Coming to Terms with the Past: Japan

In Japan since the Second World War, the battle over history and memory concerning Japan’s war experience has largely been fought in the arena of junior and senior high school history textbooks. Since Japan’s defeat in 1945, questions of war responsibility, imperial accountability and the cultural roots of Japan’s expansionist adventure into Asia and the Pacific between 1931 and 1945 have festered in the popular and academic imagination. In fundamental ways, the issues of the Second World War in postwar Japan remain unresolved, thus opening the way for opportunistic readings of the past in the present, and for history to be used for political purposes. The history textbook lawsuits waged against the Japanese government by Professor Ienaga Saburo have reflected and sustained this divided discourse on the war in contemporary Japan.