Can It Be a Gamechanger? Interrogating the Prospects of Decolonization Through Public History in Japan

Abstract

As a historical settler and colonizer in Asia, yet a state not colonized by European countries, Japan and its colonial history seem to have been left out from the debates on public history as a decolonizing process, due to the field having arguably been Eurocentric. This article interrogates the extent to which public history could serve as a vehicle to decolonize the history-making process in Japan and demonstrates the challenges of decolonizing through public history within Japan’s national framework due to nationalistic or patriotic silencing and censorship. Such nationalistic public history is rooted in Japan’s narratives of victimhood fostered in its course of history, including the ‘inferior’ position against the West or the experience of the atomic bombs. Moreover, Japan’s historical division between the internal and external colonies as well as its nationalistic, defensive attitude towards the history of external colonialism have played significant roles in burying its settler colonial past. To include narratives about the internal and external colonial victims, I argue that both Eurocentric decolonization and academia-centered public history in Japan need to be, in themselves, decolonized so that they provide more nuanced approaches to Japan’s colonial past. Furthermore, given that narratives of the colonial past in national history projects can be silenced under nationalistic victimhood, this article suggests that transnational collaborative public history could disconnect historical narratives from nationalistic discourses of victimhood, gathering more sympathy beyond Japan and supporting efforts towards decolonization. The overall article eventually contributes to decolonizing the Eurocentric debates on ‘decolonization through public history.’