Japanese history
Selective memory
A timely meditation on shaping narratives of the past
Aug 25th 2012 | from the print edition
Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World. By John Dower. The New Press; 336 pages; $26.95 and £19.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
AS THE ghosts of the Pacific war judder back to life in Asia, it seems appropriate to consider how nation states remember, and misremember, the past. Japan’s current tiffs with its neighbours, China and South Korea, are rooted in the march to war and its undigested aftermath, more than 75 years ago. They are inflamed, however, by different narratives of history, and by national media coverage that is often parochial and amnesiac.
Conflict and memory are the themes that animate this new collection of essays by John Dower, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning “Embracing Defeat” (1999), which looked at Japan after the second world war. Mr Dower is particularly interested in Japan’s sanitisation of its military past, but also the way history in general is often a tool used by the powerful.
Mr Dower discusses his surprise at hearing his own work cited after 9/11, when American officials evoked the post-war occupation of Japan as a model for post-invasion Iraq. President George W. Bush should have seen that Japan provided “no model” for occupying Mesopotamia, Mr Dower wrote in a strikingly prescient 2002 New York Times op-ed, reproduced here. “To rush to war without seriously imagining all its consequences, including its aftermath, is not realism but a terrible hubris.”
He returns to the terrain of “Embracing Defeat”, marvelling at how the vicious racial hatreds of the Pacific war dissipated so quickly, as though “turned off like a spigot”. The lesson for Mr Dower is not only that reluctant civilians must be mobilised by propaganda to fight and die, but also that new realities force new biases.
No side, he argues, launched a more sophisticated propaganda blitz than the Japanese, who saw their “mongrel” enemies as biologically inferior. But they were hardly alone. During the war Americans viewed their Asian rivals as “monkeys” or “rats”, but with the start of the occupation, Japan became an ally. The popular racism in the American media more or less stopped, and stayed buried until the 1970s, when Japan emerged as an economic superpower. This resurrected Japanese stereotypes of “predatory economic animals” in Western suits who were launching a new “financial Pearl Harbor”. The spigot of racial hatred had been turned back on.
When the fighting is finished, history is written, inevitably by those in power, observes Mr Dower. The standard American view of the struggle against Japan is that it was just and moral. But this grants little space for the ghastly side of victory, which included the airborne destruction of 66 cities and the incineration of more than half a million civilians. China and Korea’s political elites have found it endlessly useful to bang the nationalist drum to unite potentially fractious populations against their old enemy. Japanese conservatives have made it easy for them, whitewashing the past and attempting to pass off Imperial Japan’s rampage across Asia as a “holy war” against Western colonialism.
Selective memory is often a harmful feature of children’s education. Japanese high-school textbooks devote impressively little space to the war, reflecting official attempts to “downplay the dark aspects of Japan’s modern history,” writes Mr Dower. For its part, China’s government relies on its struggle against Japanese aggression for its historical legitimacy, so memories of wartime atrocities are kept fresh in schools. This helps to explain the strikingly different public reactions to the current island disputes. While the Chinese angrily take to the streets, the Japanese stay at home and watch it on TV.
For a solution, Mr Dower looks to the 20th-century views of E.H. Norman, a Japan expert and Marxist historian. Like Norman, he feels that most countries need a “revolution from below” against any system that “represses freedom, sacrifices life, and retards the creation of true self-government”. All citizens should be able to challenge the narratives held by elites. At a tense time of toxic nationalism in Asia, this book is a timely reminder of the uses and abuses of history.
AS THE ghosts of the Pacific war judder back to life in Asia, it seems appropriate to consider how nation states remember, and misremember, the past. Japan’s current tiffs with its neighbours, China and South Korea, are rooted in the march to war and its undigested aftermath, more than 75 years ago. They are inflamed, however, by different narratives of history, and by national media coverage that is often parochial and amnesiac.
Conflict and memory are the themes that animate this new collection of essays by John Dower, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning “Embracing Defeat” (1999), which looked at Japan after the second world war. Mr Dower is particularly interested in Japan’s sanitisation of its military past, but also the way history in general is often a tool used by the powerful.
Mr Dower discusses his surprise at hearing his own work cited after 9/11, when American officials evoked the post-war occupation of Japan as a model for post-invasion Iraq. President George W. Bush should have seen that Japan provided “no model” for occupying Mesopotamia, Mr Dower wrote in a strikingly prescient 2002 New York Times op-ed, reproduced here. “To rush to war without seriously imagining all its consequences, including its aftermath, is not realism but a terrible hubris.”
