Japan's History Problem: Agency, Violence, and the Limits of Decolonizing History
Embargo until
2019-12-01
Date
2015-10-15
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Publisher
Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
If history-writing and modern forms of colonialism have been complicit with one another, how can we decolonize history-writing? The public appearance of former “comfort” women in 1992 and their demand for apology and acknowledgment have ushered in a new level of urgency in thinking through the relationship between history-writing and decolonization in post-Cold War Japan. Postcolonial critics of history-writing’s relationship to a Eurocentric world order elucidate how history-writing can exclude and thus marginalize and silence the non-European Other. If history-writing, or what Chakrabarty calls historicism, pertains solely to denial of one’s agency, then the antidote would be to assert one’s agency against such denial as a form of resistance. Still, examining modern Japan’s engagement with Western history-writing and its aftermath since 1945, where contentions over proper modes of history-writing persist as a “history problem (rekishi mondai)” between the former empire and its victim states, elucidates the need to rethink the potential and limits of decolonizing history. Through discourse analysis of writings by Yukichi Fukuzawa, Ukichi Taguchi, Kiyoshi Miki, and Norihiro Kato, I identify that historicism as a historiographical concept embodies at least two versions and thus implications. The first is a historicism which denies the agency of those who are deemed as being “backward” in relation to linear progressive history; the second is historicism which affirms agency, individuality, and particularity against Western claims to universality. The first type of historicism appeared ascendant in early Meiji period until 1890s, the second type affirmed and legitimated Japanese imperialism in Asia in the 1930s and 40s in the name of creating an alternative new world order and culture. Taken together, the discourse over how to decolonize history since 1945 is bound by two kinds of limits of historicism—the denial of agency is problematic, but so was the assertion of agency in the name of making Japan the subject of history as a sovereign nation among others.
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Keywords
decolonization, historicism, history writing, East Asia, Japan, war memory, narrative, post colonialism, history problem