Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan, 1945-2001
Author(s): Sebastian Conrad
Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 38, No. 1, Redesigning the Past (Jan., 2003),
pp. 85-99
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3180698
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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryCopyright? 2003 SAGEPublications,London,ThousandOaks,CAand
New Delhi,Vol 38(I), 85-99.
[0022-0094(200301)38:1 ;85-99;029965]
SebastianConrad
Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in
Germany and Japan, 1945-2001
In the history of memory, the national paradigm continues to reign supreme.
This may come as a surprise at a time when the historical profession is
beginning to discard the category of the nation and starting to produce transnational
work. International comparisons and relational histories, and also the
largerframeworks of European, post-colonial, or world history gradually seem
to be replacing the narrow confines of the nineteenth-century paradigm of
national history.
Studies of memory, however, continue to cling to the nation with a peculiar
stubbornness. Remembering and forgetting are the means through which
nations confront their respective pasts. At the same time, nations appear as
the products of memory - forged into imagined communities through a series
of memorial days, public speeches and visits to memorial sites. Within this
scheme, an idealized or traumatic moment is remembered internally in
metaphors of a 'past that does not go away'. Memory thus appears as largely
a temporal relation between significant moments in the national past that
linger on as memories for generations to come. In the cases of postwar
Germany and Japan, the past and the present are severed through historical
rupturesand 'zero hours' which, it is held, need to be bridged in order to come
to terms with a traumatic experience that haunts both societies. From this
perspective, memory appears as the almost direct expression of a national
mentality, indicative of a nation's ability to mourn, to learn and to mature (by
overcoming narrow nationalist perspectives).1
The language of temporality thus produces the familiar image of the
interpretation of the past as a matter of national culture. The conventional
picture of Japan as inherently unable to deal critically with her aggressive and
expansionist history falls in this category. This 'inability' and 'deficiency' is
frequently couched in cultural terms and explained as the product of national
character.2The German preoccupation with the nazi past, on the other hand,
is attributed to a process of collective learning. Daniel Goldhagen's thesis
1 The 'ability to mourn', of course, refers to Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich,
Die Unfdhigkeit zu trauern (Miinchen 1968).
2 Even Ian Buruma's masterful Wages of Guilt. Memories of War in Germany and Japan
(London 1994) is not free from such a tendency.
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol38 No I
that innate German antisemitism has only been successfully overcome since
1945 is just the latest version of this culturalist paradigm.3
Apart from the unifying tendencies of such accounts - that homogenize
the nation synchronically as memory-community, and diachronically across
generations - this perspective conveys an almost xenophobic negligence of
factors associated with the outside of the national territory. The history of
memory is portrayed through a 'tunnel vision' of the past, where the influence
of and entanglements with other national memories are marginalized.
Memory is thus depicted as the last realm of national autonomy. But can we
interpret, to give only one example, the famous visit by Japanese Prime
Minister Nakasone to the Yasukuni shrine in 1982 - to honour the war dead
at a memorial site symbolically appropriated by nationalist groups - only in
terms of internal Japanese developments? Could we not read this particular
event as an articulation with a global context that can for illustrative purposes
be associated with the names of Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and Ronald
Reagan? The Nakasone visit would then appear not only as the expression of
an 'evasive' Japanese mentality, but also a part of a global situation that three
years later produced the reconciliation ceremony at Bitburg with Kohl and
Reagan standing hand in hand at a military cemetery.
Interpretations of the past, this would imply, do not originate and develop
within one country but rather must be understood as the product of the connection
and exchange between different discourses and practices. 'Mastering
the Past' (Vergangenheitsbewdltigung)was by no means only a German affair,
'war responsibility' (senso sekinin) was never exclusively a Japanese concern.
The seemingly national discourse on what were considered problematic
legacies of war and violence was always inscribed into larger transnational
contexts. Against the grain of much recent debate that treats memory as the
last vestige of a national 'culture',4it seems promising to wrestle the complex
processes of remembering and forgetting from the phantasma of autonomy
and to read them as 'entangled memories'.
The term 'entangled memories' does not refer so much to the fact that the
past which is remembered- the object of memory - must itself be placed in
a transnational context and be seen as a product of processes of exchange and
influence. Instead, it focuses on the moment of memory production which is
seen not only as an attempt to connect to the individual or collective past, but
also as the effect of a multitude of complex impulses in the present. The
history of memory production, moreover, is a process of entanglement rather
than a 'shared history' suggesting the hope for consensual interpretations of
the past. There have been endeavours to arrive at an uncontested and shared
version of the past, most notably in the German-Polish (and, more recently,
3 Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(London 1996).
