Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. x, 356 pp. (Illustrations.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8047-9970-6.
This is the last book of a multi-year project on historical memory in East Asia carried out by Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center. Its three previous publications were all comparative in nature. The same applies here. The authors contrast the views of opinion leaders in China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. They do so by conducting interviews (mainly from December 2009 through August 2010). Their transcripts serve as the main source for the book. Shin and Sneider hold that this approach offers a “critical and fresh understanding” of wartime memories in the region. In my appraisal, however, the final product does not fully live up to this claim.
First, the work is descriptive more than analytical. In the first five chapters, the authors describe the background of twenty people (five for each country), and extensively quote their views on World War II and related issues. Knowing some of the interviewees personally, I enjoyed the biographical vignettes very much. But after having read two hundred pages of various life stories and truncated statements on a myriad of complex issues, I found it difficult to recall who said what. I was also not certain what conclusion to draw from this. Apart from the obvious one: the divisions over the past are deep. They are deep not only between but also within the nations these men represent. This also seems to be the book’s main message (ergo its title: divergent memories). There is nothing wrong with such a thesis. But it will hardly qualify as a fresh insight to those who know the region.
It is probably also not surprising that the scholars reached this verdict given the choice of their method. For one, Shin and Sneider selected individuals who embody a wide range of views: from the very nationalistic to the more progressive. Moreover, they spoke predominantly to intellectuals: mostly historians or other academics and in smaller numbers filmmakers, news editors, human rights activists, and politicians. In such a sample, nuance and diversity of views is naturally more pronounced. The public discourse especially in present-day China or South Korea, however, offers a much cruder picture. Despite this, the scholars hold that the interviewees’ positions reflect the sentiments of the larger civil society (278). But whose opinions? And to what degree? In the same vein, how do we know that their “elite opinion leaders” are the key memory makers in these countries? Is not, for instance, Hata Ikuhiko, Ōe Kenzaburō, or Ishihara Shintarō as influential in the forming of Japanese national memory as Tōgō Kazuhiko (featured in the book)? And can we really say that the impact of Mark Pettie’s scholarship or the activism of Lester Tenney on US public memory carries the same weight as the work of other American scholars, movie directors, or journalists? Simply put, why are certain individuals included in this publication, and amongst those selected, why do some receive substantially more coverage than others? We are never told what methodology lies behind these decisions.
My biggest concern, however, pertains to the limited analytical purchase gained from the interviews themselves. Shin and Sneider asked their subjects open-ended questions about thorny historical problems. But the answers that appear in the book tend to be superficial. To queries about the Nanjing Massacre, the atomic bombing of Japanese cities, the role of China in Japan’s defeat, and so forth, we typically get a few lines or less in response. This is understandably a product of constraints in time and space (applies both to the interview and the publishing process). But it is precisely because of these constraints that I question the usefulness of this method in this context. These doubts are further amplified by the fact that most of the respondents have already spoken or written about these topics in a much more sophisticated manner elsewhere. One feels the need to revisit these sources. And indeed, that is what Shin and Sneider do with some individuals. For instance, in the chapter featuring Mark Pettie, John Dower, and Iris Chang, they cite from previous publications more than they rely on the newly collected material. At times, the book therefore reads more like a review of already well-known literature.
The last hundred pages give likewise the impression that the interviews did not produce sufficient (or sufficiently interesting) material upon which an entire manuscript could be based. The Stanford scholars implicitly acknowledge this when they start reusing some of the older data from their project on high-school textbooks (Shin and Sneider, History textbooks and the wars in Asia: divided memories, London: Routledge, 2011). The concluding essay underscores this problem as well. Instead of providing a synthesis of the varied messages and ideas contained in the interviews, the authors skip them altogether. Nor do they attempt to theorize more deeply on the potential link between the biographical data and their respondents’ positions. Given how much energy was spent on these issues in the first two-thirds of the publication, this is rather surprising. And a necessary closure is missing.
Lastly, I would like to comment on the style in which the book is written. I am not certain how much the style reflects the publisher’s decisions, but throughout the text, we find explanations of some of the most basic terms and concepts. Repetition of arguments and information that is well known is not uncommon. As an extreme example, consider chapter 10. Here at the beginning, the authors go on to list all of the fifty-two attendees to the San Francisco treaty in the main body of the text. This listing in no way advances their argument. I believe that ridding the work of such passages, and writing it with an assumption of greater knowledge on the part of the readership, would have greatly improved the end product. It would have also forced the authors to offer more on the analytical side.
Professor Shin and Sneider are excellent scholars. They have contributed substantially to the studies of memory and reconciliation in Asia already. I am afraid, however, that this publication will not have the same impact in the academic community as their previous titles.
Ivo Plšek
University of California, Berkeley, USA
pp. 779-781