Routledge Studies in Education and Society in Asia. London; New York: Routledge, 2013. xv, 264 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$155.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-71399-3.
East Asia has enjoyed a long period of relative peace since the end of the Vietnam War some four decades ago, a peace undergirded by the remarkable economic growth of the region. While the unresolved problems of the Cold War, most notably the divided Korean peninsula, remain a source of tension, the postwar structure of order in East Asia has been unusually stable. A principal source of that stability and order has been the role of Japan, resurgent from the destruction of World War Two as an engine of economic growth and the pillar of the American-led system of alliances in the region.
The East Asian order is increasingly under stress, however. Globalization produces stresses on social and political systems, as well as inter-state relations. New powers such as South Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia seek a greater role in the region. And most powerfully, China claims its place as the new regional hegemon, an aspiring equal to the United States as a great power, at least in East Asia. These forces combine to create political and cultural changes within East Asian societies, manifest in the search for forms of national identity that can serve the needs of the state and society.
Japan occupies an important role in the construction of national identity across East Asia. As the first Asian nation to achieve the status of a modern nation state, one capable of challenging the Western powers, it was a role model for many in Asia. But there is another Japan, the “dominant Other,” which embarked on a path of imperial aggression, colonial occupation and invasion earlier in this century, leaving a legacy of mistrust that remains stubbornly intact.
Images of Japan continue to play a critical role today in the formation of national identity in East Asia, most obviously in the nationalist ideologies of China and Korea but even elsewhere in the region. But those images can vary widely, not only over time within each society but also between nations, some of whom embrace the image of Japan as a model of modernization much more than as a perpetrator of aggression.
What is most disturbing to observers of contemporary events is the degree to which anti-Japanese sentiments, driven by historical memories of the wartime period that are encouraged and sharpened by governments, are now dominating relations in Northeast Asia. The Sino-Japanese rivalry is most worrisome, raising the specter even of armed conflict, but the tensions now prevailing between Japan and South Korea are equally entrenched.
This volume offers a valuable contribution to the literature on the formation of national identity in East Asia through its focus on how the images of Japan shape that process of identity construction. The volume looks at the images of Japan through two comparative lenses. At the broadest level, the volume is broken down into two sections: one examines the images of Japan in popular culture and public propaganda and the second looks at the portrayal of Japan in school textbooks, which is a form of official discourse in most Asian countries due to the role of the state in the content and publication of school textbooks. The second comparative dimension is between nations: the volume provides varied studies of the images of Japan in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines in Southeast Asia, and of Japan in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong in Northeast Asia. The volume is also comparative in a disciplinary sense in that the contributors work in a variety of academic fields from education, culture and history, to the social sciences.
In the comparison between Southeast and Northeast Asia, across both popular culture and textbooks, the volume offers evidence that in Southeast Asia the images of Japan tend to emphasize its use as a normative model, rather than dwelling on its wartime past. The “learn from Japan” campaign in Singapore, for example, was a valuable tool for the regime’s own developmental model. The view of Japan in South Korea and China is quite different, though not necessarily uniformly negative. In an interesting contribution on the depiction of Japanese in Chinese war films, Kinnia Yau Shuk-tin points to the emergence of “good Japanese” characters who offer a more subtle portrait of Japanese than the previously Manichean portrayals found in Communist Chinese propaganda movies about the war.
The discussion of popular culture is necessarily somewhat anecdotal in nature, given the scope of the subject. The most cogent and useful section of this book deals with textbooks. In particular there is an excellent contribution from Caroline Rose on changing views of the Sino-Japanese war in Chinese high-school history textbooks, which have been revised to reflect a more “patriotic” and anti-Japan narrative, downplaying the previous emphasis on the civil war struggle against the Nationalists. Other chapters, such as Alisa Jones’ detailed examination of Taiwanese textbooks and Paul Morris and Edward Vickers’ chapter on Hong Kong textbooks provide useful contrasts with the Chinese textbooks. And finally there are very fresh additions to the literature in chapters on the images of Japan in the textbooks of Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
As the editors of this volume stress in their introduction, this is a study of how images of Japan are constructed and the plasticity of their use in neighbouring Asian societies. It is not a study of how Japanese themselves have acted to construct a self-image, or to portray themselves to others, and most importantly, not a study of how closely those images actually track reality. And equally important, this does not look at how other foreign nations, such as the United States, might also impact the formation of national identity in East Asia. But it does assert, and quite correctly, that: “Understanding how and why portrayals of Japan have become so intertwined with the construction of identity in many societies across the region is an essential precondition for steps—that must follow—to untangle image from reality, and prevent the war of minds from becoming a war of men” (23).
Daniel Sneider
Stanford University, Stanford, USA
pp. 317-319