4 PierreNora's project Les Lieux de Memoire, 7 vols (Paris 1984-92) comes readily to mind.
86
Conrad:VersionsofthePastinGermanyandJapan,1945-2001
Japanese-Korean)project of writing a common history textbook.5 Against this
nostalgia for a 'pure' and 'objective' (and therefore uncontroversial) account
of past reality, the term 'entanglement' stresses the asymmetrical relations and
interactions that produce different and conflicting accounts of the past.
A focus on the entangled histories of memory in West Germany and Japan
can help to contextualize and situate the postwar experience in both countries
and thus to render more complex a story frequently caught in the stereotypes
of divergent national characteristics. In particular, the outburst of controversies
over issues of memory in Japan since the 1990s demands clarification. Has
Japan finally caught up with the West German model of coming to terms with
its past, as many commentators would have it? Must the increase of critical
voices be read as attesting to a learning process and a willingness to take
responsibility for the atrocities and crimes in the nation's past? Can the
current debates be understood as yet another example of Japan as the 'latecomer',
this time to the critical turn West Germanmemory had witnessed since
the 1960s? A comparative perspective that reads the history of memory in
both countries as 'entangled memories' may help to eschew the forms of cultural
essentialization so frequently employed and instead situate Japanese
memory in a largercontext. Rather than interpretingthe virtual 'explosion' of
discussions about the past as an expression of political maturation, I will
argue, they must be understood as what could be called the 'Return of Asia'.
In the early years after 1945, memories of the war in both Germany and Japan
were already situated in a context that transcended the nation state. The point
of reference in both countries was first and foremost the USA, not least
because remembering happened in the context of the American occupation.6
Both Japanese debates on the 'dark valley' (kurai tanima) of fascism and the
attempts to come to terms with the 'evil past' of the Third Reich in Germany
cannot be understood without taking American interventions into account.
The American presence, permeating interpretations of the past, made itself
felt in different forms. Not all influence was direct, and not every taboo was
made explicit. Perhaps it is no exaggeration, however, to say that what was
remembered and forgotten in postwar Germany and Japan was already prestructured.
As Eto Jun has remarked, Japanese understanding of past events
5 See Wolfgang Jacobmeyer (ed.), Zum padagogischen Ertrag der deutsch-polnischen Schulbuchkonferenzen
der Historiker 1972-1987 (Braunschweig 1989); Fujisawa H6ei, 'Nihon no
rekishi ky6kasho mondai to Nikkan ky6kasho kenkyfi no igi' in Yamazaki Yasushi and Ronald
Ruprecht (eds), Rekishi to aidentiti. Nihon to doitsu ni totte no 1945nen (Kyoto 1993), 407-16.
6 While in Japan the occupation was essentially an American affair, West Germany was occupied
by French, English and American troops. In the educational and academic spheres, however,
American policies soon emerged as the most important factor. SeeJohannes Weyer, Westdeutsche
Soziologie 1945-1960. Deutsche Kontinuitaten und nordamerikanischer Einflug/ (Berlin 1984),
308-10.
87
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol38 No I
happened within a closed discursive space.7 The unprecedented and highly
publicized war crimes trials held in Nuremberg and Tokyo were among the
more direct interventions with the side-effect of producing an authoritative
master narrative of the war. In both cases, the political and military leaders
were severed from the larger population and held responsible for expansion
and atrocities - to different degrees, however. In Germany, the population
had to undergo individual denazification, and a number of subsequent trials
extended the circle of perpetrators. In Japan, however, no follow-up trials
complemented the Tokyo trial, and even the emperor was exempted from
indictment.8
The war crimes trials had long-lasting effects, particularly in Japan, where
even today the 'war crimes trial view of history' (Tokyo saiban shikan) is a
frequent object of denunciation from the nationalist fringe.9Some of the more
direct interventions, however, had more ephemeral effects. They included
purges in universities when representativesof an older interpretation of history
that had by now become obsolete were expelled from academe."?The enunciative
space for interpretations of the past was further delimited by the institution
of censorship. In both countries, the central objects of national commemoration
were subject to restrictive measures by the occupation authorities. In
Japan, coverage of the atomic bomb explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
was largely prohibited, and photographic documentary was banned. Only
after the end of the occupation in 1952 were pictures of the catastrophic event
published in major newspapers."'In Germany, it was the resistance movement
of the Twentieth of July that attracted the attention of the censors. From the
perspective of the occupation forces, the largely aristocratic composition of
7 Et6 Jun, Tozasareta gengo kukan. Senry6gun no ken'etsu to sengo Nihon (Tokyo 1994);
idem, Wasureta koto to wasuresaserareta koto (Tokyo 1979). For the continuity to wartime
censorship see Sat6 Takumi, 'The System of Total War and the Discursive Space of the War on
Thought' in Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann and Ryfiichi Narita (eds), Total War and
'Modernization' (Ithaca, NY 1998), 289-314.
