Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. x, 279 pp. US$62.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5674-8.
Since the 1980s, a widespread recalling of the past violence of Japanese imperialism toward its own people and neighbouring Asians has resulted in growing transnational social activism to seek belated justice in the region. At the same time, there have been growing attempts to homogenize and nationalize the resurging memories of horror and honour, pain and shame. The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia, by Hiro Saito, confronts the entangled histories of recalling and commemorating imperial wars, national defeats, and colonial resistances and liberations in East Asia.
While analyzing the politics of commemorating the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II among China, Japan, and Korea, Saito probes into the conditions and ways to resolve the difficult past among them. This difficult past is represented as a “history problem,” which is exemplified by “interpretations of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, apologies and compensation for foreign victims of Japan’s past aggression, prime ministers’ visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, and Japanese history textbooks” (1). The first chapter delineates the formation of nationalist commemoration in the defeated nation of Japan, with a focus on the negative interpretations of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, also known as the Tokyo Trial. At the same time, this chapter also identifies the formation of the “universalistic frame of commemoration” centred on Japanese A-bomb victims, albeit with “one fundamental flaw” of excluding foreign A-bomb victims (41). Yet, transnational networks to address wartime plights of Koreans and Chinese also began to appear, especially after Japan’s signing of normalization treaties with the Republic of Korea (1965) and the People’s Republic of China (1972). The second chapter introduces the cosmopolitan commemoration activities of Japanese civil society. Still much weaker than nationalist commemoration, such civic activism, nonetheless contributed to the injection of “cosmopolitan logic in a limited way” to Japan’s official commemoration (72). The third chapter then examines the growing tension between nationalist and cosmopolitan commemoration within Japan. This domestic tension was internationally expressed in a series of official apologies for Japan’s past wrongdoings juxtaposed by conservative denunciations, which escalated the history problem in the region by triggering Korean and Chinese nationalist reactions against Japan. The fourth chapter narrates the deepening complication and complexity of the history problem as a result of the competition between cosmopolitan commemoration and nationalist backlash in the years from 1997 to 2015.
Reconstructing the evolution of Japan’s history problem through the dialectic of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, Saito returns to the issue of the Tokyo Trial in the fifth chapter. Both proponents of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, Saito points out, “used the Tokyo Trial as a reference point to articulate their commemorative positions” (129). The former rejected the trial as “victors’ justice,” while the latter embraced the judicial judgement. Problematizing both positions, Saito calls for a critical reassessment of the Tokyo Trial because such reassessment is “the key to challenging nationalist commemorations and resolving the history problem” (153). He argues that the unevenness in assigning responsibility for waging imperialist wars solely on the vanquished nation of Japan undermined the moral legitimacy of the trial and fostered Japanese ambivalence towards their own responsibility for war crimes. “Collective and fair” redistribution of responsibility for the Asia-Pacific War between Japan and the Allied Powers, on the other hand, would facilitate recognition of Japan’s victimhood vis-à-vis the Allied powers, which in turn would allow the Japanese “to empathize with South Korean and Chinese victims in a universalistic manner” (153). Finally, in the sixth chapter, Saito brings into focus the potential role of historians in the critical reflection of the difficult past.
On balance, there is much to applaud in Saito’s study. The accounts of diversified commemorative activities of politicians, lawmakers, NGOs, educators, and intellectuals in Japan are informative and critical. The incorporation of various socio-political frameworks are relevant and insightful. Saito also reviews and incorporates previous studies that discuss the evolution and politics of commemoration in China and South Korea. Although these efforts are commendable, the literature reviews, especially related to the Korean cases, are deficient. Admittedly not all of the important works done by Korean scholars on the history problem are translated into English or Japanese, but most of Saito’s references are nonetheless limited and narrow in that they do not provide the full context of the complex assumptions, interests, and polemics in the Korean politics of commemoration. I was perplexed to read that “the history problem emerged after Japan normalized its diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1965” (15 and chapter 2). As Chong-Sik Lee’s study, Japan and Korea (Stanford: Hoover Institute Press, 1985), which did not appear in Saito’s work, illustrates, the history problem existed in Japan-Korea relations long before 1965, and this problem was the main reason why the normalization process dragged on for more than a decade despite US intervention.
Although our opinions on the origin of the history problem may differ, I agree with Saito’s view that “the cause of the history problem cannot be attributed to Japan alone” (6) and the problem is “relational.” His dichotomous approach to the relational problem, however, is questionable. Whereas “the logic of cosmopolitanism had been already institutionalized in Japan’s official commemoration,” Saito claims, “South Korea and China continued to use nationalism as the dominant logic of commemoration” (128).
The implication here is that overdeveloped Chinese and Korean nationalisms, or underdeveloped Chinese and Korean cosmopolitanisms, are causing Japanese conservative counterattacks. The way to cut the vicious cycle of the history problem is, therefore, to envision a “mutual cosmopolitan commemoration” (188). This form of idealizing cosmopolitanism is 1) theoretically problematic since such a stance denies the ineradicability of collective agency based on particularism in social, national, and international relations, and 2) practically dangerous since the stance downplays Japanese (neo-)nationalism as merely reactionary without political and popular substance. Redressing the history problem in Japan as well as in East Asia is not a question of how to overcome the dichotomy between nationalism and cosmopolitism in order to reach “mutual cosmopolitanism,” but rather how to re-politicize past conflicts and injustices in such a way as to cultivate reflexive nationalisms capable of drawing and redrawing the lines between “us” and “them” in more democratic ways.
Jung-Sun Han
Korea University, Seoul, South Korea