Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge Series, 49. London; New York: Routledge, 2014. xvi, 233 pp. US$140.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-70771-8.
Who are the main grass-root champions of progressive memory politics in Japan today? How are they organized? What are their goals? What is their relationship with the public, the state, and overseas actors? And finally how effective have they been in influencing the Japanese national memory landscape? This book offers answers to these questions. It is original in that it covers five civil society groups that have not yet been examined. It is also timely. It focuses on the latest period of 1990 to 2012 and updates the thus far published literature on this subject.
The five organizations under study—The Center of Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility, Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21, Violence Against Women in War Network Japan, Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, and POW Research Network Japan—are highly diverse in their structure, size, and focus area. What they share, however, is a desire to educate the public and push the Japanese state to assume greater responsibility for the Japanese wartime past. How successful have they been? Not too successful. As the author acknowledges, they have neither been able to stop the conservative onslaught on the positive policies of the early 1990s, nor have they brought any changes to Japan’s redress practices. Nevertheless the author’s overall evaluation seems to be positive. The existence of the groups and their activities are proof to Szczepanska that Japanese civil society is neither bereft of “civil advocates,” nor politically apathetic or dominated by historical revisionism.
Reading the book, however, one might reach a different conclusion. As is shown, the combined membership of the five associations reaches 7,750. Rival organizations such as the Nihon Izokukai list 1 million members and the Japanese radical right lists approximately 100,000. Anticipating this charge, Szczepanska stresses twice that not numbers but political clout matters in civil activism. Yet, later we learn that none of the five groups have had regular access to Japanese mainstream media or influential political elites (whereas their right-wing opponents do). Moreover, some of the greatest accomplishments of these groups—such as the staging of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal or the pressure put on the Japanese government through the UN to address the issue of comfort women—were largely ignored in Japan. The same applies to the establishment of the WAM museum, which has so far attracted 2,000 visitors per year (hardly comparable to its rivals such as the Yasukuni’s Yūshūkan Museum with 250,000 visitors annually). In short, more than a vigorous progressive civil society, the evidence presented in this book points to a trend many have been observing since the mid-1990s: a drastic decline in the strength, organizational capability and political relevance of the Japanese Left and its progressive movement.
The book also documents another problem that is often discussed in the literature on Japan: the relative amateurishness with which its civil society actors approach political activism. Here it especially applies to the use of the Internet. The five groups’ websites are inexpert and fragmentary; updates are irregular and mostly in Japanese; English content is limited and Korean and Chinese translations non-existent. Szczepanska explains that this is mainly due to the age of the organizations’ members and their lack of funding and staff. But, it is precisely for this reason that the Internet needs to be their priority. A relatively small effort can significantly improve the groups’ communicative capabilities and help them reach critical target audiences that have thus far eluded them: the Japanese youth and overseas actors. In fact, the Chinese and Koreans (also great potential sources for funding) have shown considerable interest in such contacts in the past but were hampered by a lack of appropriate communication channels. Szczepanska does not discuss this in the book.
Neither is she too critical of the five groups’ unwillingness (or inability?) to seek greater support from Japanese policy makers. In her chapter on the relationship between the two, the scholar mostly analyzes their antagonistic relationship with the Liberal Democratic Party. As for potential partners—the Democratic Party of Japan, Social Democratic Party or the Japanese Communist Party—the activists seem to prefer interdependence over closer endorsement by these parties. They do not display a strong will to spread their message or expand their membership, either. An introduction by existing members is necessary for entry into some of these associations. And much of the groups’ communications remain internal while their publications are for sale only. As such, the citizen groups appear to operate as self-contained units within the limits of what is comfortable. Or, as Szczepanska seems to argue, they are civil advocates doing their best in an increasingly difficult conservative environment. Such a lenient evaluation, however, fails to explain why they have attracted so little attention from the Japanese public—a public which largely agrees with their message as the author herself suggests.
The lack of a more critical analysis of the groups’ activities and achievements is a major shortcoming of this work. It is likely linked to the Szczepanska’s over-reliance on the main sources of this research: the organizations’ publications and interviews with their members. Too often the book simply reads as a report based on the self-reporting of the groups themselves. Moreover, there are many passages, such as chapter 2, that add very little to the overall argument and should have been left out. The book’s coherence and utility would have also greatly improved if each group received a separate chapter treatment rather than being treated in a lump. Last but not least, the author explores civil society activism without ever properly introducing its main protagonists. This is a serious flaw as the reader is not allowed to fully understand the many personal linkages that exist between the groups’ leaders and the fact that their circle is fairly limited. One can also not assess their social position in the larger Japanese society and hence the import of the organizations they represent.
In sum, this is the most up-to-date research on Japanese progressive activism in the area of memory politics in the last decade. Those who are seriously interested in this subject might find useful information in this book. Overall, though, the publication leaves much room for improvement.
Ivo Plsek
University of California, Berkeley, USA