8 On the effects of the American occupation in Germany see Walter L. Dorn, 'Die Debatte iiber
die amerikanische Besatzungspolitik fur Deutschland (1944-45)', Vierteljahrsheftefur Zeitgeschichte,
6 (1958), 60-77. For Japan, see Richard H. Minear, Victors' Justice. The Tokyo War
Crimes Trial (Tokyo 1972); Awaya Kentar6, Tokyo saibanron (Tokyo 1989); Hosoya Chihiro et
al. (eds), The Tokyo War Crimes Trial. An International Symposium (Tokyo 1986).
9 Prominent examples of this tendency are the interpretations put forward by the 'Association
for a liberalist view on history' (Jiyushugishikan kenkyukai) led by Fujioka Nobukatsu. See Rikki
Kersten, 'Neo-nationalism and the "Liberal School of History"', Japan Forum, 11 (1999), 191-
203; Aaron Gerow, 'Consuming Asia, Consuming Japan: The New Neonationalistic Revisionism
in Japan' in Laura Hein and Mark Selden (eds), Censoring History. Citizenship and Memory in
Japan, Germany, and the United States (London 2000), 74-95.
10 For Germany, see Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munchen
1993), 121-30; for Japan, see Yamamoto Reiko, Senry6ka ni okeru ky6shoku tsuiho. GHQ,
SCAP monjo ni yoru kenkyu (Tokyo 1994).
11 John Dower, Embracing Defeat. Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York 1999),
405-40; Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed. American Censorship in Occupied Japan
(New York/London 1991); Horiba Kiyoko, Genbaku. Hy6gen to kenetsu (Tokyo 1995).
88
Conrad:VersionsofthePastinGermanyandJapan,1945-2001
the resistance group seemed to make it unsuitable as a starting-point for the
democratization of German society. The first studies on the planned assassination
of Hitler in the bomb plot of 1944, therefore, had to be published in
Switzerland or the USA.12
While the bulk of American measures was prohibitive in character, there
were instances of prescription as well. In Japan, an American version of the
Pacific War was serialized in all national newspapers in autumn 1945. It used
'unimpeachable sources' to present the 'truth' about the recent past 'until the
story of Japanese war guilt has been fully bared in all its details'.13In addition,
a radio documentary with the title 'This is the truth!' (shinso wa k6 da) was
broadcast between December 1945 and February 1946, to inculcate the
American version of the Japanese past into the minds of the Japanese people.14
In Germany, documentary films showing the liberation of concentration
camps were shown to a population that in addition was confronted with its
genocidal past through a series of large-scale posters displayed in various
German cities.15
The intervention of the occupation forces contributed to and reinforced a
number of striking similarities in West German and Japanese interpretations
of the recent past. At the same time, however, the transnational context can
help to explain one of the most striking differences - namely the persistence
of a largely conservative orientation among German historians (who remained
pledged to the methodological tenets of a 'politically and morally tamed historicism')16that
contrasted sharply with the strong influence which Marxism
had on postwar Japanese scholarship. Marxist historiography, it is true, was
by no means a postwar invention. Particularlyin the field of economic history,
it can be traced back to the late 1920s. The intensive 'debate on Japanese
capitalism' (Nihon shihonshugi ronso) that raged in the early 1930s was the
most notable example of the new perspective. In the course of the following
years, however, these discussions were subdued and their protagonists gradually
removed from Japanese academe. After defeat in 1945, Marxist scholars
12 Ulrich v. Hassel, Vom anderen Deutschland (Zurich 1946); Fabian v. Schlabrendorff,
Offiziere gegen Hitler (Zurich 1946); Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler (Chicago
1948). This taboo was only overcome when the renowned historian Hans Rothfels translated his
account into German in 1949. See PeterSteinbach, 'Widerstand im Dritten Reich - die Keimzelle
der Nachkriegsdemokratie? Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Widerstand in der historischen politischen
Bildungsarbeit, in den Medien und in der offentlichen Meinung nach 1945' in Gerd R.
Ueberschar (ed.), Der 20 Juli 1944. Bewertung und Rezeption des deutschen Widerstandesgegen
das NS-Regime (Koln 1994), 79-100.
13 GHQ (General Headquarters United States Army Forces, Pacific), Historical Articles on the
War in the Pacific, GHQ/SCAP-Records in the National Diet LibraryTokyo, Sheet No. CIE (D)
05235, 05236, Box No. 5869, Classification No. 840, 800, 000 and No. 000, 840, 1.
14 Takeyama Akiko, 'Senry6ka no h6s6 - "shins6 wa k6 da"' in Minami Hiroshi (ed.), Zoku:
Sh6wa bunka 1945-1989 (Tokyo 1990).
15 Cornelia Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung. Offentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus
nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Berlin 1998).
