February 1936, the war
between China and Japan from 1937 to 1945, and the war between the
United States and Japan that followed the Japanese attack of Hawaii. In
his serial, Smith informed the readers of wartime atrocities such as the
Bataan Death March and the Nanjing Massacre. Smith referred to a wit-
ness who stressed that the atrocities in Nanjing were the worst in modern
world history. In the article, Smith estimated that at least 20,000 civilians,
including women and children, were slaughtered in the city from early
December 1937 to January 1938.
15
This estimate probably came from War
Damage in the Nanking Area(1938), written by Lewis Smythe, professor
of Sociology at Nanking University, in which Smythe gives the same
statistics.
16
Before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946–48),
nine witnesses testiﬁed regarding the atrocities in Nanjing, and their
testimonies were detailed in newspaper articles often under shocking
headings such as ‘Children Also Brutalized’ and ‘Atrocities in Nanjing
Revealed’.
17
In contrast to their feelings during the war, many war-
weary Japanese now condemned the military for dragging the nation
into a reckless war and felt ashamed of the atrocities in Nanjing. An edi-
torial printed in the Yomiuri shinbunin late July 1946 is particularly
noteworthy:
Newspaper correspondents accompanying the army that captured
Nanjing were more or less aware of the atrocities by the army. They
witnessed innumerable atrocities during the so-called ‘sacred war’,
which was in fact a war of aggression. Yet they dared not remon-
strate to the military, deeming it wiser to shut their eyes and to
excuse the brutality as an unavoidable wartime evil. The irresponsi-
bility of war correspondents, ourselves included, is reprehensible in
its disregard of humanity. . . . We must acknowledge the crimes
committed by the militarists, epitomized by the Nanjing Massacre,
as an ineradicable blot in our history.
18
One may debate whether newspaper correspondents intentionally
whitewashed the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing or tacitly treated the
execution of Chinese citizens as justiﬁable acts. In any event, however,
the remorse expressed in the editorial was indeed sincere and was
shared by other Japanese. For example, Hanaki Sankichi, a farmer in
Chiba Prefecture, was deeply ashamed of the atrocities in Nanjing and
suggested in the op-ed section of the Asahinewspaper that every single
Japanese should reﬂect on what had happened in Nanjing.
19
Sentiment
among the populace was now overwhelmingly anti-war. Moreover, the
20 Memory in Politics and International Relations
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American occupation censored opinions that questioned the proce-
dures and judgements of the war-crimes tribunal. Thus, few articles crit-
icizing the judgement of the tribunal as to the Nanjing Massacre
appeared in the press during the occupation. It was estimated that at
least 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war were killed in Nanjing and
its vicinity during the ﬁrst six weeks of the Japanese occupation.
20
This
view became the orthodox narrative of Nanjing in the post-war period.
THE NANJING MASSACRE IN THE COLD WAR
The American occupation of Japan ofﬁcially ended in 1952. By then,
driven by fear of communism, the occupational authority had rehabili-
tated many wartime political leaders, and the Japanese government was
no longer eager to discuss its wartime atrocities at home or abroad. In
the 1950s and the 1960s, the energies of peace activists were largely
committed to movements against nuclear weapons, the US-Japan
Security Treaty and the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, even when the great
majority of public attention was absorbed by the politics of the Cold
War, a few peace activists continually attempted to remind the nation
of Japan’s erstwhile colonialism and wartime atrocities. For example,
together with the Japanese Red Cross, as well as Buddhist and labour
organizations, the Association for Japan-China Friendship (Nit-Chu
–
yu
–
ko
–
kyo
–
kai), began in 1953 to return the remains of approximately
3,000 forced labourers to China. Formed in 1950 and representing a
spectrum of ethnicities and political viewpoints, this association also
sponsored memorial services for Chinese war victims.
21
In 1957, a group
of former Japanese soldiers who had been held as prisoners of war in
China published their memoirs of atrocities that they had committed
while in China. In this book, titled Three Alls(Sanko
–
), they confessed to
heinous crimes such as arson and murder. These men also founded an
organization called the Group of Returnees from China (Chu
–
goku
kikansha renrakukai) in order to enlighten the public regarding the
destruction inﬂicted by Imperial Japan.
22
In 1965, as Japan and South Korea discussed the possibility of normal-
izing their relations, Park Kyong-shik, a scholar of the modern history of
Korea, published Records of Forced Korean Migrants (Cho
–
senjin kyo
–
sei renko
–
no kiroku). In this book, Park opposed normalization and, through an
extensive examination of his subject, reminded Japanese readers of the
sufferings of wartime Korean slave labourers in the Japanese Empire.
23
In
general, however, these voices of solemn commemoration did little to
enrich either the popular understanding or scholarly study of the Nanjing
Massacre. It was not until 1971 that millions of Japanese were forced to
confront the memory of the atrocities in Nanjing.
The year 1971 was indeed a turning point in the historiography of the
Nanjing Massacre. In August 1971, ‘Travels in China’ (Chu
–
goku no
tabi), a serialized article appeared in the evening edition of the Asahi
For the Nation or for the People? 21
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newspaper. The author, Honda Katsuichi, visited the sites of wartime
Japanese atrocities in China, including Nanjing. He interviewed sur-
vivors who were still haunted by painful memories of the past and
vividly presented these personally agonizing recollections to the news-
paper’s nearly four million subscribers.
24
Honda reconstructed the his-
tory of the Nanjing Massacre solely from the memories of the survivors
such as Jiang Genfu, who, at the age of nine, had watched as Japanese
soldiers killed his parents and siblings.
25
The narratives collected by
Honda in no way spared the emotions of his readers; his interviewees
spoke tearfully of episodes that can only be described as heartbreaking.
Whereas Honda’s article prompted refutations from critics who dis-
agreed such as Yamamoto Shichihei, it succeeded in reminding many
Japanese of the Nanjing Massacre and its consequences. Honda often
bluntly responded in the media to critics who tried to discredit his
reportage, while Honda’s critics were every bit as blunt in their rejoin-
ders.
26
Such open hostile exchanges of words incited an unprecedented
number of participants to weigh in on the dispute over Nanjing, and
both popular journal accounts and scholarly monographs increased sub-
stantially in number in the 1970s. Honda himself published two books
on Nanjing, and Hora Tomio, a history professor at Waseda University,
published two monographs on the atrocities in Nanjing.
27
Moreover, the
dispute encouraged mindful schoolteachers to shift the focus of their
instruction, devoting more attention to Japanese victimizations of other
nations than to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
28
Not only journalists, scholars and teachers, but also well-known artists
committed themselves to publicizing the Nanjing Massacre. In 1975,
Maruki Toshi and Iri, married artists who had previously produced paint-
ings relating primarily to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completed a work
titled ‘The Rape of Nanking’. Referring to photographs of Japanese atroc-
ities in China that had recently become widely available as a result of the
dispute over Nanjing, the Marukis reconstructed the images of horror in
Nanjing. In the case of the Marukis, however, the initial decision to paint
Nanjing came not from reading Honda’s serial article, but from their
tour of the United States in 1970, which they undertook in support of a
travelling eight-city exhibit of their Hiroshima and Nagasaki canvases.
Their travels through the United States were eye-opening to them.
Although they encountered hostile Americans who saw them as perpe-
trators responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack, they met other Americans
who enthusiastically supported the exhibitions, despite criticism or con-
frontation from their fellow citizens. One day, they experienced a reve-
lation as an American professor who supported their work asked them
how they would feel if a Chinese painter asked them to assist in an exhi-
bition portraying the Nanjing Massacre. The two artists were shaken;
they realized that they knew little about the history of the Nanjing
Massacre. After returning from the United States, they thus began to
collect historical materials to enable them to paint the atrocities of
22 Memory in Politics and International Relations
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Nanjing.
29
The developing literature on Nanjing facilitated the comple-
tion of their painting.
The 1970s witnessed a renaissance in public interest regarding the
history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre—indeed, the greatest
expression of interest in the subject since the end of the occupation
period. Yet there was much more to come. In the 1980s, the incorpora-
tion of the Nanjing Massacre into Japanese national history was further
accelerated by a controversy over history textbooks that provoked both
national and international protests.
THE TEXTBOOK CONTROVERSY AND ITS AFTERMATH
In June 1982, newspapers in Japan reported that the Ministry of
Education had tightened its screening standard and was attempting to
tone down the discussion of Japanese wartime atrocities and colonialism
in history textbooks. The report immediately attracted international
attention, and the Japanese government soon received pointed ofﬁcial
protests from its counterparts such as China and South Korea.
30
In order
to ease diplomatic tension, the Japanese government issued an ofﬁcial
announcement, stressing that the government and its citizens were pro-
foundly aware that the Japanese state had brought tremendous suffering
on peoples in Asia. The Japanese government promised to assume
responsibility for rectifying textbook descriptions of Imperial Japan.
31
Although the ofﬁcial statement brought international governmental
protests to an end, the textbook controversy inspired concerned indi-
viduals to educate the public about the devastations and destructions
inﬂicted by the Japanese state, such as the atrocities in Nanjing. For
example, Ienaga Saburo
–
, who had long sought to shed more light upon
the misdeeds of the Japanese military, ﬁled his third lawsuit against the
government in 1984, condemning the Ministry of Education for its
allegedly unconstitutional intervention in the descriptions of historical
facts, including the Nanjing Massacre. Also in 1984, disturbed by the
government’s attempt to whitewash Japanese wartime atrocities, histo-
rians, lawyers and journalists founded the Research Committee on the
Nanjing Incident (Nankin jiken cho
–
sa kenkyu
–
kai). From the start, mem-
bers of the committee have enthusiastically published a steady stream
of monographs and journal articles. To this day, they remain highly
active. Without doubt, the Research Committee laid the foundation for
contemporary studies of Nanjing. Collectively, they have enriched the
history and memory of the Nanjing Atrocities in Japan.
32
By the 1990s, thanks to the vigorous efforts of the members of the com-
mittee, the study of the Nanjing Massacre had ﬂourished, and countless
readers had discovered the facts of Nanjing from the viewpoints of per-
petrators, victims and witnesses.
33
This academic trend was reﬂected in
museum displays and history textbooks. The Osaka International Peace
Centre, which opened in 1991, the Kyoto Museum for World Peace,
For the Nation or for the People? 23
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Ritsumeikan University, opened in 1992, the Kawasaki Peace Museum,
opened in 1992, the Peace Museum of Saitama, opened in 1993, the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, renovated and reopened in 1994,
the Oka Masaharu Memorial Nagasaki Peace Museum, opened in 1995,
and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, renovated and reopened in
1996, all included some form of description of the Nanjing Massacre.
34
Similarly, by the early 1990s, all history textbooks used in junior high
schools and high schools discussed the atrocities in Nanjing, though the
degree of description varied, depending on the publisher. Whereas the
publisher Yamakawa Shuppan’s 1989 high school history text merely
offered a footnote to the effect that the Japanese military killed many
Chinese, including civilians, during the occupation of Nanjing, Jikkyo
–
Shuppan’s 1990 high school history textbook stated in the main text,
‘the Japanese military slaughtered more than 100,000 [ju
–
su
–
man] Chinese
both inside and outside the city of Nanjing in one month after the occu-
pation’. The 1990 edition of Sanseido
–
’s textbook even referred to the
Chinese ofﬁcial estimate of 300,000 deaths in a footnote, highlighting
the ferocity of the atrocities in Nanjing.
35
As to junior high school
textbooks, by 1997, six out of seven textbooks elected not to use the
vague term ‘many’ (tasu
–
) and included speciﬁc estimates of the atrocities,
ranging from 100,000 to 300,000.
36
By the end of 1990s, the Nanjing Massacre had become one of the
best-known symbols of Japanese wartime atrocities among the Japanese
populace. Nevertheless, this did not mean that the entire Japanese