He returns to the terrain of “Embracing Defeat”, marvelling at how the vicious racial hatreds of the Pacific war dissipated so quickly, as though “turned off like a spigot”. The lesson for Mr Dower is not only that reluctant civilians must be mobilised by propaganda to fight and die, but also that new realities force new biases.
No side, he argues, launched a more sophisticated propaganda blitz than the Japanese, who saw their “mongrel” enemies as biologically inferior. But they were hardly alone. During the war Americans viewed their Asian rivals as “monkeys” or “rats”, but with the start of the occupation, Japan became an ally. The popular racism in the American media more or less stopped, and stayed buried until the 1970s, when Japan emerged as an economic superpower. This resurrected Japanese stereotypes of “predatory economic animals” in Western suits who were launching a new “financial Pearl Harbor”. The spigot of racial hatred had been turned back on.
When the fighting is finished, history is written, inevitably by those in power, observes Mr Dower. The standard American view of the struggle against Japan is that it was just and moral. But this grants little space for the ghastly side of victory, which included the airborne destruction of 66 cities and the incineration of more than half a million civilians. China and Korea’s political elites have found it endlessly useful to bang the nationalist drum to unite potentially fractious populations against their old enemy. Japanese conservatives have made it easy for them, whitewashing the past and attempting to pass off Imperial Japan’s rampage across Asia as a “holy war” against Western colonialism.
Selective memory is often a harmful feature of children’s education. Japanese high-school textbooks devote impressively little space to the war, reflecting official attempts to “downplay the dark aspects of Japan’s modern history,” writes Mr Dower. For its part, China’s government relies on its struggle against Japanese aggression for its historical legitimacy, so memories of wartime atrocities are kept fresh in schools. This helps to explain the strikingly different public reactions to the current island disputes. While the Chinese angrily take to the streets, the Japanese stay at home and watch it on TV.
For a solution, Mr Dower looks to the 20th-century views of E.H. Norman, a Japan expert and Marxist historian. Like Norman, he feels that most countries need a “revolution from below” against any system that “represses freedom, sacrifices life, and retards the creation of true self-government”. All citizens should be able to challenge the narratives held by elites. At a tense time of toxic nationalism in Asia, this book is a timely reminder of the uses and abuses of history.
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中日圖史
http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/home/vis_menu.html
John W. Dower
Ford International Professor of History, Emeritus
John
Dower, emeritus professor of Japanese history, retired from the History
faculty in 2010 but remains active in MIT's online "Visualizing
Cultures" project, a pioneering website he co-founded in 2002 that
breaks new ground in the scholarly use of visual materials to reexamine
the experience of Japan and China in the modern world. As of 2012,
eleven of the lengthy presentations on this multi-unit site were
authored by him.
Books by Professor Dower include The Elements of Japanese Design, (1971); Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman (1975); Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1876-1945 (1979); A Century of Japanese Photography (edited, 1980); The Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki (co-edited, 1985); War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986); Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (1994); Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999); Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (2010); and Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World (2012). War Without Mercy won several prizes in the United States and Japan, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. Awards for Embracing Defeat include the Pulitzer Proze (for general nonfiction), National Book Award (for nonfiction), Bancroft Prize (for U.S. hisotry), Fairbanks Prize (for history of Asia), Los Angeles Times Book Prize (in history), and two prestigious Japanese prizes for the documentary version of its work. Professor Dower also was executive producer of a documentary titled Hellfire---A Journey from Hiroshima that was a finalist for an academy award in 1988.
Books by Professor Dower include The Elements of Japanese Design, (1971); Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman (1975); Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1876-1945 (1979); A Century of Japanese Photography (edited, 1980); The Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki (co-edited, 1985); War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986); Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (1994); Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999); Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (2010); and Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World (2012). War Without Mercy won several prizes in the United States and Japan, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. Awards for Embracing Defeat include the Pulitzer Proze (for general nonfiction), National Book Award (for nonfiction), Bancroft Prize (for U.S. hisotry), Fairbanks Prize (for history of Asia), Los Angeles Times Book Prize (in history), and two prestigious Japanese prizes for the documentary version of its work. Professor Dower also was executive producer of a documentary titled Hellfire---A Journey from Hiroshima that was a finalist for an academy award in 1988.
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