16 Ernst Schulin, Traditionskritik und Rekonstruktionsversuch. Studien zur Entwicklung von
Geschichtswissenschaft und historischem Denken (Gottingen 1979), 140.
89
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol38 No I
were called back to the universities, and historical materialism soon emerged
as the most influential school of interpretation that for almost a decade effectively
silenced the more traditional (and conservative) historians.17
This emergence of a Marxist intellectual hegemony was thus the continuation
of a longer trend, at the same time colluding with occupation politics. For
as unlikely as it may seem, US pressure to reinstate oppositional academics in
their former positions primarilyreferredto Marxist scholars, due to their antiwar
stance regularly termed 'friend of America' in the occupation documents.
But apart from purges, reinstatements and the politics of personnel, in the
early postwar years there was an astonishing degree of consensus between the
occupation forces and Japanese Marxists. In particular, the sweeping reform
programme that the American headquarters had designed for postwar Japan
- a new constitution, the limitation of the power of the zaibatsu, and,
most important, a thorough land reform - met with approval from Marxist
academics. The American reforms were based on the conviction that feudal
remnants characterizedJapanese society and polity, and they seemed to represent
the kind of modernization - a 'bourgeois revolution' - that in Marxist
eyes had long been overdue.18
In West Germany, the notion of structural deficits that made fascism seem
like a logical result rather than a temporary aberration - a notion the
Japanese Marxists so readily embraced - was received far less favourably
among historians. In fact, most reacted polemically against views propagated
by the adviser to the BritishForeign Office, Lord Vansittart, who conceived of
continuities 'from Bismarck to Hitler'.19The negligible role that early variations
of a 'Sonderweg thesis' played in West Germany - in its Japanese incarnation
common currency in the early postwar decades - had a great deal
to do with the fact that the personal composition of the historical profession
remained largely unchanged. In addition, however, the aversion to interpretations
of historical continuity must be situated within the context of what can
provisionally be described as a division of labour between East and West
German historians. To the degree that the interpretation of the 'German catastrophe'
as a necessary outcome of German history gained hegemonic status in
East Germany, it lost credibility among West German historians.20
West German historiography was thus inscribed into a matrix, with the USA
and East Germany as the two principal points of reference. This double per-
17 Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton,
NJ 1986).
18 Sebastian Conrad, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation. Geschichtsschreibung in
Westdeutschland und Japan 1945-1960 (Gottingen 1999), 88-114.
19 Joachim Radkau, 'Die Exil-Ideologie vom "anderen Deutschland" und die Vansittartisten.
Eine Untersuchung uiberdie Einstellung der deutschen Emigranten nach 1933 zu Deutschland',
Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B 2 (1970), 31-48; Jean Solchany, Comprendre le nazisme dans
L'Allemagne des annees zero (1945-1949) (Paris 1997), 5-24.
20 For East German historiography, see Martin Sabrow, Das Diktat des Konsenses. Geschichtswissenschaft
in der DDR 1949-1969 (Muinchen2001).
90
Conrad:Versionsofthe PastinGermanyandjapan,1945-2001
spective was particularly evident in the historiography of the nazi period now
undertaken under the label of 'contemporary history' (Zeitgeschichte). The
interpretations of the recent past, it was held, had to be wrestled from distortions
by American historians who did not have direct experience of dictatorship
and consequently lacked the ability to 'understand' life in a totalitarian
state. Only those who had lived through the Third Reich and 'themselves
stood the test of the times' seemed eligible to interpret German history.2'From
its inception, one of the purposes of the newly-founded Institute for Contemporary
History in Munich was to keep interpretations of the recent past
firmly in German hands. The director of the institute, Hermann Mau, proclaimed
in 1950: 'Research into the history of National Socialism is a German
task.'22At the same time, West German Zeitgeschichte was set against the
emerging East German orthodoxy and stressed the possibility of unfettered
scholarship, free from propagandistic purposes. The focus on the German
opposition to Hitler, for example, was thus not only meant to complement
Anglo-American views but at the same time to correct the distortions and
'pseudo-truths from the East'.23
While in West Germany interpretations of the recent past were frequently
indexed with this double reference, in Japan the principal orientation
remained towards the USA. The voices of the neighbouring Asian countries
hardly contributed to the views taken on the wartime past. To some extent,
these two aspects were interrelated. The hegemonic role of the USA, undiminished
after the end of the occupation as a result of the Cold War, also reinforced
an ignorance of Chinese or Korean perspectives. A particularlytelling
example concerned the naming of the war which until 1945 had been glorified
as the 'Greater East Asian War' (daitoa senso), a term prohibited during the
occupation. Instead, 'Pacific war' was introduced as the official name of the
second world war in Japan. This term, however, highlights certain aspects of
the conflict, namely the Japanese war against the USA beginning with the
attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The long period of fighting on the Asian
mainland with its estimated toll of over 20 million Chinese lives is marginalized.24These
terminological interventions during occupation days were not
simply forced upon the Japanese, however, but were appropriated and internalized.
