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The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Hiro Saito
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Abstract

This essay summarizes my argument in The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia. The history problem is essentially a relational phenomenon that arises when nations promote self-serving versions of the past by focusing on what happened to their own citizens with little regard for foreign others. East Asia, however, has recently also witnessed the emergence of a cosmopolitan form of commemoration taking humanity, rather than nationality, as its primary frame of reference. When cosmopolitan commemoration is practiced as a collective endeavor by both perpetrators and victims, a resolution of the history problem will finally become possible.

Keywords

East AsiamemorycommemorationhistoryAsia-Pacific Warnationalismcosmopolitanism
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 15 , Issue 15 , August 2017 , e3
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2017

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References

Notes

1 I thank Laura Hein and Mark Selden for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

2 For concrete examples of how this relational dynamic of East Asia's history problem works, see Mikyoung Kim, “Myth and Fact in Northeast Asia's History Textbook Controversies,” Japan Focus, Aug. 1, 2008; Jeff Kingston, “Nanjing's Massacre Memorial: Renovating War Memory in Nanjing and Tokyo,” Japan Focus, Aug. 1, 2008

3 Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider, “Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda,” British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 1 (2006): 1–23.

4 Saito Kazuharu, Chūgoku rekishi kyōkasho to Higashi Ajia rekishi taiwa: Nicchūkan sangoku kyōtsu kyōzai zukuri no genba kara (Tokyo: Kadensha, 2008).

5 Roger Friedland and Robert R. Alford, “Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 232–263.

6 Media Culture Online, “Speech in the Bundestag on 8 May 1985 during the Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the End of War in Europe and of National-Socialist Tyranny”

7 Herbert C. Kelman, “Reconciliation as Identity Change: A Social-Psychological Perspective,” in From Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation, ed. Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 119–120, emphasis in original.

8 Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

9 For example, see how conservative politicians discussed the 2007 U.S. House of Representatives House Resolution 121 at the House of Representatives Cabinet Committee, March 28, 2007.

10 Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

11 Mark Selden has also shown how East Asia's history problem needs to be contextualized in Asia-Pacific, including the United States. “Japanese and American War Atrocities, Historical Memory and Reconciliation: World War II to Today,” Japan Focus, April 1, 2008