A descendant of the Hokkaido Ainu people, Chiri Yukie (1903-1922) became versed in the oral tradition of kamuy yukar (songs of the gods) from a young age. At the encouragement of the linguist Kindaichi Kyŏsuke, she transliterated and translated these songs into Japanese. Her Ainu shin'yŏshŭ (Ainu Songs of the Gods) was published posthumously in 1923. The following translation presents the author's preface, as well as a song attributed to the owl, patron deity of the village (kotan kor kamuy). In the former, Chiri shares both her nostalgia for a lost Ainu past, and her hope that her heritage will be preserved by sharing it with a Japanese-speaking audience. In the latter, we find a depiction of Ainu ritual, one that revolves around the notion of animals as both deities and the prey of hunters - after choosing to fall to an arrow, the owl is invited to stay with the impoverished family of the boy who shot it, receiving inau (offerings) and making the household prosper once more. It is a song that speaks, not only to the profound religious significance of animal spirits in hunter-gatherer traditions like that of the Ainu, but offers a commentary on the shifting nature of social fortunes - something of which Chiri seems to have been poignantly aware. It is hard not to view, in her recounting of an ancient hunting ritual, a thinly veiled commentary on the fate of her people - though reviled by their neighbors, both once had wealth and distinction, a state to which they may yet return through the proper veneration of the deity (kamuy).

While Kawabata and Kitazawa's article regarding the whitewashing of history and erasure of the term “group suicide” from history textbooks shows the Japanese government trying to hide its crimes of the colonial period, Underwood describes a more positive— albeit small—step forward in redressing colonial harm. Due to former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's actions between 2003 and 2008, the process of repatriating the remains of Koreans to South Korea has begun, after several attempts by previous administrations stalled.

Andre Vltchek has written more than one article for The Asia-Pacific Journal demonstrating the rise of militant Islamic nationalism in Indonesia, in refutation of many Western media outlets and statements in U.S. foreign policy that would characterize the country as a bastion of human rights and religious moderation in the Islamic world. In the article reproduced here, he indicates several strands that come together to form the religious climate in the most populous Islamic nation in the world. In at least some instances, the rise of intolerance appears to be a matter of religious orthodoxy in the strict sense of the word: for example, the Ahmadiyah sect, a minority group that posits the existence of prophets after Muhammad, has faced concerted pressure by mainstream Islamic groups (who have declared them heretical) and by the government itself (which has prohibited them from publicly spreading their doctrines on the basis of their “deviant” views). Other instances - like the anti-pornography laws of 2008 - seem to combine calls for Islamic sexual morality with opposition to the traditional dress of minority ethnic groups like the Balinese, while offering sweeping new censorship powers to the government.

In this article, lewallen discusses a pivotal moment in Ainu history, when on June 6, 2008, the Ainu were formally recognized as an indigenous people by the Japanese government. For a people whose history of colonization has often been brushed aside in studies of Japanese history, such as in textbooks, this official recognition appears to be a step in the right direction. However, this is probably not the last battle. The government recognized the Ainu as indigenous due to international pressure that came when the G8 summit was hosted in Toyako, Hokkaido in 2008; it was a potential cause for embarrassment if the host country was seen to be blatantly ignoring indigenous people's rights. Therefore, some Ainu leaders have doubted the commitment of the Japanese government to their needs, since Japanese officials have not acknowledged that imperial government policies marginalized and impoverished Ainu. Fundamentally, it remains to be seen whether the government will enact policies that actually redress colonial treatment of the Ainu.

The Yasukuni shrine is a rich focal point for myth-making, by the shrine's supporters as well as its critics. In the following essay, Mark Selden examines the reciprocal action of war memory and nationalism at Yasukuni, placing the distinctive features of the shrine as a religious focal point for national identity in the context of broader trends in twentieth- and twenty-first-century nationalisms. As he notes, the “alchemy” by which the horrors of war are transformed into memories of a glorious past represents a central feature, not only of the Yasukuni shrine, but of war memorials the world over. Indeed, his consideration of war memorials and ossuaries constructed in Okinawa - under the auspices of Okinawan villages, the Japanese government and the U.S. military occupation - suggests something of the complex dynamics at work in the enshrinement of memory and the shaping of national identity.

The controversies that continue to swirl around the Nanjing Massacre, the military comfort women, Unit 731 and other Japanese military atrocities rooted in colonialism and the Asia Pacific War are critical not only to understanding the dynamics of war, peace, and terror in the long twentieth century. They are also vital for understanding war memory and denial, with implications for peace and regional accommodation in the Asia Pacific region and the US-Japan relationship. [1]

This article offers a comparative framework for understanding war atrocities and the ways in which they are remembered, forgotten and memorialized. It examines a number of high profile atrocities in an effort to understand their character and the reasons why recognizing and accepting responsibility for their actions have been so difficult. Neither committing atrocities nor suppressing their memories is the exclusive property of a single nation. The issues examined here begin with atrocities committed during the Asia Pacific War and continue to the present.

In 1978, Yasukuni enshrined the spirits of 14 Class A war criminals as “martyrs,” after which Emperor Hirohito (and, from his accession to the throne in 1989, Emperor Akihito) ceased making visits to the shrine. Nevertheless, visits by prominent elected representatives (most notoriously, the annual visits by Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro on the anniversary of Japan's surrender) have continued, stirring international protest and internal legal challenges. As the following article suggests, at stake in these challenges is not only the constitutionality of such visits, but also the meaning of enshrinement itself. If, as legal arguments contend (and the Osaka High Court affirmed), shrine visits by Koizumi took place in his official capacity as Prime Minister, this represents a violation of the separation of religion and state power affirmed in the post-war Constitution. At the same time, these official visits imply to many at least tacit governmental support for the policies of the shrine, which not only works to glorify Japan's imperialist past, but also enshrines a number of names (including those of former Taiwanese and Korean colonial subjects) over the strong objection of surviving relatives.

