Section 7 | History, Politics and International Relations | Opening Session A, Panel
Chair and Discussant: Hartwig Hummel (University of Düsseldorf)
Japanese historical debates are often depicted, especially outside Japan, as simple battles between war apologists and their critics. The increasingly conservative and nationalistic slant of historical memory is thus seen as an extension of the power of conservative, nationalistic politicians to write the history of the Asia-Pacific War from their point of view. This panel will attempt to show that the reality is a great deal more complex by looking at uses of memory politics not tied to that war. These papers show how politicized memories are useful for promoting a variety of conservative and patriotic causes including defense of traditional views of political duty and national character. In each case study, we find that these programs are fraught with outcomes and consequences unintended by the practitioners of memory politics.
In examining popular cultural images of the Russo-Japanese war since 1905, Naoko Shimazu shows that such memory politics has a long history. Although the war could be appropriated by popular culture in times of peace, in times of national emergency it was re-appropriated by the state as an important source of a heroic narrative for modern Japan. Robin LeBlanc looks at a conservative but youthful politician, who draws on historically validated and supposedly reliable values of the past to win election. She charts his discovery that the appeal of these historic values may be at the expense of the larger political goals he hopes to achieve. Michael Schneider's study of recent Foreign Minister Tanaka Makiko similarly highlights the struggle with popular imagery in contemporary politics. Daughter of a famously powerful politician, Tanaka struggled to break free from mundane political battles at the moment that Japan sought a fundamental transformation of its position in the global arena. Collectively, these papers ask us to look at popular memory as a slippery form of political currency in contemporary Japan.
This paper investigates the reconstruction of the Russo-Japanese war in popular memory in post-1905 Japan. An analysis will be made of the competing images of the war constructed by various actors through various cultural forms. War films became important conductors of the memory of the Russo-Japanese War as the audience enjoyed the sanitized nostalgia of the 'good war' through many co mmercial box office successes. On the other hand, the middle classes took to touring the 'sites' of the war in Manchuria, as tourism began to take off in the expanding Japanese colonial empire in the 1930s. In the 1930s, anniversary events of the Russo-Japanese War reached a new height as the Navy and the Army competed to appropriate the fading memory of the victories in 1904-5. In the centennial years of the Russo-Japanese war in 2004-5, how do the Japanese remember the war? What will become clear is that political climate determined strongly how the memory of the war was constructed in the period 1905-1945, but also in the post-1945 period.
One of the first decisions imposed by the Allied Powers after their victory on Japan was to censure the textbooks used in Japanese schools. Every single reference to the imperial system, the shintô, the army, the national defense, the exaltation of the patriotic spirit, warlike exploits or Japanese conquests in Asia and in the Pacific was expurgated from textbooks. More generally, whatever could disturb the dynamics of peace and democracy which the Allies wanted to introduce in the Japanese society was dealt with in the same way: torn off pages, sentences or texts inked, texts rewritten when that was possible: fighters flying in the sky which became, for example, swallows both in the text and the illustrations, Japanese flags transformed into trees, etc. Thus, to replace these books which were not convenient at all and even incoherent from a pedagogical point of view, the authorities undertook the drafting of new elementary textbooks, especially for the teaching of the Japanese language. Published in 1946-1947, these textbooks were used until 1949, a year from which they were gradually replaced by textbooks from private publishers.
All these new textbooks and, more generally, all the books for children who were published during the years following the defeat did not only have to put an end to the militarist and nationalist drifts from the pre-war period and the war but also had to propose a new image and a new vision of childhood and children which were to play an important role in the construction of the Japanese collective memory. The Japanese language textbook Minna ii ko, ' All nice children', used from 1947 onwards is a good example of the publications of that period: 'They put flowers to decorate, all nice children / Speak a nice language, all nice children / friends, comrades, all nice children'. Beauty, human, sociability: the new programs and the new 'official' ideology of the end of 1940 were all contented in the first words of this textbook.
We will thus examine in our paper this construction of a 'new' collective memory through two different but complementary approaches:
– the evolution – from the war and pre-war period to the years of the i mmediate post-war period – of the image of childhood and children which appears in the textbooks and children's literature
- the adequacy between this new image of childhood and children and the real and daily life of the children during the war and the years of the i mmediate post-war period.
Michael A. Schneider (Knox College)
This paper explores Tanaka Makiko's brief tenure as Japan's Foreign Minister in the context of a gender history of Japanese diplomacy. Tanaka Makiko's appointment as Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2001 was historic. A politician of unco mmon popularity and controversy, she was the highest cabinet level appointment for a female politician to date. Global turmoil, moreover, intensified long-standing calls within Japan for a fundamental change in nation's international political and military posture. With the further complication of scandals rocking the Foreign Ministry, some hailed Tanaka's rise as the signal of revolutionary change, a minister who could operate free of the burdens of past practices.
Tanaka's tenure, however, was marred by debilitating political squabbles that depicted her as inexperienced in the ways of Japan's foreign policy and ill-tempered to lead reform of the Foreign Ministry. Ultimately she was forced to resign under the cloud of an ordinary, "old boy" corruption scandal similar to the one that hounded her famous father. Within the context of a process of "re-masculinization" of Japan's diplomacy, Tanaka's role in ending decades of emasculated foreign policy was an ironic one. I will show how her rise and fall played out a gender drama largely ignored in Japan's foreign policy debates.