When historian lenaga Saburo wrote a new history of the war in
1968, he produced a Marxist narrativethat focused on the events in China. He
nevertheless chose to call his book 'The Pacific War' because otherwise (as he
21 Hans Rothfels, Die deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler. Eine Wiirdigung (Krefeld 1949), 11.
22 Quoted from Institut fur Zeitgeschichte (ed.), 25 Jahre Institut fir Zeitgeschichte. Statt einer
Festschrift (Munchen 1975), 27.
23 Paul Kluke, 'Aufgaben und Methoden zeitgeschichtlicher Forschung', Europa-Archiv, 10
(1955), 7429-38, here 7433.
24 Richard Minear, 'Nihon no rekishika to sens6. 1945-1965nen' in Nakamura Masanori et al.
(eds), Sengo Nihon. Senry6 to sengo kaikaku, vol. 5: Kako no seisan (Tokyo 1995), 133-56.
91
Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol38 No I
admitted in the preface) he would have anticipated the readership's ignorance
of what the book was about.25Some of the discursive effects of American interventions
lived on after the occupation forces had left.
At the same time, the example shows that the privileged position of the USA
colluded in the marginalization of Japan's military involvement in China and
Korea during the war. In the 1960s and 1970s, this was not an exceptional
phenomenon but rather part of a general pattern. It illustrates what Karatani
Kojin has called the 'De-Asianization' of Japanese postwar discourse.26In a
sense, this can be interpreted as a continuation of earlier attempts to 'escape
from Asia' (datsu-a) and write Japan into the history of the modern West. In
the field of memory, this led to partial amnesia about Japan's expansionist
past. Japanese victimization of other Asian nations and the history of Japanese
violence on the Asian mainland remained largely undiscussed. The war
appeared, in the first place, as a conflict between Japan and the USA. The
atrocities committed on the Asian mainland - the Nanjing massacre, the
biochemical experiments of Unit 731, the forced prostitution throughout Asia
- were excluded from debate. In Japanese discourse, 'Asia' disappeared in a
historiographical vacuum.27
This is not to say that there were no attempts by other Asian nations to
intervene in Japanese memory politics. One example is the extended negotiations
between Japan and South Korea between 1951 and 1965 leading to a
treaty of reparation and compensation. In the process of the negotiations,
however, Korea had to give up the idea of an official apology on the part of
the Japanese government. Demands for material compensation and for payment
of wages for conscript labour during the war met with stubborn resistance
from the Japanese delegation. Finally, reparations were not paid to make
up for colonial oppression, but rather, as the official rhetoric went, as part of
'economic assistance'. In the context of asymmetrical power relations and the
dichotomous logic of Cold War thinking, the South Korean perspective on the
common past had no repercussions in the Japanese debates.28
In the virtual absence of Asia, the principal referent of Japanese politics and
world view was the USA. In the realm of historiography, this constellation
translated into the massive import of US modernization theory, beginning with
the famous Hakone conference in 1960. Funded by the Ford- and AsiaFoundation,
the conference formed part of a decidedly anti-communist politics
25 lenaga Sabur6, Taiheiyo senso (Tokyo 1968), 4. On the different terminological approaches
to coming to terms with the war, see David Reynolds' article 'The Origins of the Two "World
Wars": Historical Discourse and International Politics' in this issue.
26 Karatani K6ojin,'The Discursive Space of Modern Japan' in Masao Miyoshi and Harry D.
Harootunian (eds), Japan in the World (Durham, NC 1993), 288-315. The philosopher Takeuchi
Yoshimi in his Kindai no cho6koku(Tokyo 1983) has made a similar point.
27 James Orr, The Victim as Hero. Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan
(Honolulu 2001).
28 Volker Fuhrt, Erzwungene Reue. Vergangenbeitsbewaltigungund Kriegsschulddiskussion in
Japan 1952-1998 (Hamburg 2002).