nation agreed either upon the signiﬁcance of Nanjing or even on exactly
what happened there. As accounts that underscored horrors of Nanjing
increased, the historiography of Nanjing written by revisionist authors
also increased signiﬁcantly. Both the condemnations of Japanese atroci-
ties in Nanjing and attempts to answer those condemnations must be
understood within a complex conceptual framework. It must always
be remembered that, within Japan, ‘Nanjing’ has never had a single,
unambiguous meaning.
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF REVISIONIST ACCOUNTS
Although accounts that questioned the authenticity of the Nanjing
Massacre have existed since the late 1940s, the history of the Nanjing
Massacre introduced to Japan during the American occupation period
went largely unchallenged until Honda Katsuichi’s ‘Travels in China’
appeared in the Asahi. Disturbed by Honda’s serial article, revisionist
critics often accused Honda of using testimonies of the survivors with-
out critical scrutiny. They maintained that Honda was one-sided and
wilfully disregarded accounts of the Japanese veterans who participated
in the Battle of Nanjing. Honda refuted his critics with vigour, and so
did his opponents. It was in this exchange that the dispute over Nanjing
in the mass media originated.
37
24 Memory in Politics and International Relations
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Yet it was only after the 1982 textbook controversy that publications
of revisionist accounts of the Nanjing Massacre dramatically acceler-
ated. Revisionists excoriated the Japanese government for meekly yield-
ing to the demands of the foreign governments, and the controversy
compelled them to publicize their viewpoints. Some revisionists such as
Tanaka Masaaki, a critic, sued the Ministry of Education in 1984 for
erroneously describing the Nanjing Massacre and demanded that the
term ‘Nanjing Massacre’ be deleted from the textbooks.
38
To a number of revisionists, the opening of the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial Hall in Nanjing in 1985 was another notoriously offensive
event. The Memorial Hall includes an inscription afﬁrming the Chinese
ofﬁcial estimate of 300,000 deaths, and, to many revisionists, this ﬁgure
was intolerable. In the 1980s alone, two frustrated ministers openly
denied the Nanjing Massacre, and they were forced to resign from the
cabinet because of their denials. Although their political careers were
ruined, neither regretted what they had said, nor did they withdraw
their controversial statements.
39
In the 1980s and the 1990s, as the Nanjing Massacre became an icon of
wrongful acts of Imperial Japan, revisionist activities inevitably redou-
bled. Revisionists routinely denied Japanese responsibility for the mas-
sacre or blamed the Chinese communist government for fabricating
historical facts and demonizing Imperial Japan. They courted attention
from the media in order to appeal to the public, and the media seem
to have welcomed their comments as a ready source of provocation and
controversy. In 1996, a cadre of revisionists led by Fujioka Nobukatsu, a
prominent spokesman for revisionism in the 1990s, formed the Japanese
Society for History Textbook Reform, whose mission particularly focuses
on the revisions of textbook descriptions which, in their eyes, deprive the
youth of national pride. In 2000, Fujioka and Higashinakano Osamichi, a
professor at Asia University, established Nihon ‘Nankin’ gakkai (the Japan
Association for ‘Nanjing’ Studies), whose stated objective is to study the
historical truth of the incident known as the ‘Nanjing Massacre’.
40
To
Higashinakano, president of the Association, the Nanjing Massacre is
nothing but a myth, fabricated by wartime Chinese propaganda and the
Tokyo War Crimes Trial during the American occupation of Japan.
41
To many members of such revisionist organizations, killings of the
Chinese combatants were an acceptable procedure of warfare. They
regard estimates of more than 200,000 civilian deaths in Nanjing as
brazen attempts to manipulate public opinion and to undermine the
honour of nation.
42
They ﬁnd it astonishing and unacceptable that six
out of seven 1997 junior high school history textbooks included the
speciﬁc death tolls as a historical fact. Unlike the objectives of members
of the Research Committee on the Nanjing Incident, the main concern
of the revisionists lies narrowly in disputing the estimate of the num-
ber of victims killed in the ‘massacres’. Indeed, it is a grave limitation of
the revisionist approach that its understanding has been so obsessed
For the Nation or for the People? 25
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with statistics. Revisionists seem not to recognize that, even if only ten
thousand people were wrongfully put to death in Nanjing, those deaths
still represent an incalculable and irremediable tragedy for the victims
and their loved ones. By reducing the controversy to a bland debate over
numbers, the revisionists fail to see that they, like the empire of seventy
years ago, are reducing the humanity of thousands to a meaningless
ﬁgure on a printed page.
In the eyes of the revisionists, the history of the Nanjing Massacre
does not exist because they believe that the Japanese troops were not
responsible for the ‘massacre’ of 200,000 Chinese non-combatants dur-
ing the Japanese occupation of Nanjing. They claim that inclusion of
such a mythical event in textbooks is compulsively anti-Japanese and
demonizes the history of the nation.
43
Understandably, their denials are
not limited to the Nanjing Massacre. They also claim that the so-called
comfort women were paid prostitutes and that Imperial Japan fought
the war to liberate Asia from Western colonialism.
44
In short, their ulti-
mate goal is to liberate Japanese history from the alleged ‘leftists’ whom
they regard as hopelessly obsessed with writing an ‘anti-Japanese’ and
‘masochistic’ (jigyaku) history of Japan.
SEEKING THE UPPER HAND: WHICH VERSION OF NANJING
WILL ACHIEVE BROADER ACCEPTANCE?
Today various accounts on Nanjing, including those written by the mem-
bers of the Japan Association for ‘Nanjing’ Studies and the constituents
of the Research Committee on the Nanjing Incident, are widely available
in Japanese society. One may be curious to learn whether the revisionists
are winning or losing the struggle for public acceptance. As no detailed
numerical survey has ever been conducted, my analysis can only offer
speculation. Even so, the ideas, interests and passions involved are too
complicated to permit a simple conclusion. Whereas a number of cabinet
ministers have openly denied the Nanjing Massacre since the 1980s,
both Diet members and local government representatives are generally
reluctant to publicly endorse the revisionist viewpoint. Such a controver-
sial stand would not only jeopardize national or regional relations with
China, but would also set at risk the political career of the speaker. This
reasoning also helps to explain why the New History Textbook, a junior
high school history textbook written by the strongly revisionist Japanese
Society for History Textbook Reform, has rarely been selected for use in
schools since 2002.
45
Though the revisionists continue to struggle for dominance in Japanese
society, those who publicize the horrors of the Nanjing Massacre have not
been fully victorious, either. Whereas most junior high schools in Japan are
not using New History Textbook, which stressed the on-going dispute over
Nanjing rather than the dreadful facts of the atrocities, the other existing
seven textbooks have reacted to New History Textbookby toning down the
26 Memory in Politics and International Relations
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description of the Nanjing Massacre in comparison with their previous
editions. In general, these textbooks retreated from controversy, replacing
numerical death estimates with ambiguous terms such as ‘many’ (tasu
–
).
46
Likewise, in order to avoid challenges from reactionary forces, many pub-
lic museums, such as the Osaka International Peace Centre, are now more
defensive in nature, and contradictory accounts of Nanjing stand side by
side on their library shelves.
Seemingly, neither side is winning an all-out victory in the dispute
over the Nanjing Massacre. Instead, each side has experienced both
gains and losses. Both views have been more easily accessible since the
early 1980s and both have cultivated their own supporters among the
public. Whereas those who acknowledge Japan’s responsibility for its
wartime conduct and colonialism tend to support the narratives written
by the Research Committee on the Nanjing Incident, others who ﬁrmly
believe that Imperial Japan liberated Asia from Western imperialism are
likely to support the publications by the Japan Association for ‘Nanjing’
Studies.
In the Nanjing dispute there will probably be no winner in absolute
terms. In the eyes of many revisionists, the Japanese military did not
‘massacre’ 300,000 Chinese civilians, therefore, they argue, the Nanjing
Massacre was a fabrication and must not be a part of Japanese ofﬁcial
history. Although the members of the Research Committee would agree
that the Japanese military never slaughtered 300,000 civilians in
Nanjing, they believe that the Nanjing Massacre was a historical truth
that should be remembered as the sufferings of the victims were too
dreadful to be dismissed. The differences in interpretation regarding
Nanjing are irreconcilable. Neither side will yield to the other, nor will
either faction be silent so long as each remains committed to writing its
ideal national history.
CONCLUSION
In post-war Japan, ‘progressive intellectuals’ who deeply regretted
Japan’s wartime aggression and destruction have traditionally been the
prevailing voice in the historical academy. However, opponents have
assailed these progressives with cries of ‘leftists’, ‘Marxists’, ‘masochists’,
‘anti-Japanese Japanese’ and other labels that they consider derogatory.
They believe that these progressives are obsessed with negative aspects of
national history and are deterring young Japanese from experiencing
patriotism. After all, they reason, nations need citizens who are willing
to sacriﬁce their lives for the state. In the eyes of progressives, however,
Japan’s wartime nationalism and militarism caused the deaths of mil-
lions of human beings in the Paciﬁc region, including Japanese lives,
and they have passionately studied the war and its impact on the
peoples to prevent the state from repeating the errors of the past. It is no
wonder that the progressives have examined wartime Japanese atrocities
For the Nation or for the People? 27
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and colonialism, such as the Nanjing Massacre, for decades. It is proba-
bly fair to say that Japan today has a far more extensive scholarly litera-
ture on the study of Nanjing than any other country, and peace activists
have amassed a strong arsenal of facts and arguments to defend their
views against revisionist claims.
It is true that the revisionists have their own crowds who believe in
their efforts to extenuate the atrocities in Nanjing, a stance which, by the
way, has elicited reciprocal feelings of ethnocentric nationalism in other
nations, particularly in China. Nevertheless, these revisionists deserve a
partial credit for nationalizing and internationalizing the history and
memory of the Nanjing Massacre. They are, perhaps, the irritant within
the oyster that has produced the metaphorical pearls of progressive
scholarship. Without the revisionists, the study of the Nanjing Massacre
within Japan and elsewhere would not have been as advanced as it is
today. Without them, the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre
would have never become a symbol of Japanese wartime misconduct in
modern world history. However, their denials of Nanjing have justly dis-
turbed many individuals both inside and outside Japan, who too quickly
forget that the revisionist position is the minority view.
Sensationalist denials attract more interest than moderate voices and
patient scholarship. It is therefore perfectly understandable that these
revisionists receive signiﬁcant attention from the media and critics.
Nevertheless, we must all keep in mind that training too much focus on
the revisionist movement obscures the fact that the revisionists are the
challengers who have been trying to rewrite the existing history of the
Nanjing Massacre for more than three decades. More importantly, those
who are unfamiliar with Japanese history may blindly assume that the
revisionists dominate Japanese society and that the nation as a whole is
trying to efface the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre. To
suppose that the revisionists speak for the entire Japanese people is to
do grave disservice to the progressives and their supporters who cer-
tainly deserve credit for facilitating the understanding of Nanjing in
Japan for nearly four decades.
NOTES
1
For a more detailed analysis of the Nanjing Massacre, see my The Making
of the ‘Rape of Nanking’: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United
States(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
2
See, for example, ‘Fuho
–
shageki ni waga gun hangeki’ (Our Army Fights
Back Against Illegal Shootings), Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, 9 July 1937, p. 1;
‘Shinagun mata fuho
–
shageki’ (Chinese Army Commits More Unlawful
Shootings), Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, 20 July 1937, p. 2; ‘Ko
–
gun o jo
–
mon ni irete
totsujo mo
–
sha o abisu, gekisen jitsuni san-jikan’ (After Allowing Imperial
Army inside Wall, [Chinese Army] Suddenly Begins Intense Shooting; Fight
Lasts Three Hours), Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, 27 July 1937, p. 2.
28 Memory in Politics and International Relations
2357_03_Part1 5/10/08 1:11 PM Page 28

