Japan's Contested War Memories

✍ Scribed by Philip A. Seaton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 267
• Series: Routledge Contemporary Japan
• Edition: annotated edition
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Japan's Contested War Memories is an important and significant book that explores the struggles within contemporary Japanese society to come to terms with Second World War history. Focusing particularly on 1972 onwards, the period starts with the normalization of relations with China and the return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972, and ends with the sixtieth anniversary commemorations.

Analyzing the variety of ways in which the Japanese people narrate, contest and interpret the past, the book is also a major critique of the way the subject has been treated in much of the English-language. Philip Seaton concludes that war history in Japan today is more divisive and widely argued over than in any of the other major Second World War combatant nations. Providing a sharp contrast to the many orthodox statements about Japanese 'ignorance', amnesia' and 'denial' about the war, this is an engaging and illuminating study that will appeal to scholars and students of Japanese history, politics, cultural studies, society and memory theory.

✦ Table of Contents

Book Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 5
Copyright......Page 6
Contents......Page 7
List of Illustrations......Page 9
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Notes on text......Page 11
Abbreviations and glossary......Page 12
Introduction......Page 15
1. Historical consciousness in contemporary Japan......Page 23
2. The ‘long postwar’......Page 47
3. ‘Addressing the past’......Page 71
4. The war as a current affairs issue......Page 89
5. August commemorations......Page 109
6. History and ideology......Page 132
7. War stories......Page 150
8. Regional memories......Page 167
9. War and the family......Page 183
Epilogue: Beyond the sixtieth anniversary......Page 198
Appendix: Critiques of orthodox arguments......Page 203
Notes......Page 217
Bibliography......Page 221
Index......Page 234