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Conrad:Versionsof thePastinGermanyandjapan,1945-2001
in East Asia by presenting the concept of modernization without revolution
as historical norm.29While in the early years of the occupation period we
encountered surprising affinities between American and Japanese Marxist
versions of the Japanese past, the perspective of modernization theory was
explicitly anti-Marxist. In the framework of modernization theory, Japanese
fascism appeared as but a temporary aberration from an otherwise successful
path towards modernity.30Its principal proponent, the Harvard historian,
Edwin 0. Reischauer, stressed the political nature of this remodelling of the
Japanese past: 'This classical Marxism is our true foe in Japan. I have never
shirked from an opportunity to inflict a blow against it. Of course, one does
not use such words. The words I do use are: "Taking on a new view of
history".'31When in 1960 Reischauer was appointed US ambassador to Japan,
this marriageof scholar and politician only underlined the fact that interpretations
of the past are not formed in an academic vacuum. The Cold War setting,
as Harry Harootunian has argued, 'prompted Japanese to incorporate
American expectations to fulfill a narrative about themselves, produced by
others, elsewhere'. The memory of the recent past was inscribed in a decidedly
transnational context; Harootunian concludes that 'America's Japan became
Japan's Japan'.32
While Japan remained 'de-Asianized', in West Germany the 1960s through
the 1980s can be characterizedby what historian Heinrich August Winkler has
recently called Germany's 'Long path towards the West'.33In historiographical
terms this implied the dominance of the Sonderweg interpretation of modern
Geman history which must be understood as an attempt to write Germany
into the history of Europe. This is not to say that American influence disappeared;
particularly through the appropriation of the work of Max Weber
by Parsonian systems theory and its subsequent re-import into Germany,
American approaches remained an important factor. At the same time,
'Europe' emerged as a complementary point of reference and, in its particular
and mostly metaphorical incarnation, as a Weberian ideal type. The alleged
Sonderweg was pitted against a supposed north-west European normality, and
modern German history was interpreted by measuring distance, difference
and deviance. The preoccupation with comparative history among social
historians since the 1980s is one of the consequences of this approach. Not
only in terms of historical trajectory, but also in theoretical and methodological
perspective, the ascendancy of social history (Sozialgeschichte) was
29 Judith Coburn, 'Asian Scholars and Government - The Chrysanthemum on the Sword' in
Edward Friedman and Mark Selden (eds), America's Asia - Dissenting Essays on AsianAmerican
Relations (New York 1969), 67-107.
30 See Kinbara Samon, 'Nihon kindaika'ron no rekishiz6. Sono hihanteki kent6 e no shiten
(Tokyo 1968).
31 Quoted from Harry D. Harootunian, 'America's Japan/Japan's Japan' in Miyoshi and
Harootunian (eds), Japan in the World, op. cit., 196-221, here 207.
32 Ibid., 200, 215.
33 Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, 2 vols (Mtinchen 2000).
93
Journalof Contemporary History Vol 38 No I
part of an attempt to integrate Germanhistoriography into the European land-
scape.34
The Sonderweg emerged as the new metahistory of the German past, not
unlike its Japanese equivalent in the immediate postwar decades. In both
countries, this interpretation for a long time remained the most influential
meta-narrative.35The main difference was that it allowed West Germany to
become European, while Japan hardly perceived herself as Asian. In the
German case this development was spawned by the political process of
European unification, and also by various treaties of compensation making up
for German atrocities during the war.36The dynamics of this larger political
situation had repercussions in the interpretations of history that needed to take
their potential European reception into account. In Japan, on the other hand,
in the absence of a movement towards political allegiance, Asia largely
remained in a political and historiographical vacuum. The marginalization of
'Asia' in postwar Japanese memory was not so much the product of conscious
decisions but rather itself the effect of the larger international context. The
silencing of 'Asia' corresponded with the great divide of the Cold War, the
incorporation of Japan into a western/capitalist world order dominated by the
USA. Under the umbrella of the security treaty with the USA, there was no
space in Japanese discourse for the concerns of other Asian nations. Japan
regarded itself as 'western',37and was likewise treated as the 'Prussia of the
East'. In Noam Chomsky's words: 'Of course Europe now includes Japan,
which we may regard as honorary European.'38
Beginning in the 1980s, but particularly in the course of the 1990s, the landscape
of Japanese memory changed dramatically. This shift can be described as
a combination of two phenomena: a massive increase in discussions about the
wartime past, and the emergence of new actors in these debates. Most importantly,
the voices of other Asian nations made themselves heard in the heated
discussions about Japan's wartime legacy. Their interventions were no longer
marginalized but met with an often critical, and at times sympathetic,
response.
34 Thomas Welskopp, 'Westbindung auf dem "Sonderweg". Die deutsche Sozialgeschichte vom
Appendix der Wirtschaftsgeschichte zur Historischen Sozialwissenschaft' in Wolfgang Kiittler,
Jorn Riisen and Ernst Schulin (eds), Geschichtsdiskurs, vol. 5 (Frankfurt1999), 191-237.
35 In West Germany, this meta-narrative became hegemonic to the degree that what was perceived
as a Japanese Sonderweg was interpreted as an outright copy of the German model. See
Bernd Martin, 'Verhangnisvolle Wahlverwandtschaft. Deutsche Einfliusseauf die Entstehung des
modernen Japan' in Jost Diilffer et al. (eds), Deutschland in Europa. Kontinuitat und Bruch
(Frankfurt 1990), 97-116.