3
‘Counted up to Forty; Don’t Remember the Rest of Slaying’, Tokyo Nichi-
nichi Shinbun2 September 1937, reprinted in Kikan Senso
–
Sekinin Kenkyu
–
,
no. 50 (winter 2005), p. 77.
4
Ishiko Jun, Nihon manga-shi (Tokyo: Shakai Shiso
–
sha, 1988), pp. 184–6.
5
Ibid., p. 186.
6
Kaigo Tokiomi, Nihon kyo
–
kasho taikei kindai hen(Tokyo: Ko
–
dansha, 1965),
vol. 16, p. 644; Nihon kyo
–
kasho taikei kindai hen(Tokyo: Ko
–
dansha, 1962),
vol. 20, pp. 232–3.
7
See for example, Kaigo Tokiomi, Nihon kyo
–
kasho taikei kindai hen(Tokyo:
Ko
–
dansha, 1964), vol. 8, pp. 34–5 and his Nihon kyo
–
kasho taikei kindai hen
(Tokyo: Ko
–
dansha, 1962), vol. 3, pp. 298–9.
8
Kaigo, Nihon kyo
–
kasho taikei kindai hen(Tokyo: Ko
–
dansha, 1963), vol. 7,
pp. 709–11; vol. 8, pp. 202–204.
9
Yasukuni jinja, Yasukuni jinja hakunen shi (Tokyo: Hara Shobo
–
, 1983),
vol. 2, pp. 77–8.
10
Yu
–
shu
–
kan, Yu
–
shu
–
kan-shi(Tokyo: Yu
–
shu
–
kan), pp. 477–89.
11
Hora Tomio, Nit-chu
–
senso
–
: Nankin daigyakusatsu jiken shiryo
–
shu
–
(Tokyo:
Aoki Shoten, 1985), vol. 2, pp. 311–13.
12
Kaji Wataru Nihon heishi no hansen undo
–
I(Tokyo: Do
–
seisha, 1962), pp. 79,
83–5.
13
Fujiwara Akira and Himeta Mitsuyoshi, Nit-chu
–
senso
–
-ka Chu
–
goku ni okeru
Nihonjin no hansen katsudo
–
(Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1999).
14
The date in Japan when the attack occurred was 8 December 1941.
15
See, for example, ‘Taiheiyo
–
senso
–
shi’ (The History of the Paciﬁc War),
Asahi Shinbun, 8 December 1945, p. 2, 4; ‘Taiheiyo
–
senso
–
shi: senki no dai
tenkan’ (The History of the Paciﬁc War: The Turning Point of the War),
Asahi Shinbun, 9 December 1945, p. 1; ‘Taiheiyo
–
senso
–
shi: Rengo
–
koku no
tainichi mo
–
ko
–
’ (The History of the Paciﬁc War: Fierce Attack against Japan
by the Allied Forces), Asahi Shinbun, 10 December 1945, p. 2; ‘Taiheiyo
–
senso
–
shi: Hokyu
–
o tatsu’ (The History of the Paciﬁc War: Cutting the
Supply Lines), Asahi Shinbun, 11 December 1945, p. 2; ‘Taiheiyo
–
senso
–
shi:
To
–
jo
–
shusho
–
no botsuraku’ (The History of the Paciﬁc War: The Fall of
Premier To
–
jo
–
), Asahi Shinbun, 12 December 1945, p. 4; ‘Taiheiyo
–
senso
–
shi:
Reite, Sam~ru no sensen’ (The History of the Paciﬁc War: The Battles of
Leyte and Samar), Asahi Shinbun, 13 December 1945, p. 2; ‘Taiheiyo
–
senso
–
shi: Kanpai ni owatta Hito
–
sen’ (The History of the Paciﬁc War: The
Complete Defeat at the Battle of the Philippines), Asahi Shinbun, 14
December 1945, p. 2; ‘Taiheiyo
–
senso
–
shi: Io
–
jima to Okinawa’ (The
History of the Paciﬁc War: Iwo Jima and Okinawa), Asahi Shinbun, 15
December 1945, p. 2; ‘Taiheiyo
–
senso
–
shi: Soren kara mo hijitetsu’ (The
History of the Paciﬁc War: Getting a Snab from the Soviet Union, Too),
Asahi Shinbun, 16 December 1945, p. 2; ‘Taiheiyo
–
senso
–
shi: Tokyo wan jo
–
ni cho
–
in’ (The History of the Paciﬁc War: The Signing Ceremony in Tokyo
Bay), Asahi Shinbun, 17 December 1945, p. 2.
16
Lewis Smythe, War Damage in the Nanking Area (Shanghai: Mercury Press,
1938), p. 8.
For the Nation or for the People? 29
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17
‘Osanago ni mo bo
–
ko
–
; Wuiruson shi Nankin gyakusatsu o bakuro’
(Children Also Brutalized; Dr. Wilson Discloses Nanjing Atrocities), Asahi
Shinbun, 26 July 1946, p. 2; ‘Onna kodomo mo higo
–
no shi; Nankin no
gyakusatsu o bakuro’ (Women and Children Died by Violence; Atrocities
in Nanjing Revealed), Yamanashi nichi nichi Shinbun, 27 July 1946, p. 1.
18
‘Chu
–
gokujin ni shai’ (Gratitude to Chinese People), Yomiuri Shinbun,
31 July 1946, p. 1.
19
Hanaki Sankichi, ‘Nankin jiken’ (The Nanjing Incident), Asahi Shinbun,
8 August 1946, p. 2.
20
John Pritchard, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1981), vol. 20, pp. 49, 608.
21
Nihon Chu
–
goku yu
–
ko
–
kyo
–
kai zenkoku honbu (The Headquarters of the
Japan China Friendship Association), Nit-chu
–
yu
–
ko
–
undo
–
shi(Tokyo:
Seinen Shuppansha, 1980), pp. 62–3, 66n2.
22
Chu
–
goku kikansha renrakukai (The Group of Returnees from China),
Sanko
–
(Tokyo: Ko
–
bunsha). The group still exists today and continues to be
involved in public education.
23
Park Kyong-shik, Cho
–
senjin kyo
–
sei renko
–
no kiroku(Tokyo: Miraisha, 1965).
24
According to an advertisement of the Asahi, the circulation of the evening
edition in November 1970 was 3,979,055. See the Japan Newspaper
Publishers and Editors Association, The Japanese Press 1971, n.p.
25
Honda Katsuichi, ‘Chu
–
goku no tabi’ (Travels in China), Asahi Shinbun ,
evening edition, no. 24 (6 November 1971), p. 2; no 25 (8 November 1971),
p. 2; no. 26 (9 November 1971), p. 2; and no. 31 (16 November 1971), p. 2.
26
See, for example, Isaiah Ben-Dasan (Yamamoto Shichihei), ‘Asahi Shinbun
no “gomen nasai”,’ in Shokun! 4:1 (January 1972), pp. 166–79; Honda
Katsuichi, ‘Izaya Bendasan shi e no ko
–
kaijo
–
,’ in Shokun! 4:2 (February
1972), pp. 208–17; Isaiah Ben-Dasan, ‘Honda Katsuichi sama e no hen-
sho,’ in Shokun! 4:3 (March 1972), pp. 40–60; Honda Katsuichi, ‘Zatsuon
de ijimerareru gawa no me,’ in Shokun! 4:4 (April 1972), pp. 148–76.
27
Honda Katsuichi, Chu
–
goku no tabi(Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1972);
Chu
–
goku no Nihongun(Tokyo: So
–
jusha, 1972). Hora Tomio, Nit-Chu
–
senso
–
shi shiryo
–
shu
–
9: Nankin jiken(Tokyo: Kawade Shobo
–
Shinsha, 1973);
Nankin daigyakusatsu: ‘maboroshi’ ka ko
–
saku hihan(Tokyo: Gendaishi
Shuppankai, 1975).
28
See, for example, Oda Baku, ‘Ju
–
gonen sonso
–
o do
–
oshieruka,’ in Rekishi
Chiri Kyo
–
iku219 (December 1973), pp. 28–33.
29
Kozawa Setsuko, ‘Genbaku no zu’ egakareta kioku, katarareta kaiga (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 2002), pp. 221–4. Maruki Toshi, Onna ekaki no tanjo
–
(Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentâ), pp. 228–35.
30
Tokutake Toshio. Kyo
–
kasho no sengo shi(Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha,
1995), p. 202.
31
‘Seifu kenkai’ (View of the Government), Asahi Shinbun, 27 August 1982,
p. 1.
32
Founding members included Fujiwara Akira (historian), Honda Katsuichi
(journalist), Hora Tomio (historian), Kasahara Tokushi (historian), Ono
30 Memory in Politics and International Relations
2357_03_Part1 5/10/08 1:11 PM Page 30

