Inherited Responsibility and Historical Reconciliation in East Asia

Contemporary East Asian societies are still struggling with complex legacies of colonialism, war and domination. Years of Japanese imperial occupation followed by the Cold War have entrenched competing historical understandings of responsibility for past crimes in Korea, China, Japan and elsewhere in the region. Given these difficult challenges, the impressive economic and cultural networks that have developed over the past sixty years have failed to secure peaceful coexistence and overcome lingering attitudes of distrust and misunderstanding. Some form of historical reconciliation is necessary to generate and sustain cross-national mutual trust and prevent nationalist sentiments from re-emerging. Nevertheless, the different understandings of historical wrongdoings have been an obstacle to reconciliation and cooperation in the region: Koreans, Japanese, Chinese and others all regard themselves as victims of historical wrongs at the hands of foreign powers, undermining the possibility of fostering regional reconciliation and just peace. This book examines the challenges of historical reconciliation in East Asia, and calls for reimagining our understandings of historical identity and responsibility by adopting a 'forward-looking' approach that eschews obsession with the past in favour of grounding the possibility of mutual trust in a reflective and deliberative engagement with history. We focus on the problem of reconciliation and "inherited responsibility," or the question of how to understand multigenerational national responsibility for crimes that one's nation committed elsewhere. We examine a number of related questions: what exactly are the conceptual and ethical parameters of inherited responsibility? Who are the relevant actors? If such a form of responsibility is ethically defensible, what follows from taking it seriously? And ultimately, what are the boundaries to inheritance how extensive ought it to be?