36 The attempt to adapt interpretations of the past to a European context began much earlier.
For an illustrative example, see Institut fur Zeitgeschichte (ed.), Das Dritte Reich und Europa
(Munchen 1957).
37 See, for example, Umesao Tadao, 'Bunmei no seitai shikan josetsu', Chuo koron (1947),
32-49.
38 Noam Chomsky, 'The New World Order', Agenda, 62 (1991), 13-15, here 13.
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Conrad:VersionsofthePastinGermanyandjapan,1945-2001
Not unlike many other countries, Japan in the 1990s witnessed an intensified
debate over issues of memory and remembrance. The reasons for this
notable increase in public interest and awareness are manifold. Some are
worldwide in character and have contributed to a global vogue of memory
debates, while others are more specific to the Japanese archipelago. To begin
with, the current omnipresence of discussions about the past clearly has a
generational dimension. Those who experienced the war themselves and can
still remember it will not be alive much longer. This biological factor has
contributed to the heated nature of some recent conflicts over issues like compensation
for forced labour and the 'comfort women' in the service of the
Japanese military. In addition, documentation and testimony of personal experience
have developed into an urgent need at a time when there are only a few
witnesses around. The extraordinary boom of personal histories (jibunshi), of
innumerable 'ordinaryJapanese', has to be placed in this context as well.39
Most importantly, the end of the Cold War has helped to open up a new
space for debate and dissenting voices. The fall of the Berlin wall and the
breakdown of the Soviet Union not only had effects in these countries themselves,
but were indicative of the end of the postwar world order in a broader
sense. With the disappearance of the East-West dichotomy, the clearcut
framework within which all events were endowed with political meaning has
also disappeared. In many respects, the symbolic conflicts over the meaning of
the past have moved into its place and been substituted for the ideological
antagonisms.40As a result, we can speak of a virtual 'explosion' of memory in
Japan in the 1990s. After the 'end of history' (at least the end of a history
dominated by universalist projects), the permanent discourse on the past
corresponds with a post-ideological economy of signs.41
The end of the primacy of the US-Soviet antagonism affected the political
landscape in Japan considerably. One of the consequences was the end of the
political monopoly of the LiberalDemocratic Party (LDP) in 1993. The dissolution
of the '1955 system', based on the dominance of the conservative LDP
and a foreign and security politics exclusively oriented towards the USA,
corresponded with a renewed and contested debate about the national past
that had been muted in the decades before. The end of the power monopoly of
the LDP coincided with the crash of the 'bubble' economy in the early 1990s,
and the ensuing economic recession also provided the motivation to look
inwards and to subjectJapan's past history to critical scrutiny. One last factor
39 See Petra Buchholz, Schreiben und Erinnern. Uber den Umgang mit der Vergangenheit in
Japan (Miinchen 2002).
40 Carol Gluck, 'Das Ende der "Nachkriegszeit". Japan vor der Jahrtausendwende' in Irmela
Hijiya-Kirschnereit (ed.), Uberwindung der Moderne? Japan am Ende des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts
(Frankfurt1996), 57-85; Carol Gluck, 'The Past in the Present'in Andrew Gordon (ed.),
Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley, CA 1993), 64-95.
41 lida Yumiko, 'Between the Technique of Living an Endless Routine and the Madness of
Absolute Degree Zero. Japanese Identity and the Crisis of Modernity in the 1990s', positions, 8
(2000), 423-64.
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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryVol38 No I
must not be overlooked: the death of Emperor Hirohito, head of state since
1926, who through his sheer presence made an open discussion over war
responsibility (senso sekinin) and the failures of coming to terms with this past
after 1945 (sengo sekinin) virtually impossible.42
The most notable effect of the end of the Cold War was the change it
spawned in Japan's relationship with her Asian neighbours. After a long
period of relative ignorance, Japan was again 'homing in on Asia'.43This
development had already begun in the 1980s and was influenced in particular
through the economic upswing in South Korea, for example. Political and
economic contacts as well as the exchange of popular culture have increased
since, and in this context the interpretation of the national past has undergone
palpable changes as well.44In particular, the voices of Asian victims of Japan's
wartime expansion were given an importance that they had not had in the
decades before. These complex and reinforcing shifts have opened up the
possibility of new forms of contestation of the hegemonic versions of national
memory.