Kenji (factory worker), Yoshida Yutaka (historian), and Watanabe Harumi
(lawyer). For more details of the Study Group, see Takashi Yoshida (2006),
chapters 7 and 10.
33
For example, see Nankin jiken cho
–
sa kenkyu
–
kai (The Research Committee
on the Nanjing Incident), Nankin jiken shiryo
–
shu
–
(Tokyo: Aoki Shoten,
1992), 2 vols.
34
As to general descriptions of war and peace museums in Japan, see Rekishi
kyo
–
ikusha kyo
–
gikai (Association for History Educators), Heiwa hakubut-
sukan, senso
–
shiryo
–
kan gaido bukku(Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1995).
35
Tawara Yoshifumi, Kyo
–
kasho ko
–
geki no shinso
–
(Tokyo: Gakushu
–
-no-tomo-
sha, 1997), pp. 158–9, 161.
36
Ibid., pp. 170–2.
37
See Yoshida (2006), chapter 4.
38
The Tokyo District Court ruled against Tanaka in May 1987, and the
Supreme Court dismissed the case in December 1989.
39
Takashi Yoshida, ‘Battle Over History: The Nanjing Massacre in Japan,’ in
Joshua Fogel (ed.), The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 92.
40
See Yoshida (2006), chapter 10.
41
See, for example, Higashinakano Osamichi, Nihon ‘Nankin’ gakkai nenpo
–
:
Nankin ‘gyakusatsu’ kenkyu
–
no saizensen Heisei 15 nen ban(Annual Report
of Japan Association of Nanjing Studies: The Forefront of the Studies of
the Nanjing ‘Massacre,’ 2003), pp. 305–308.
42
See, for example, Fujioka Nobukatsu and Nishio Kanji, Kokumin no yudan
(Tokyo: PHP Kenkyu
–
jo, 1996), pp. 209–14. See, also, Yoshida (2006),
chapter 10.
43
Fujioka and Nishio (1996), pp. 1–3.
44
Ibid., pp. 155–62, 194–7. See also the contribution of Ahn Yonson in this
volume (the editors).
45
According to Shuppan ro
–
ren kyo
–
kasho taisaku iinkai (The Textbook
Examination Committee of the Japanese Federation of Publication
Workers), Kyo
–
kasho Repo
–
to 2002, no. 46 (February 2002), the share of the
revisionist textbook was 0.039% of the market. Since spring 2006 the
share has risen to 0.4%. See Uesugi Satoshi, ‘ “Tsukuru-kai” to no tatakai
2005 nen,’ in Senso
–
Sekinin Kenkyu
–
50 (winter 2005), pp. 58–9.
46
Ishiyama Hisao, ‘Chu
–
gaku rekishi kyo
–
kasho wa do
–
kakikaerareta ka,’ in
Kyo
–
kasho Repo
–
to 2002, no. 46, pp. 17–18.
For the Nation or for the People? 31
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3
Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’
and Historical Memory: The
Neo-nationalist Counter-attack
YONSON AHN
INTRODUCTION
A
mong the controversies and conﬂicts over interpreting Japan’s Second
World War history (sometimes referred to as the Asia-Paciﬁc War,
1931–45) is the debate over the issue of ‘comfort women’. Since 1970,
and particularly since the 1990s, numerous studies on the ‘comfort
women’ have sustained remembrance of the issue in Japan, Korea and
across the English-speaking world. This body of literature examined the
involvement of the Japanese state, the role of nationalism, sexual vio-
lence, colonialism and transnational feminism. In response, Japanese neo-
nationalists, known as ‘historical revisionists’ in Japan, since the 1990s
have attempted to erase this issue from public memory. This nation-
alist ‘historical revisionism’ (rekishi sh
u
–
seishugi) ‘proposes to replace the
“masochistic” view of “leftist” historians (jigyaku shikan) by a “bright” his-
torical narrative as the basis for a “healthy nationalism” or patriotism’.
1
Japan’s neo-nationalists set out explicitly to ‘preserve the national essence
(kokutai)’, for example, ‘to honour the special (dokutoku) values, traditions
and the culture of their country’.
2
Authors working within this framework
include Fujioka Nobukatsu,
3
Watanabe Sho
–
ichi,
4
Nishio Kanji,
5
Sakamoto
Takao,
6
Nakamura Akira,
7
Hosaka Masayasu,
8
Nishioka Tsutomu,
9
Hata
Ikuhiko,
10
Kusaka Kimihito,
11
Okazaki Hisahiko and cartoonist Kobayashi
Yoshinori.
12
These authors have challenged the literature on the ‘comfort
women’ with respect to the following issues:
1. the terminology of the ‘comfort women’
2. state involvement in the ‘comfort station’ project
2357_03_Part1 5/10/08 1:11 PM Page 32

