Negotiating War Legacies and Postwar Democracy in Japan

Abstract

Abstract This article surveys the ongoing struggles over legacies of World War II within Japan's postwar history. As in Europe, different types of responsibility for the wartime past manifested themselves in changing international and domestic contexts and continuously redefined the relationships between victors, perpetrators of crimes, survivors, and a growing population for whom the war — and increasingly the postwar past — registered only as memory. Under the Allied occupation, Japan's criminal past loomed large in war crimes trials, political reforms, and intellectual discourse but contributed mightily to the deep divisions that have characterized Japan's political landscape ever since. Struggles over Japan's militarist past animated these domestic political divisions through the 1970s over questions of history textbooks, commemorations of the war dead, social relations, as well as Japan's compromised position within Cold War Asia. Globalisation processes beginning in the 1980s brought Japan's colonial past to the fore as questions of individual compensation and state reconciliation began to connect formerly domestic struggles over the legacies of the war to the international politics of historical memory. Both the chronology and the political uses of the wartime past followed a different pattern from Europe, not only because of stark differences between the wars themselves but more critically because of the historical developments that kept Asia as a region divided for decades.