War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005, and: Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia (review)

It seems that the issue of contemporary Japan's relationship with its modern historical consciousness (and especially its war memory) will not go away. There is a resilient and slightly mysterious presumption among various commentators and political practitioners that postwar Japan has not yet successfully come to terms with the violence it perpetrated on much of Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Japan is entrapped and enwrapped by sengo (postwar), unable to escape. And yet, there is a definite accusative sense in the discourse, particularly when it is framed in the (now very conventional) comparative terms that place postwar Japan alongside postwar Germany: while Germany (and the Germans) appear to have made peace with (and shown penitence for) the violence done in World War II, Japan (and the Japanese) have not. In some versions of this story, this comparative discrepancy explains why Germany is now fully integrated into the European Union, but no comparable regional order has managed to integrate Japan into East Asia. In other words, Japan is both trapped in a perpetual sengo and has somehow managed to escape it without really dealing with it. Thankfully, Seraphim as well as Jager and Mitter take us outside and beyond these conventional kinds of problematics. Indeed, both of these volumes appear to indicate a new and welcome direction for the field.

The resilience of the paradoxical sengo narrative that we have seen until recently is surprising and mysterious for a number of clear, historical reasons, not least because there is such a large body of evidence to suggest that Japan (perhaps more than any other nation since South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995) has made many and various attempts to demonstrate its penitence (its guilt or its shame?) about its treatment of its regional neighbors. Japan was certainly one of the key participants in what Wole Soyinka (the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner) has referred to as the "fin de millenaire fever for atonement" or what Seraphim calls the "explosion of memory productions" in the 1990s (p. 262).

Of course, this is not to say that these attempts at openness or contrition have always (or even occasionally) been successful (the persistence of the impression that no such attempts have been made demonstrates their failures). Instead, they call attention to the fact that one of the core problems in this area is not necessarily why Japan has failed to come to terms with its past but rather why the perception that it is uniquely incapable of doing so has managed to survive in the face of so much evidence to the contrary.

There are any number of possible answers to this question, many of which are political in nature and have as much (if not more) to do with the fact that penitence (especially in the form of an apology) requires some form of reciprocation from the ostensible victims. This is the political force of forgiveness: the power to forgive or to withhold forgiveness, and hence the power to make an apology succeed or fail, does not lie with the penitent but with the wronged. Of course, there are various ways to encourage the dispensing of forgiveness, such as the quality of the apology (or its apparent sincerity) or other more material inducements (such as financial aid or trade agreements), but ultimately forgiveness is not something Japan can give to itself (although this is another fascinating issue); it is at the mercy of its neighbors (and, of course, scholars of Japan studies). Hence, the question of why Japan is still seen as recalcitrant about its past must also be directed more reflexively toward...