3. credibility of narratives of former ‘comfort women’
4. reference to ‘comfort women’ in school textbooks
5. identifying the ‘comfort women’ as prostitutes
6. universality of the existence of military brothels
7. ‘presentism’.
This chapter investigates the themes raised in recent works of ‘historical
revisionism’ and analyses the representation of ‘comfort women’ in
neo-nationalist discourse in Japan. In doing so, it also examines the way
Japanese neo-nationalists represent the ‘comfort women’ in their recon-
struction of the memory of the Asia-Paciﬁc War.
TERMINOLOGY OF ‘COMFORT WOMEN’
To begin, the very term ‘comfort women’ (ianfu) is questioned by
authors such as Fujioka Nobukatsu and Watanabe Sho
–
ichi.
13
The full
expression, ju
–
gun ianfu, literally means ‘comfort women who followed
the military.’ Fujioka argues that ju
–
gunis a reference to gunzoku, that is,
civilians who had ofﬁcial status in the military.
14
Fujioka and Watanabe
claim that the women had no such ofﬁcial status in the military but
were ‘paid prostitutes’ taken by trafﬁckers who served ‘client soldiers’.
15
The neo-nationalists as a group seek to distance the state and the mili-
tary from the ‘comfort women’ by insisting that they had no ofﬁcial sta-
tus in the military, a question to which we return below. The heart of
the problem, however, lies not only with the inappropriate use of the
term ju
–
gun, but also ianfu which means ‘comfort women’, since the term
ianfudescribes the women’s experience in a euphemistic way. Yet, the
improper use of the term ianfuhas been conveniently ignored by the
neo-nationalists.
Some mainstream liberal activists and scholars who have worked on,
or written about, this issue also reject the term ju
–
gun ianfubecause of the
euphemism in the term ianfu, ‘comfort women’. They prefer to refer to
the women as ‘sex slaves’ (seidorei), based on the slavelike conditions
(such as detention, conﬁnement and lack of autonomy) under which
the women were forced into sexual servitude. For example, a report
from the United Nations Human Rights Committee by Radhika
Coomaraswamy in February 1996 described the ‘comfort women’ as ‘sex
slaves’.
16
I use the term ‘comfort women’ here in order to record the
euphemistic and subtle implications of the term as well as to address the
international debate which has principally been conducted on the basis
of the term.
In Korea, the term cho˘ngsindae
17
—the Women’s Volunteer Labour
Corps, teishintaiin Japanese—has generally been used to frame the
experience of the ‘comfort women’. Cho˘ngsindaewere mobilized osten-
sibly to work in various sectors to support the war. This mobilization
was conducted on the basis of Imperial Japan’s Manpower Mobilization
Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’ and Historical Memory 33
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Act, promulgated in 1939. A further ordinance, the Women’s Volunteer
Labour Corps Act (Yo˘ja cho˘ngsindae ryo˘ng) was promulgated in August
1944. Women between the ages of fourteen and forty-ﬁve were required
to participate in the ‘volunteer’ corps for a period of one to two years.
18
Accounts of the former ‘comfort women’ and a report by the Korean
Ministry of Foreign Affairs reveal that female members of the corps were
sometimes transferred to provide sexual ‘services’ as ‘comfort women’
to soldiers.
19
In the case of Kim U˘n-jin and Kang To˘k-kyo˘ng, even though
they were ﬁrst recruited in the name of the voluntary corps through
their schools, they were later sent to ‘comfort stations’ instead of doing
ordinary physical labour.
20
Thus, the general term cho˘ngsindae tends to
obscure the fact that some women were mobilized to provide sexual
services while others worked in diverse industrial and service jobs.
The neo-nationalists’ disapproval of the term ju
–
gun ianfucentres on the
denial of the fact that the Japanese state and military were involved in the
‘comfort station’ project. They point out that if the women were civilian
personnel with ofﬁcial status in the military like ju
–
gun kangofu, who were
wartime nurses on the military payroll, this implicates the military or the
state in running the ‘comfort facilities’ in the Japanese Imperial Army and
Navy. At the heart of the question of correct terminology is the role of the
state and the military in the ‘comfort women’ project.
STATE INVOLVEMENT IN THE ‘COMFORT STATION’ PROJECT
The state and military involvement in running the ‘comfort facilities’ in
the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy and the use of force in the pro-
curement procedure of ‘comfort women’ are central to the denial dis-
course of neo-nationalist works. Fujioka, for example, insists that proof
of force in procurement requires military or government archival evi-
dence.
21
The testimonies of the former ‘comfort women’ and those who
witnessed or were involved in the ‘comfort women’ system in fact pro-
vide abundant evidence to document the fact that the military and gov-
ernment authorities were heavily involved in the procurement—and, in
particular, in the coercive procurement—of women, and in the estab-
lishment and management of ‘comfort stations’.
22
There were basically
two avenues of recruitment of the women—one was through military or
local authorities, the other was through trafﬁckers.
23
Both routes were
more or less controlled and supervised by agents of the Japanese state.
While the recruitment was carried out by civil agencies in many cases,
the Japanese Imperial Army screened and selected the agencies.
24
My
own interviews with former ‘comfort women’ include instances of
police or military police escorting the recruited girls, and the use of mili-
tary equipment and accommodation, for example, trains, naval ships
or military trucks controlled by the military, both within Korea and
internationally.
25
Many of the women as well as army veterans have
testiﬁed to the involvement of civilian or military police in recruitment
34 Memory in Politics and International Relations
2357_03_Part1 5/10/08 1:11 PM Page 34

