CHASMS IN REMEMBERING: CLASHING WAR MEMORY NARRATIVES FROM JAPAN, 1955-PRESENT

Abstract

More than 75 years after the end of the Pacific War, Japan remains embroiled in a longstanding, tense war over history with its neighbors, China and South Korea. This struggle has itself evolved and breached new domains of both domestic politics and international relations in Japan. This thesis studies Japan’s “history problem” through the lens of narratives; by bringing historical, memory studies, and international relations literatures into conversation, it probes the embedded nature of history writing and the performance of collective memory in the current global epoch. It investigates what global norm of memory-making and narrative creation Japan has had to navigate in addressing its history of aggression and war crimes against its East Asian neighbors and problematizes the suggestion that Germany’s memorialization of the Holocaust is a successful model for Japan to emulate. I trace the historical origins of the norm of creating “Universalist” narratives of traumatic historical memories, showing how it was the creation of particular actors with their own memory agendas in the immediate postwar years. I then examine the range of war memory narratives being generated by civil society actors in Japan using Kiyoteru Tsutsui’s typology, showing that all seven types are present in the country. Finally, I suggest that the Japanese state, unable to present this diversity of narratives to China and South Korea, resorts to presenting a Universalist narrative of pacifist anti-nuclearism, arguing that this narrative is insufficient to promote regional reconciliation. In so doing, this thesis disputes the recommendations of He and Shin, that allowing civil society actors unrestrained freedom in advancing their preferred narratives would facilitate reconciliation, suggesting that the plural society would only lead to gridlock and hinder the creation of an acceptable Universalist narrative.