[A] conference of historians, psychoanalysts, and artists, gathered to reflect on the relation of education to the Holocaust, watched the videotaped testimony of the woman in an attempt to better understand the era. A lively debate ensued. The testimony was not accurate, historians claimed. The number of chimneys was misrepresented. Historically, only one chimney was blown up, not all four. Since the memory of the testifying woman turned out to be, in this way, fallible, one could not accept–nor give credence to–her account of the events. It was utterly important to remain accurate, [lest] the revisionists in history discredit everything. A psychoanalyst … profoundly disagreed. “The woman was testifying,” he insisted, “not to the number of the chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence.”—Dori Laub

[Japan Focus introduction: Prime Minister Abe Shinzo recently added another entry to the long, sorry chapter of official Japanese war-crime denials when he said that there was no coercion of the so-called comfort-women by the imperial military “in the narrow sense of the word.” On March 1, an historic day in the history of Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule, he said: “The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion.”

Liberal Democratic Party power broker Nakayama Nariaki further insulted the dwindling group of surviving women when he compared government involvement in the brothels that enslaved them to college canteens. “Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies,” he said.

In the furor that followed and in the lead-up to a potentially booby-trapped visit to Washington, Abe backpedaled and issued a series of unsatisfying but politically expedient mea culpas, saying he stood by the famous1993 statement by Kono Yohei, acknowledging state involvement in the brothels and culminating in an expression of sympathy during his stateside trip that sought to lay the matter to rest.

In a one-hour meeting with US politicians arranged by Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and hosted by Sen. Nancy Pelosi, Abe was reported to have expressed sympathy for the victims: “As an individual, and the prime minister, I sympathize from the bottom of my heart with the former comfort women who experienced this extreme hardship. I'm deeply sorry about the situation in which they were placed.”

Calling such remarks an apology—to the US President not the comfort women—George Bush sought to lay the issue to rest in order to get on to the important issues of redefining the US-Japan military relationship. But the problem is unlikely to end there. On close analysis, the Abe statement is a model of the equivocation that has long characterized many official pronouncements on Japanese war crimes. It managed, for example, to douse the fires in Washington caused by his original denial while still conceding nothing on the key issue of coercion.

Among the many groups for which the Yasukuni Shrine raises important questions is Japan's Christian population. In 1988, for example, the Japanese Supreme Court rejected the claim of Nakaya Yasuko, the Christian widow of an officer in Japan's Self Defense Force, who objected on religious grounds to her husband's enshrinement as a Shinto deity at a shrine affiliated with Yasukuni. Yet, as John Breen's survey of Catholic responses to Yasukuni indicates, relations between Christian authorities and the shrine are often complex. At one level, of course, is a basic theological question: to what extent can Catholics participate in rituals associated with non-Christian religious traditions? Interestingly, the Vatican (in a continuation of policies set down when Yasukuni was an institution of State Shinto) affirmed that Catholics may, in fact, participate in such rituals, insofar as those rites serve as expressions of patriotism. At the same time, however, Yasukuni has raised criticism from the Catholic Bishops in Japan, especially regarding the threat posed by government support of the shrine to the constitutional separation of religion and state power. Catholic politicians and intellectuals, meanwhile, run the gamut from outright apologetics for the shrine to advocacy for a more secular memorial. In his concluding comments, Breen carefully outlines the various issues at stake, and suggests that no simple solution is likely to address them all.

Fueled by perennial controversies over official Japanese regulation of textbooks, Western media and academics thrive on claims of a peculiar Japanese “forgetfulness” of wartime atrocities. But the postwar record of Japanese discussions of wartime biological warfare experiments reveals an impressive level of public exposure that, in some ways, surpasses American discussions of its own wartime past. To stress Japanese “forgetfulness” tells only half the story and obscures the tale of postwar political polarization that has greatly facilitated exposure of war crimes in Japan.

Japan Focus introduction: In late 1937, a Tokyo newspaper reported on a “hundred head contest” in which two Japanese imperial army officers competed to see who could lop off one hundred Chinese heads first during the campaign to take the Chinese capital city of Nanjing. The contest is symbolic of the perversion and loss of military discipline during the Japanese capture and occupation of the city that has come to be known variously as the Nanjing Massacre, the Rape of Nanjing, or simply the Nanjing Incident. The event belongs to a long list of 20th century atrocities, and is emblematic of Chinese suffering at the hands of a barbarous Japanese military as well as of Japanese predations across wartime Asia and the Pacific.

As part of what one might call a “canon” of horror, various groups have interests in how the event is remembered not only in China and Japan, but also internationally. Estimates of the numbers killed at Nanjiing vary from several thousand to over 300,000, depending on national and political persuasion and the parameters one puts in terms of time, place, and ethnicity of victim. (See David Askew, “New Research on the Nanjing Incident,” available at http://www.japanfocus.org/109.html).

What is the role of apologies in international reconciliation? Jennifer Lind finds that while denying or glorifying past violence is indeed inimical to reconciliation, apologies that prove to be domestically polarizing may be diplomatically counterproductive. Moreover, apologies were not necessary in many cases of successful reconciliation. What then is the relationship between historical memory and international reconciliation?

2010 is the centennial year of Japan's takeover of Korea. The history of this event is of enormous significance to the 20th century, and not simply because it garnered Japan a foothold on mainland Asia. Although Koreans see it very differently, for Japan, the 1910 annexation of Korea established Japan's entry as a power on the world stage.