and transportation.
26
But these narrative materials are not considered
credible evidence by neo-nationalist academics and intellectuals. They
insist that the absence of ofﬁcial documents to verify the narratives is
proof that no state force was used in procuring the women. This enables
them to claim that the women were paid prostitutes who ‘volunteered’
themselves into the business since, they claim, there was no forced pro-
curement. Fujioka and Kusaka claim that if there was forcible recruit-
ment, ofﬁcial documents in support of this should exist.
27
In fact, due
to the scarcity of ofﬁcial records, discussion of coercion relies mainly on
the oral narratives of the former ‘comfort women’. But this lack of doc-
umentary evidence should not be a reason to discredit oral testimonies.
One can be sceptical whether there are any ofﬁcial documents available
by the Japanese state or military on forces used in the procurement pro-
cedure of the women.
Despite the scarcity of ofﬁcial records on the issue, Yoshimi Yoshiaki,
a Japanese historian, has retrieved and published Japanese archive mate-
rial on the direct role of the Japanese military in establishing and main-
taining a huge network of ‘comfort stations’, for example in the transport
of the women to ‘comfort stations’, granting permission to open the facil-
ities, equipping the facilities and drawing up regulations for the ‘comfort
stations’ that set the hours of operation and fees and stipulated such
matters as precautions to be taken in the use of the facilities.
28
It should
be pointed out that the employment of military transportation needed
the sanctioning of the military headquarters, because civilians were not
allowed on board naval ships. All civilians needed an ofﬁcial pass to leave
the country and travel abroad.
29
Furthermore, when the women were
allocated to each unit, their names were written on papers under the titles
of ‘distribution of supplies’ and ‘receipt of supplies’ for the forces.
30
The
contribution of Yoshimi’s research has been to establish unequivocally
the involvement of the Japanese military, from the recruitment of the
women to the setting up and running of the ‘comfort stations’, using
ofﬁcial military documents. His research has shown a systematic involve-
ment by the military and the state both in the process of recruitment
and transportation of the ‘comfort women’ and running the ‘comfort
facilities’.
As an excuse, neo-nationalists like Hata and Fujioka depict the ‘com-
fort stations’ as akin to modern-day restaurants housed within Japan’s
Ministry of Education building: visited by Ministry personnel but not
operated by the Ministry.
31
In this example, Fujioka points out that the
Ministry merely provides water and electricity, and restaurant employ-
ees are not Ministry personnel. In the same way, Fujioka alleges: ‘The
military at the front during the war did not run “comfort stations” but
was just involved in transport and protection for the women given the
extraordinary wartime situation.’
32
His rationalization of the military’s
involvement leads even further to a rhetoric of protection of the women
in which this involvement is legitimized.
Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’ and Historical Memory 35
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Another problem with the neo-nationalist assertion is their narrow deﬁ-
nition of force/coercion—one limited to the application of physical force,
such as abduction or slave hunting. As deﬁned in the Protocol to Prevent,
Suppress and Punish Trafﬁcking in Persons, Especially Women and Children
by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, force/coercion encom-
passes ‘the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction,
of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulner
ability or of the giving or receiving of payments or beneﬁts to achieve
the consent of a person having control over another person, for the pur-
pose of exploitation’.
33
These various forms of coercion—including physi-
cal force, mental or psychological coercion, and abuse of authority—were
clearly involved both in the procurement procedure and in the everyday
life of the ‘comfort women’. For example, testimony of former ‘comfort
women’ reveals that daughters were sometimes blackmailed into offering
themselves to the stations in order to save their fathers and brothers from
being conscripted into the Japanese army or from having to work in the
coal mines and other forms of forced labour in Manchuria or Japan.
34
Daughters from families who were involved in the Korean independence
movement were often targeted as ‘comfort women’.
35
The use of mental
coercion, deception and abuse of power can be routinely witnessed from
the narratives of ‘comfort women.’
More important, former ‘comfort women’ report the presence of phys-
ical and psychological coercion not only in the recruitment but also
in their day-to-day experiences in the ‘comfort stations’. After the crisis
of sexual initiation, which usually took the form of rape by military
personnel, being forced to ‘serve’ the soldiers became an on-going daily
routine of the women. In most cases, they were conﬁned in the ‘comfort
stations’ and under surveillance. Even though they were allowed to go
out of the station in some cases, when the station was housed on or very
near battleﬁelds, it might have been more dangerous outside. Moreover,
they were not able to access help or transportation to escape mainly
because of a language barrier between them and local people when
they were taken abroad, which occurred frequently.
36
They were isolated
physically and socially. Despite this overwhelming narrative evidence,
neo-nationalists do not credit the testimony of ‘comfort women’ on
coercion as valid evidence, and they claim that no documentary source
shows the role of the state or military in coercive practices in procure-
ment. The issue of coercion inherent in the ‘comfort women’ project
itself, not only in the procurement process but also more intensively and
constantly, in everyday life in ‘comfort stations’, is conveniently ignored
by the neo-nationalist groups.
THE VALIDITY OF NARRATIVES OF THE ‘COMFORT WOMEN’
Japan’s neo-nationalists question the validity of the narratives of former
‘comfort women’. If the narrative evidence is not corroborated by ofﬁcial
36 Memory in Politics and International Relations
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written documentation, it is discounted. Minute details of the women’s
accounts of their experiences six or seven decades earlier are checked for
factual accuracy, and any errors that are found are presented as proof of
the unreliability of the testimony. Ofﬁcial state documents are deemed
as the only legitimate historical source, that is, they engage in ‘docu-
mentary fetishism’, to use Gregor McLennan’s term.
37
The state evi-
dence is held to be uniquely reliable and valid while that of the victims
is written off. Ofﬁcial state documents are deemed as the most legiti-
mate historical source by the neo-nationalist intellectuals; yet, interest-
ingly, narrative sources are selectively introduced as evidence. Some of
the testimonies by former Japanese government ofﬁcers that deny the
responsibility of the state for the ‘comfort women’ system are presented
as crucial evidence, for example, in Nakamura’s work.
38
Yet, no credence
has been given to the women’s accounts of the events. It appears that
checking the reliability of the testimonies of the women with docu-
ments is stressed merely to discredit, rather than to weigh and assess,
their evidence.
Another contradiction can be observed in the notion of ‘history as
storytelling’ by neo-nationalist academics like the late Sakamoto Takao,
Nishio Kanji and Fujioka Nobukatsu. Sakamoto Takao viewed history
as a story that is derived from a plot. He ‘employs the discourse of
a national history that is not necessarily based on veriﬁed facts from
studies of history, but one in which facts are simply “woven into the
story” in order to enhance its reality’.
39
Fujioka also implies that any
kind of story, including ﬁctive stories, can be constructed as history.
40
It
seems that congruence between ‘scientiﬁc’ history and myth, ritual and
memory is acknowledged. This echoes the American philosopher of his-
tory Hayden White’s argument about the ﬁctive character of historical
reconstructions.
41
Neo-nationalist historians such as Sakamoto, Nishio,
and Fujioka appear to abandon the empiricist or positivistic methodol-
ogy to historical inquiry based on veriﬁable facts and then accede the
historian’s emplotment of historical events in historical investigation.
They recognize that historians are implicated in the ﬁctive constitution
of the past as history. But in contrast to the neo-nationalists’ assumption
about history writing as construction, contradictorily, when they deal
with issues such as ‘comfort women’ they strictly return to the naïve
historical positivist’s quest for a ‘scientiﬁc’ approach to the past that can
be objectively veriﬁed with documents. It is an ironic inconsistency:
they deal with the issue of ‘comfort women’ applying strict empiricist
or positivistic methodology to ﬁnding historical ‘facts’ but nonetheless
attempt to construct national history by blurring the boundary between
‘fact’ and ‘ﬁction’ or myth. Yoshiko Nozaki highlights the contradiction
in neo-nationalist methodology: ‘The vocabulary they used may have
been borrowed from recent postmodern literature, but it paradoxically
serves modernist ends, especially the construction of a national unity by
(re)instituting national history.’
42
In order to serve and reify national
Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’ and Historical Memory 37
2357_03_Part1 5/10/08 1:11 PM Page 37

