Japan's Contested War Memories: The 'Memory

Japan's Contested War Memories is an important and significant book that explores the struggles within contemporary Japanese society to come to terms with Second World War history. Focusing particularly on 1972 onwards, the period starts with the normalization of relations with China and the return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972, and ends with the 60th anniversary commemorations. Analyzing the variety of ways in which the Japanese people narrate, contest and interpret the past, the book is also a major critique of the way the subject has been treated in much of the English-language. Philip Seaton concludes that war history in Japan today is more divisive and widely argued over than in any of the other major Second World War combatant nations. Providing a sharp contrast to the many orthodox statements about Japanese 'ignorance', amnesia' and 'denial' about the war, this is an engaging and illuminating study that will appeal to scholars and students of Japanese history, politics,cultural studies, society and memory theory.

Philip A. Seaton is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Media and Communication, Hokkaido University, Japan.

List of illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. x
Notes on text	p. xi
List of abbreviations and glossary	p. xii
Introduction	p. 1
The 'orthodox' interpretation of Japanese war memories	p. 2
'Memory rifts': reframing the discussion of Japanese war memories	p. 7
Historical consciousness in contemporary Japan	p. 10
Theoretical approaches to the study of war memory	p. 10
Towards an 'integrated approach'	p. 12
Judgemental war memory	p. 18
Japanese war memories: a hypothesis	p. 20
A media/cultural studies approach	p. 28
The war representations business: a hypothesis	p. 31
Conclusions	p. 35
The 'long postwar'	p. 37
Occupation, 1945-52	p. 38
Japan's return to the international community, 1952-72	p. 42
To the end of the Showa era and '1955 system', 1972-93	p. 48
Japan's contested war memories in the Heisei era, 1994-2005	p. 56
Conclusions	p. 63
'Addressing the past'	p. 65
State-centredness: the official narrative and its importance	p. 65
Human rights vs state rights: international backing for Japan's compensation policy	p. 67
The role of American policy	p. 70
'The orthodoxy' and Japanese war memories	p. 73
Culturally deterministic approaches	p. 75
International comparisons	p. 78
Conclusions	p. 83
The war as a current affairs issue	p. 85
The war as front-page news	p. 85
Prime ministerial apologies vs Yasukuni worship	p. 87
The fiftieth anniversary statement and politicians' gaffes	p. 94
The press taboo: criticizing the emperor	p. 96
The 'comfort women', lawsuits and compensation	p. 98
Textbooks	p. 100
The A-bombs	p. 102
Returnees	p. 104
Conclusions	p. 105
August commemorations	p. 107
Television and war memories	p. 107
War-related television: 1991-2005	p. 110
NHK's survey of war-related programming in 1995	p. 114
The politics of war-related television	p. 116
The sixtieth anniversary as seen on TV	p. 123
Conclusions	p. 130
History and ideology	p. 131
Publishing and the selective historical gaze	p. 132
Consuming ideological debate	p. 137
Ideological confrontation: the liberalist view of history	p. 140
History at school: textbook content vs history education	p. 144
Conclusions	p. 150
War stories	p. 151
War cinema and war memories	p. 151
Japanese war cinema: an overview	p. 153
War cinema: 1972-2005	p. 155
The secrets of success in war cinema	p. 159
The challenges of progressive film-making	p. 161
Television dramas	p. 163
Simulation fiction	p. 167
Conclusions	p. 169
Regional memories	p. 170
Local memories, local victimhood	p. 170
War museums in Japan	p. 171
The politics of war and peace exhibits	p. 172
Consuming museums: museums as sites of education	p. 175
Japanese pacifisms	p. 177
Air raids: from distinctive local memories to generic narrative	p. 180
Okinawa: unique and personalized memories	p. 185
Conclusions	p. 187
War and the family	p. 188
Testimony: the voice of the individual	p. 189
War and the family: when love and historical consciousness collide	p. 192
War guilt: inherited traumas in Japanese families	p. 193
Patriotism: commemorating sacrifice	p. 197
The war and day-to-day family relationships	p. 198
Activism: the personal is political	p. 200
Conclusions	p. 203
Epilogue: beyond the sixtieth anniversary	p. 205
Critiques of orthodox arguments	p. 211
Notes	p. 226
Bibliography	p. 230
Index	p. 245
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Japan's Contested War Memories: The 'Memory Rifts' in Historical Consciousness of World War II

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