Enabling International History Wars: Everyday Mnemonic Foreign Policy in South Korean and Japanese Popular Culture

In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of memory in world politics. Within this literature, contentious memory politics have been shown to play an outsized role in many international relationships, especially among post-Soviet states and in Northeast Asia. Most existing scholarship on such international “history wars,” however, has tended to privilege explanation of their official diplomatic conduct, unproblematically assuming the existence of a social reality in which this conduct is possible and makes sense in a national context. To address this, in this article, I draw from critical understandings of foreign policy and research on popular culture and world politics to theorize how, what I term, the everyday mnemonic foreign policy practices of popular culture materials, through their construction of understandings of the past and identities of Self and Other in relation to this past, contribute to making possible, imaginable, and even common-sensical the official conduct of international history wars. To illustrate this phenomenon, I analyze Japanese and South Korean popular culture materials to demonstrate the role they play in (re)producing a mnemonic social reality through which the conflictual official diplomatic conduct of the so-called “history problem” between these countries is enabled.