Other documents randomly have
different content

Benjamin, 56
Berachah, 88, 90
Berea, 122
Besor, 31
Bethabara, 104
Bethany, 84, 108, 111
Beth-barah, 62, 63
Bethel, 33, 35, 56, 62, 63, 83
Beth-hoglah, 35
Beth-horon, 52, 57, 85
Bethlehem, 56, 57, 62, 84, 103, 104
Beth-nimrah, 56
Beth-rehob, 57
Bethsaida, 106
Beth-shean, 57, 62, 63, 102
Beth-shemesh, 57, 59, 89, 90
Bezek, 53, 61, 63, 65
Bezer, 55, 59
Bezetha, 74
Bithynia, 117
Cæsarea, 113
Cæsarea Philippi, 107
Camon, 62
Cana, 57, 104
Canaan, 26, 29
Canaanite, 62
Canaanites, 38
Canatha, 102
Capernaum, 104
Caphtorim, 25
Capitolias, 102
Cappadocia, 118
Carchemish, 90
Caria, 118
Carmel, 56

Casluhim, 25
Cenchrea, 123
Chaldean, 21
Cherith, 31
Chios, 127
Chittim, 25
Cilicia, 93, 118
Colosse, 131
Coos, 127
Corinth, 123
Crete, 38, 128
Cush, 25
Cyprus, 118
Daberath, 57
Dalmanutha, 107
Damascus, 70, 71, 102, 113
Dan, 33, 54, 57, 59, 61
Danite, 63
Debir, 53, 56, 61, 63
Decapolis, 101, 107
Dedan, 25
Derbe, 119
Dibon, 55
Dion, 102
Dodanim, 25
Dor, 57
Dothan, 57
Ebal, 32
Ebenezer, 63
Edom, 45, 70, 71, 87
Edomites, 40
Edomite War, 65
Edrei, 51, 54, 56
Egypt, 33, 41, 93, 103

Egypt, River of, 29, 43
Ekron, 63
Elah, 66
Elah, Valley of, 84
Elam, 26
Elim, 46
Elishah, 25
Emim, 38
Emmaus, 84, 111
Endor, 67
En-gannim, 57, 108
En-gedi, 33, 56, 66
Enon, 31
Ephes-dammim, 66
Ephesus, 125
Ephraim, 57, 84, 108
Ephraim, The Wood of, 71
Ephrath, 35
Erech, 91
Esdraelon, Plain of, 32
Eshtaol, 57
Etham, 46
Etham, Wilderness of, 43
Fair Havens, 128
Farah, 31
Gad, 55
Gadara, 56, 102
Gadarenes, Country of the, 106
Galatia, 118
Galilee, 101
Gath, 63, 66, 69, 71, 88, 90
Gath-hepher, 57
Gaulanitis, 101
Gaza, 63

Geba, 57, 62, 65
Gehenna, 74
Gerar, 34, 56
Gerasa, 102
Gerizim, 32
Geshur, 70
Gether, 26
Gibeah, 56, 61, 63, 65, 66, 83
Gibeon, 52, 56, 71, 85
Gihon, 74
Gilead, 51
Gilgal, 52, 56, 63, 65
Girgashites, 39
Golan, 56, 59
Gomer, 23
Gomorrah, 33, 34, 38
Goshen, 41
Hadad-rimmon, 63
Ham, 37
Hamathites, 40
Haphraim, 57
Haran, 33, 35
Hareth, 66
Harosheth, 62, 63
Hauran, 32
Havilah, 25
Hazerim, 38
Hazeroth, 46
Hazezon-tamar, 33
Hazor, 53, 54, 57, 62
Hebron, 33, 38, 56, 59, 61, 63, 67, 84
Helam, 70, 71
Heliopolis, 42
Heshbon, 54, 55
Hieromax, 31

Hill of Evil Counsel, 74
Hinnom, Valley of, 73
Hippos, 102
Hittites, 39
Hivites, 39, 40
Hobah, 33
Horim, 38
Hormah, 56
Hul, 26
Iconium, 119
Iturea, 101
Jabbok, 31
Jabesh-gilead, 56, 65
Jahaz, 54
Japheth, 23
Jarmuth, 57
Javan, 25
Jazer, 56
Jebel Jermuk, 29
Jebel Mukhmeel, 32
Jebus, 63, 69
Jebusites, 39
Jericho, 54, 56, 61, 63, 109
Jerusalem, 56, 69, 71, 73, 90
Jeshimon, 56, 84
Joppa, 113, 114
Jordan, Fords of, 62
Jordan, Plain of, 32
Judæa, 101
Judah, 56
Kadesh-barnea, 46, 47
Karkor, 62, 63
Kedemoth, 55

Kedesh, 57, 59
Kedron, Valley of the, 73
Keilah, 66
Kenath, 56
Kenites, 40
Kibroth-hattaavah, 46
Kingdom of Israel, 87
Kingdom of Judah, 87
Kir-haraseth, 88, 90
Kiriathaim, 55
Kirjath-jearim, 54, 56, 63, 85
Kirjath-sepher, 38, 53
Kishon, 31, 62
Kittim, 25
Kurûn Hattin, 32
Laish, 33, 54, 57, 61, 63
Laodicea, 134
Lehabim, 25
Lehi, 63
Leontes, 31
Leshem, 54
Levi, 59
Libnah, 56
Little Hermon, 32
Lubim, 25
Lud, 26
Ludim, 25
Lycaonia, 118
Lycia, 118
Lydda, 114, 118
Lydia, 93, 118
Lystra, 119
Maachah, 70
Macedonia, 122

