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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
This essay begins with three notable incidents of recent years, which are indicative of contemporary trends in the politics of war memory in Japan. The first is associated with the Abe administration's 2015 passage of the Collective Self Defense Bill: an interpretation of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which allows the Japanese Self Defense Forces to engage in military affairs when an ally of Japan is deemed to be under threat. The second is a part of the controversies on the “comfort women,” the systematic sexual slavery conducted at military brothels, which was implemented and managed by the Japanese military and government during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45). The third concerns a municipal museum dedicated to the local experience of the Asia-Pacific War.
1 Tokyo Asahi shinbun, November 5, 2015; November 13, 2015.
2 Uemura Takashi with Tomomi Yamaguchi, “Labeled the reporter who ”fabricated“ the comfort woman issue: A Rebuttal”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 2, No. 1, January 12, 2015.
3 Akiko Takenaka, “Reactionary Nationalism and Museum Controversies: The Case of ‘Peace Osaka’,” The Public Historian 36.2 (Spring 2014), 75-98; Philip Seaton, “The Nationalist Assault on Japan's Local Peace Museums: The Conversion of Peace Osaka”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 30, No. 2, July 27, 2015.
4 Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015).
5 Laura Hein and Mark Selden eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000).
6 Asahi shinbun, January 11, 1992.
7 The foundation closed on March 31, 2007 but still exists today in the form of a digital museum.
8 Hashimoto Ryūtarō, who succeeded the socialist Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi on January 11, 1996, had—until shortly before he assumed premiership—been the president of the Japan Bereaved Families Association (Nippon Izokukai), the powerful lobbyist group with strong ties to Yasukuni Shrine.
9 From official website.
10 Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine.
11 Kobayashi Yoshinori has authored a number of popular graphic novels that explain key postwar issues such as war responsibility, Yasukuni Shrine and the imperial family. Journalist and commentator Sakurai Yoshiko is a prolific author of texts that promote neo-conservative views of Japan. Hyakuta Naoki is the author of the best-selling novel Eien no zero, which depicts a young man's journey to learn about the military life of his late grandfather who was a tokkō pilot. He is also known for his friendly dialogues with Prime Minister Abe Shinzō.
12 For more recent developments, see, Norma Field and Tomomi Yamaguchi, Introduction, ‘“Comfort Woman” Revisionism Comes to the U.S.: Symposium on The Revisionist Film Screening Event at Central Washington University’, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 21, No. 1, June 1, 2015; Tomomi Yamaguchi and Normal Field, “The Impact of ”Comfort Woman“ Revisionism on the Academy, the Press, and the Individual: Symposium on the U.S. Tour of Uemura Takashi”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 33, No. 1, August 17, 2015.
13 The shrine was owned and operated by the Japanese state until February 1946, when it became a private institution to satisfy the SCAP issued Shinto Directive, which separated Shinto from the Japanese government. For details on the lawsuits that resulted from the “pain and suffering,” see Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine.
14 Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan: sengoshi no naka no hen'yō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 7.
15 Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan, 7.
16 Carol Gluck, “Sekinin/Responsibility in Modern Japan,” in Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing eds., Words in Motion: Toward A Global Lexicon (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 97.
17 Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
18 Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensōkan, 55.
19 Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” lecture delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11, 1882.
20 Nihon keizai shinbun, March 17, 1995.
21 Tokyo Asahi shinbun, March 18, 1995.
22 “Editorial,” Kikan sensō sekinin kenkyū no. 11 (Spring, 1996), 2-9. Takaichi currently is Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications in the Abe administration. Her comment may have been a result of her conservative leanings, but the youths' identification with her statement is worth noting.
23 According to a 2005 poll by the conservative Yomiuri newspaper, only 5 percent responded that the general public bore some responsibility for the war. A 2006 poll by the liberal Asahi newspaper yielded somewhat different results: 39 percent believed that the general public had some responsibility, while 43 percent responded that they were not responsible at all. But respondents to both polls placed the primary blame on the military and political leaders. Yomiuri Shinbun Sensō Sekinin Kenshō Iinkai ed., Kenshō sensō sekinin vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 2006), 208-9; Asahi Shinbun Shuzaihan, Sensō sekinin to tsuitō vol. 1 (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 2006), 230-31.
24 Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today (17.4): 659-86; here, 662.
25 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 3.
26 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
27 In 2012, Matsue City Board of Education made a recommendation to local elementary and junior high schools to remove the graphic novel series from school libraries in response to complaints from members of citizens group Zaitokukai, a group that seeks to eliminate what they consider as privileges extended to Korean residents of Japan. Similar requests also occurred in Tottori City and Izumisano City around the same time. Most schools initially complied to the requests, but subsequently returned the books to their open stacks.
28 Carol Gluck, “The Idea of Showa,” in Gluck and Stephen R. Graubard eds., Showa: The Japan of Hirohito (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 1-26.
29 Detailed information on the air raids is available at the online archive.
30 For the early history of the group, see here [last accessed August 1, 2014].
31 Oguma Eiji, “Minshu” to “aikoku”: sengo Nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei (Tokyo: Shin'yōsha, 2002), 588-589.
32 Oguma, “Minshu” to “aikoku,” 589.
33 Koyama Hitoshi, Nihon kūshū no zen'yō: Mariana kichi B29 butai (Tokyo: Tōhō shuppan, 1995), 252.
34 Oguma, “Minshu” to “aikoku,” 589.
35 Oda Makoto, Betonamu no Amerikajin (Tokyo: Gōdō shuppan, 1966).
36 On May 20, 1969, members of Ritsumeikan University Zenkyōtō (United Front of All Students) vandalized the Wadatsumi statue that commemorates the student soldier war dead arguing that the generation that lived through the war had collaborated with Japanese fascism. “If you were against war, why didn't you throw away your guns? Why didn't you run away from the battlefield?” they protested. Oguma “Minshu” to “aikoku,” 595.
37 For an analysis of personal war narratives from the battlefields, see Narita Ryūichi, “Sensō keiken” no sengoshi: katarareta taiken, shōgen, kioku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2010).
38 The word postwar responsibility has existed since the 1970s, but it has been mobilized in the last two decades to result in a flurry of publications that use the term in order to interrogate ways to conceive of innovative ideas for breaking through the stagnant postwar. For recent discussions on postwar responsibility, see, for example, Ōnuma Yasuaki, Tokyo saiban, sensō sekinin, sengo sekinin (Tokyo: Tōshindō, 2007); Takahashi Tetsuya, Sengo sekinin ron (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005); and Kōketsu Atsushi, Watashi tachi no sensō sekinin: “Showa” shoki 20 nen to “Heisei” ki 20 nen no rekishi teki kōsatsu (Tokyo: Gaifūsha, 2009).
39 Ienaga Saburō, Sensō sekinin (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002).
40 See, for example, Kōketsu Atsuhi, Watashi tachi no sensō sekinin (Tokyo: Gaifūsha, 2009), and Takahashi Tetsuya, Sengo sekinin ron (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005).
41 Examples of transnational scholarship include Daqing Yang et al. eds., Towards a History Beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012); Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi and Togo, Kazuhiko. East Asia's Haunted Present: Historical Memories and the Resurgence of Nationalism (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2008); Kawakami Tamio et al. eds. Kaikyō no ryōgawa kara Yasukuni o kangaeru: hisen, chinkon, Ajia (Tokyo: Oruta Shppanshitsu, 2006).
42 SEALDs has announced its official dissolution on August 15, 2017, but members assert that they will continue their political activism in different forms.
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