Victims or Victimizers? Museums, Textbooks, and the War Debate in Contemporary Japan

This essay addresses a widespread misperception in mainstream thinking about Japanese views of their World War II record. Popular works, such as Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, tend to speak of a monolithic Japanese view of the war today. This article, through an analysis of the exhibits and descriptive literature of Japanese "war" and "peace" museums as well as recent struggles over how to depict Japan's wartime record in school textbooks, disagrees. Rather than a unified "Japanese" view of the war, the reality is a struggle in which conservatives and right-wingers duel with moderates and leftists over the "correct history" of the war.