Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Japan

Hiroko Takeda, Mark Williams, Hiroko Takeda, Mark Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781134830015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Japan presents a synthesized, interdisciplinary study of contemporary Japan based on up-to-date theoretical models designed to provide readers with a comprehensive and full understanding of the dynamics of contemporary Japan. In order to achieve this, the Handbook is organized into two parts. Part I, 'Foundations', clarifies the state of contemporary Japan topic by topic by referring to the latest theoretical developments in the relevant disciplinary fields of politics, international relations, economy, society, culture and the personal. Part II, 'Issues', then offers a series of concrete analyses building upon the theoretical discussions introduced in Part I to help undergraduate and postgraduate students learn how to conduct independent analysis.

Locating Japan in a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, this Handbook is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in Japanese studies, Asian studies and global studies.

PART I
Foundations

1
HISTORY

War memory and Japan’s ‘postwar’

Elyssa Faison

This chapter explores the connections between war memory and differing concepts of the ‘postwar’ as a period of Japanese history. Only by examining what is meant by ‘postwar’ as well as ‘wartime’, and the ways these two seemingly straightforward categories have taken on different meanings for different political projects, can we understand the continued salience of war memory in Japanese political and cultural life today.

Contemporary discourse in Japan is consumed with the issue of war memory. Memory of the Asia-Pacific War animates both domestic and international politics, has become central to questions about history education and is foundational to constructions of national identity and subjectivity. It has become a near obsession in the postwar era. And indeed for Japan, the postwar era (sengo) is ongoing and thus still the historical moment in which debates over war memory and war responsibility take place. The problem of the ‘postwar’ is, by definition, bound up with the problem of war memory, for to be in the temporality of the ‘postwar’ is to define the present moment according to its relationship to the time of the war itself or, by some accounts, to the time of the Occupation – the originary moment of the ‘postwar’. But this is precisely the problem: just as ‘postwar’ does not have any agreed end point, neither does it have a clear beginning. One might want to posit 15 August 1945 – the day of the emperor’s surrender speech – as the logical beginning of Japan’s ‘postwar’, and indeed this is the most commonly invoked starting point.¹ But some suggest the end of the American-led Occupation in 1952 as the true beginnings of the postwar. The term ‘wartime’, like ‘postwar’, also suffers from a lack of definitional clarity. What events count as part of the ‘war’ which is now ‘post’, and how does the inclusion or exclusion of events in our consideration of ‘wartime’ determine the boundaries of the postwar condition?

The various flashpoints associated with Japanese memories of the war are multiple and intertwined. One can hardly speak, for example, about Japan’s textbook controversies (in which the Chinese and Korean governments, as well as Japanese citizens, have criticized government- approved history textbook coverage of the war) without invoking the many points of contention upon which these controversies swirl: the Nanjing Massacre, the comfort woman issue, and the forced suicides of Okinawan civilians during the Battle of Okinawa, among others. Debates over war memory are frequently discussed in terms of the contention between ‘progressives’ (who emphasize the importance of reflecting on the consequences of a misguided war for the people of Asia and for Japanese in order to advocate for a lasting peace) on the one side, and ‘revisionists’ (who want to prioritize the experiences of Japanese soldiers and civilians during the war years, whose sacrifices they believe have enabled postwar peace and economic success) on the other. These debates are not simply about the factual details of Japan’s military expansion throughout Asia and the various aspects of its prosecution of the war, although those are important elements; instead, they represent contests about Japan’s relationship with the West, which in turn define its relationship to the rest of Asia and ultimately the nature of Japan itself. It is my contention that examining the various definitions of ‘wartime’ and ‘postwar’ in conjunction with the outlines of some of the most heated debates over war memory allows us to more fully comprehend Japan’s postwar condition. This postwar condition is intimately connected to the project of modernity begun at the time of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and ongoing questions about that project’s successes, its failures, and what it means for Japan today.

Two key moments in postwar Japanese history: the mid-1990s and 2015

Two moments in recent history hold particular importance in this examination of war memory and its connection to the concept of the ‘postwar’. The first is the early 1990s, the time many of these debates came to dominate popular and intellectual discourse about Japan’s place in the world. Since the 1990s, there has been a surge in the institutional and cultural production of memory in Japan, which has both coincided with and been a crucial element of a global ‘memory boom’.² In 1991, only two years after the death of the Shōwa Emperor and the fall of the Berlin Wall that marked the end of the Cold War, the Korean former ‘comfort woman’, Kim Hak-sun, held a press conference in South Korea to publicly tell her story of rape and abuse at the hands of the Japanese military, when she was forced to work in a wartime ‘comfort station’ providing sex to Japanese soldiers. A few months later, she filed a lawsuit along with other former comfort women against the Japanese government demanding an apology and compensation. The international publicity attending these actions resulted in a flurry of accusations and denials within Japan, with academic historians as well as the government conducting research into the matter of institutionalized military sexual slavery.³ In 1993, as part of the unveiling of the results of a government study of the comfort woman issue, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei issued what became known as the ‘Kōno Statement’, the first official government declaration acknowledging Japanese military direction of the ‘comfort woman system’ of brothels and ‘comfort stations’.

