Local History and War Memories in Hokkaido ed. by Philip A. Seaton (review)

Philip Seaton's edited volume examines how and why Hokkaido's experiences of World War II and the present-day concentration within the prefecture of nearly 40 per cent of the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) are essential to understanding Japan's national history and memories of World War II. The book consists of an introduction, epilogue, and ten chapters divided into three parts. Part 1, titled "Local War Memories in Hokkaido," comprises three chapters written by Seaton. In chapter 1, he stresses that people in Hokkaido retain distinctive collective memories influenced by the social and political contexts of a particular period. Local memories of issues such as the colonization of Hokkaido, the government's oppression of aboriginal inhabitants (Ainu) and their culture, the home of the Seventh Division of the Imperial Japanese Army and the GSDF, the air raids of major cities such as Sapporo and Kushiro by Allied bombers, the defeat, and the exploitation of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean laborers all contributed to shaping the collective memory in Hokkaido. Chapter 2 discusses three grand narratives that Seaton observes: the "dominant narrative," the "critical counternarrative," and the "narrative of development" (p. 26). The first two narratives, Seaton states, tend to operate primarily at a national level, whereas the last narrative is local and focuses more on economic development in Hokkaido. In chapter 3, the editor analyzes both official and media accounts of war memories in Hokkaido in order to comprehend local history and war memories in the region.

Part 2, titled "Local History, Local Activism," consists of four case studies by four different contributors underscoring local history and activism. In chapter 4, Tsuneko Hayashi, a retired school teacher and a founding member of the Sapporo Research Society of Women's History, details how local peace activists promoted the preservation of the history and memory of the Sapporo air raids on July 14 and 15 in 1945 that killed approximately 3,000 people, though the bombings had been largely disregarded in Hokkaido and elsewhere until the 1980s. Chapter 5 by Aaron Skabelund, associate professor of history at Brigham Young University, describes a study centered on local and national memories of war horses, focusing on the formation of war-horse memories in Hokkaido in postwar Japan. In chapter 6, Hiroshi Oda, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Hokkaido University, discusses the people's history movement in Hokkaido and, in particular, the Okhotsk People's History Workshop. The workshop was founded in 1976 (and lasted until 1982) by Koike Kikō, a high school history teacher. The members of the workshop delved into the history of little-known people such as Inoue Denzō, who organized the uprising in Chichibu against the new government in 1884 and fled to Hokkaido after its failures. Chapter 7, by Yohei Achira who recently defended his dissertation at Hokkaido University, examines the Sapporo Society for the Unearthing of Local History, founded in Sapporo in 1982, and its activities to preserve the history and memory of Japanese indentured and Chinese and Korean slave labor in Hokkaido.

Part 3, "Memories in Militarized Hokkaido," explores the impacts of the militarization of the region from the Meiji period (1868–1912) to the present. Chapter 8 by Seaton analyzes the similarities and differences between the Hokkaido Gokoku Shrine and the Yasukuni Shrine and the controversies over the commemoration of the war dead at these shrines. This chapter highlights the lack of international attention to the local gokoku shrines even though their functions are similar to those of the Yasukuni Shrine and their visitors include high-rank government officials. In chapter 9, André Hertrich, an associated member of the International Graduate School Halle-Tokyo, details the Hokuchin Museum in Asahikawa, operated by the GSDF, and compares its exhibits and features to other GSDF base museums. Chapter 10, written by Skabelund, examines the Self-Defense Force (SDF) and its role in the snow festival in Sapporo from the 1950s to...