Madai, 25
Magog, 23
Mahanaim, 35, 56, 70
Manasseh, 56, 57
Maon, 56, 66
Marah, 46
Mareshah, 89
Mash, 26
Medeba, 55, 70, 71
Media, 93
Megiddo, 57, 63, 90
Melita, 128
Memphis, 42
Meshech, 25, 26
Michmash, 56, 65, 83
Midian, 51
Midianite, 62
Miletus, 127
Minnith, 62
Mitylene, 127
Mizpah, 35
Mizpeh, 56, 63, 83
Mizpeh of Gilead, 62
Mizpeh of Moab, 66
Mizraim, 25
Moab, 70, 87
Moab, Fords of, 62,, 63
Moabite, 61
Moabites, 39, 61
Moabite War, 65
Moreh, Hill of, 32, 57, 62, 63
Moriah, 34
Mount Carmel, 32
Mount Ephraim, 29
Mount Gilboa, 32, 62, 67
Mount Gilead, 32

Mount Hebron, 32
Mount Hermon, 32
Mount Hor, 45, 47, 49
Mount Lebanon, 32
Mount Moriah, 74
Mount Nebo, 32, 55
Mount of Offense, 74
Mount of Olives, 74
Mount Pisgah, 32
Mount Seir, 45
Mount Tabor, 32, 62, 63
Mount Zion, 32, 74
Myra, 128
Mysia, 118
Nain, 57, 106
Naphtali, 57
Naphtuhim, 25
Nazareth, 57, 103, 104
Negeb, 32
Nicopolis, 131
Nimrod, 25
Nimrud, 91
Nile, 41
Nob, 66, 83
Ophrah, 62
Palestine, 29
Pamphylia, 118
Paphlagonia, 117
Paphos, 118
Paran, Wilderness of, 43
Patara, 127
Pathrusim, 25
Patmos, 133

Pella, 102
Pelusium, 42
Peniel, 35
Penuel, 56, 62
Peræa, 101, 108
Perga, 119
Pergamos, 133
Perizzites, 39
Persian Empire, 93
Philadelphia, 102, 134
Philippi, 122
Philistia, 32
Philistine, 62
Philistines, 38
Phœnicia, 32, 107
Phrygia, 118
Phut, 26
Pirathon, 62
Pisidia, 118
Pontus, 117
Ptolemais, 127
Puteoli, 128
Raamah, 25
Rabbah, 70, 71
Rabbath Ammon, 55
Rachel's Tomb, 84
Ramah, 63, 65, 66, 83, 85
Rameses, 42, 46
Ramoth-gilead, 56, 59, 88, 90
Raphana, 102
Rehob, 70
Rehoboth, 34
Rephaim, 37, 69
Rephaim, Plain of, 84
Reuben, 55

Rhegium, 128
Rhodes, 127
Rimmon, 84
Riphath, 23
Rodanim, 25
Rome, 129
Roman Empire, 97
Sabtah, 25
Sabtechah, 25
Salamis, 118
Samaria, 57, 87, 89, 90, 101, 113
Samos, 127
Sardis, 134
Scopus, 74
Scythopolis, 102
Seba, 25
Seleucia, 118
Shalem, 35
Shalisha, 65
Shamir, 62
Sharon, 32
Sheba, 25
Shechem, 33, 52, 57, 59, 62, 63
Shefelah, The, 29
Shiloh, 57
Shochoh, 66
Shunem, 57
Shur, Wilderness of, 43
Simeon, 56
Sin, Wilderness of, 43
Sinaitic Mountains, 43
Sinites, 40
Smyrna, 133
Sodom, 33, 34, 38
Succoth, 35, 46, 56, 62

Sychar, 104
Syracuse, 128
Syria, 87
Taanach, 57, 63
Tabbath, 62
Tarshish, 25
Tarsus, 114
Tekoa, 70
Telaim, 65
Tetrarchy, 102
Thebes, 42
Thebez, 62, 63
Thessalonica, 122
Thyatira, 134
Timnath, 57, 63
Tiras, 25
Tob, 62, 70
Togarmah, 23
Tophet, 74
Trachonitis, 101
Troas, 121
Trogyllium, 127
Tubal, 25
Tyre, 127
Tyropœon, Valley of the, 73
Ur, 33, 91
Uz, 26
Viri Galilæi, 74
Wilderness, 104
Wilderness of the Wandering, 42
Zair, 88, 90

Zamzummim, 37
Zeboim, 38
Zebulon, 57
Zemaraim, 88, 89
Zephath, 61, 63
Zidon, 128
Zidonians, 38
Ziklag, 56, 66
Zin, Wilderness of, 43
Ziph, 66
Zoar, 38
Zobah, 65, 70, 71
Zorah, 57, 63
Zuph, 65
Zuzim, 37
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
To prevent them being split over two lines all
spaces in B. C. and A. D. were removed except in
the timeline.
The remaining corrections made are listed below
and also indicated by dotted lines under the
corrections. Scroll the mouse over the word and the
original text will appear.
Page xi, "Aske" changed to "Aska" (Mosque El
Aska)

Page 14, XII changed to XVII (B.C., Dynasties
XVII. to XXVII)
Page 14, "tentativey" changed to "tentatively"
(are given tentatively)
Page 15, "Shalmameser" changed to
"Shalmaneser" (860-825—Shalmaneser II)
Page 31, "plain" changed to "Plain" (watering the
Plain of Esdraelon)
Page 35, "7" changed to "8" (8. Burial of Sarah)
Page 46, "Hawarah" changed to "Hawârah" (Ain
Hawârah)
Page 62, "route" changed to "rout" (the rout that
followed)
Page 75, "Melchizedek" was hyphenated as
"Melchi-zedek" on this page in the original text to
show its similarity to "Adoni-zedek". This was
retained.
Page 78, "Tor" changed to "Tôr" (Jebel Abu Tôr
(Hill of Evil Counsel))
Page 79, "1." added to text. (1. The Birket
Mamilla)
Page 79, "rred" changed to "red" ("red pond")
Page 79, bold text changed to italic to match the
rest of the pattern (5. The spring En-rogel, called)
Page 79, word "the" moved to from before
"most" to after "of" (most of the explorers) Original
read (the most of explorers)

Page 115, "Cæesarea" changed to "Cæsarea" (3.
Cæsarea.)
Page 137, "tables" changed to "tablets" (for the
stone tablets of)
Page 144, "160" changed to "180" (Dead Sea,
180 miles)
Pages 151-154, entries in this index match the
map but not always the text. For example, the text
refers to Beth Jesimoth which the index and map
names as Beth-jeshimoth. It is Dhibân in the text
but Dhiban on the map and the map's index. Names
in the map index were not always in alphabetical
order. This was retained.
Page 157, "Keilah" moved to alphabetical
placement. Originally listed after "Kenites."
Page 157, "Miletus" moved to alphabetical
placement. Originally listed after "Michmash."
Page 157, "Misraim" changed to "Mizraim"
(Mizraim, 25) This entry was also moved to reflect
its corrected spelling.
The original table of contents seems to have
been taken from an earlier edition without the
printers updating the chart section. This only affects
the Chart of Bible History. The rest of the Table of
Contents is identical.

PAGE
CHART OF BIBLE HISTORY
13-16
I. GENERAL PERIODS.

II. SUBDIVISIONS.
III. PERSONS AND RULERS.
IV. EVENTS OF BIBLE HISTORY.
-------------------------------------
Actual text of book contains these headings:
(V. THE HISTORY OF EYGPT)
(VI. THE KINGDOMS OF THE EAST)
(VII. THE ORIENTAL EMPIRES)
(VIII. THE WORLD IN GENERAL)
-------------------------------------
Actual text of table of contents has these
headings instead:
V. BATTLES OF BIBLE HISTORY.
VI. EVENTS OF RELIGIOUS PROGRESS.
VII. THE BOOKS OF THE BIBLE.
VIII. GREAT ORIENTAL EMPIRES.
IX. EVENTS OF SECULAR HISTORY.
--------------------------------------

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The Power Of Memory In Modern Japan Sven Saaler And Wolfgang Schwentker Editors

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