In 1995, as much of the world was hearing about the formal establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, formed to investigate and bring into the open human rights abuses that had taken place in that country under the apartheid regime, Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi issued his statement ‘On the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the War’s End’. Even more than the Kōno statement which had received backlash from conservatives in Japan for its admissions of state complicity in the establishment and operation of the comfort woman system, the Murayama statement constituted a clear apology (Hashimoto 2015: 57–8, 61). Murayama expressed ‘deep remorse’ and ‘heartfelt apology’ for the ‘tremendous damage and suffering’ inflicted by Japan’s wartime actions upon ‘the people of many countries, particularly those of Asian nations’. In conjunction with this statement, the Murayama government launched the Asian Women’s Fund, established by the government but funded by private citizens who were asked to contribute in order to ‘atone for the institution of “comfort women”’.⁴ With conservative backlash to apology already underway, publication of Iris Chang’s best-selling book, The Rape of Nanking, in the United States in 1997, and subsequent attempts to have it translated and published in Japan, further internationalized what had before the 1990s been mostly a domestic debate within Japan (Yoshida 2006). While not focusing on the comfort women, it introduced the horrors of the Nanjing Massacre to a global audience precisely at a moment when conservative reaction to demands for Japanese atonement was proliferating.

The second moment crucial to understanding the relationship of the postwar to war memory is 2015. In that year, the government of Prime Minister Abe undertook three significant initiatives that have contributed to redefining the postwar as much as they have reflected the ideological underpinnings of Abe’s conception of Japan’s postwar condition. The first of these was the successful promotion and passage of legislation known as the collective self-defence bills. Throughout the year the government passed a series of bills meant to reform Japan’s collective self-defence capabilities, which greatly expanded the official interpretation of constitutionally permitted activities involving military action (Hughes 2017). Since the enactment of the American-authored postwar constitution in 1947, successive governments have adopted an increasingly capacious interpretation of what is permissible within the framework of Article 9 of the constitution, whereby Japan outlawed war as a means of settling international disputes involving the state. From the time of the adoption of the postwar constitution, there were debates about whether the wording of Article 9 permitted Japan to maintain armaments for the purpose of self-defence and, with no perceived need for such armaments in 1947 and 1948, the consensus among politicians was to assume it did not. But with the successful communist revolution in China in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, conservatives under the leadership of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru went along with American urgings that Japan rebuild its military capacity. This led to the creation of the Japan Self-Defense Force (SDF) in 1954. However, fearing social protests at home, alarm from neighbouring countries in Asia, and a drain on the still-recovering economy, they were unwilling to revise the constitution to eliminate Article 9 (Dower 1999: 394–8, 547–8). Ever since that time, politicians from the ruling (conservative) Liberal Democratic Party who have desired to eliminate Article 9 have been forced to settle for expansion of its interpretation in the face of its immense popularity among Japanese citizens. Since the Gulf War of 1990, when Japan was criticized for not sending forces as part of the American-led coalition opposing Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, laws have been enacted to allow for dispatch of the SDF abroad and for cooperation in support of allied military actions. The 2015 collective self-defence reforms gave the government broader powers to mobilize the SDF to defend an ally without explicitly revising Article 9.

The second major initiative of 2015 was the conclusion of a Japan-ROK agreement on the comfort woman issue, meant to ‘finally and irreversibly’ resolve the comfort woman problem as a bilateral issue. In December of that year, foreign ministers from Japan and South Korea met and issued a statement in which the Japanese government agreed to contribute funds in the amount of JPY 1 billion to a foundation established by the South Korean government ‘for the purpose of providing support for the former comfort women’ and to cooperate with the ROK in ‘projects for recovering the honour and dignity and healing the psychological wounds of all former comfort women’. The South Korean government, in return, pledged to acknowledge the sensitivities of the Japanese government to the presence of a statue commemorating the comfort women located just outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, and to take steps to see about its removal. It also pledged to refrain from criticizing the government of Japan over the comfort woman issue at the United Nations and other international venues (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2015). The agreement was met immediately with criticisms from groups representing the interests of former comfort women. Among the most significant complaints were that the survivors themselves were not consulted as part of this agreement; that the monies provided by the Japanese government are referred to as a ‘contribution’ rather than as ‘compensation’ (which would acknowledge the Japanese government’s role in the comfort woman system); that there is no promise on the Japanese side to teach the history of the comfort women to Japanese citizens (as there is in the 1993 Kōno Statement); and that statements by Foreign Minister Kishida and Prime Minister Abe to the Diet in the weeks after the agreement was reached deny that the comfort women were ‘sexual slaves’ and claim (incorrectly) that there is no evidence of comfort women being forcibly recruited and brought against their will to the comfort stations, thus denying the Japanese military and government involvement and responsibility for the comfort woman system (Yoshimi 2018: 35–6; Nishino et al. 2018). Despite these criticisms and the Japanese government’s consternation that the comfort woman statue was still attracting attention outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul (and that in fact a new comfort woman statue had been erected outside the Japanese consulate in Busan), the two governments continued to maintain that the agreement remained in force until Moon Jae-in became South Korea’s president in 2017 and backed away from commitments made under the agreement by his predecessor.

The third major governmental intervention in the politics of memory that took place in 2015 was Prime Minister Abe’s statement marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the War. Abe repositioned the government’s official stance on war responsibility with a war anniversary address that some saw as a rebuttal of the earlier statement by Murayama (Murayama et al. 2015). Made on 15 August 2015, the Abe Statement used diplomatic language to rehearse many of the arguments long made more stridently by revisionists, including the assertion that Japan has already apologized enough for its actions during the War, that the War was a result of Western domination of Asia, and that ongoing international demands for Japan to offer apology and compensation for its wartime actions are a reflection of the continuing cultural and political colonization of Japan by the West (and the United States specifically) that began with the postwar Occupation. I will examine these two statements – those made by Prime Ministers Murayama in 1995 and Abe in 2015 – in more detail at the end of this analysis.

Def...