The re-emergence of 'Asia' does not imply that other transnational connections
were no longer relevant. On the contrary: as the controversy over the
Enola Gay exhibition in Washington in 1995 demonstrated, the concern with
American interpretations of the Japanese past had not diminished.45Another
interesting case, particularly in our context, is the German example that from
the 1980s was instrumentalized by oppositional groups in Japan pressing for a
more critical perspective on the nation's wartime history. Japan, it was held,
had not sufficiently 'mastered the past' and should look to West Germany for
a model. The famous 1985 speech by German President Richard von
Weizsacker 40 years after the end of the war, for example, was translated into
Japanese and went into 29 editions within a dozen years. Even the term for
'mastering the past' (kako no kokufuku) was invented in 1992 to translate the
German Vergangenheitsbewiltigung. The comparison with West Germany
was implicated in the political conflicts of the time and served oppositional
interest groups as a model; at the same time, it was open to instrumentalization
by their political opponents.46
These examples of transnational entanglements notwithstanding, the most
42 Buruma, Wages of Guilt, op. cit., 249-51.
43 Laura Hein, Ellen H. Hammond, 'Homing in on Asia. Identity in Contemporary Japan',
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 27, 3 (1995), 3-17.
44 Gerow, 'Consuming Asia, Consuming Japan', op. cit.
45 See the articles in positions, 5, 3 (1997).
46 See Oishi Kiichir6, 'Die Vergangenheit in der Gegenwart. Die Frage der "Kriegsschuld" in
Japan', Cho6iki.Bunka kagaku kiyo, 3 (1983), 40-55, here 50; Volker Fuhrt, 'Von der Bundesrepublik
lernen? Der Vergleich mit Deutschland in der japanischen Diskussion iiber Kriegsschuld
und Vergangenheitsbewaltigung', Japanstudien, 8 (1996), 337-53; Awaya Kentar6 (ed.), Sens6
sekinin - sengo sekinin. Nihon to Doitsu wa d6 chigau ka (Tokyo 1994); Fujisawa Hoei,
Doitsujin no rekishi ishiki. Ky6kasho ni miru sens6 sekininron (Tokyo 1986); Sat6 Takeo, 'Doitsu
no sengo hosh6 - Nihon no mohan ka', Sekai, 561 (1991), 296-309. Nishio Kanji, Kotonaru
higeki. Nihon to Doitsu (Tokyo 1994) explicitly warns against seeing Germany as a model.
96
Conrad:VersionsofthePastinGermanyand apan, 1945-2001
important development in the 1990s was what could be named the return of
'Asia'.47On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in
1995, in particular, the demand for an official apology from the Japanese
government was made by many Asian governments and civil society groups.
The debates in Japan cannot be understood outside this broader context.48The
representation of the war in school books has also remained contested terrain,
as the Chinese protests against the admission of a revisionist textbook in the
spring of 2001 amply demonstrate. The conflicting interpretations of the
Nanjing massacre are another subject of public concern and academic dialogue.
In the course of scholarly exchange, 'Chinese' and 'Japanese' positions
are negotiated but at the same time hint at the possibility of transcending
nationality as a crucial factor determining the interpretation of the past.49The
arena in which the Asian dimension of Japanese memory is played out most
prominently, finally, is the issue of compensation for former 'comfort women'
(jugun ianfu), more precisely forced prostitutes in the service of the Japanese
army.50
What is striking in all these debates is not just the extent to which formerly
marginalized voices have made themselves heard and turned a Japanese preoccupation
with the national past into a transnational endeavour. At the same
time, these voices have diversified. In the early postwar decades, state governments
spoke on behalf of the professed interests of their nations; they intervened
to protest in schoolbook matters or to correct what they perceived as
faulty interpretations of Japan's role on the continent in the 1930s and 1940s.
Moreover, issues of reparations and compensation were negotiated exclusively
between governments, while individual claims were not admitted. This form
of representation in some cases led to surprising coalitions, as the example of
forced prostitution demonstrates, where Japanese and Korean governments
colluded in suppressing the claims of former 'comfort women'. In the 1990s,
however, the voices increased and undermined the governmental monopoly on
national memory. Individuals and civil society groups from other Asian
nations began to play a leading role in the shifting terrain of Japanese memory
production. Through these various and discordant interventions, they contributed
to the emergence of what Lisa Yoneyama has recently called 'post-
47 To be sure, a concern for things Asian has never been entirely absent from Japanese debates.
See, for example, Ubukata Naokichi, T6yama Shigeki and Tanaka Masatoshi (eds), Rekishiz6
saik6sei no kadai. Rekishigaku no ho6h6 to Ajia (T6ky6 1966); see also Wolfgang Seifert,
Nationalismus im Nachkriegs-Japan. Ein Beitrag zur Ideologie der volkischen Nationalisten
(Hamburg 1977). Before the 1980s, however, these perspectives remained marginal.
48 See Franziska Seraphim, 'Der Zweite Weltkrieg im offentlichen Gedachtnis Japans: Die
Debatte zum fiinfzigsten Jahrestag der Kapitulation' in Hijiya-Kirschnereit (ed.), Uberwindung
der Moderne?, op. cit., 25-56.
49 See Daqing Yang, 'Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of
Nanking', American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 842-65; Daqing Yang, 'Contested History.
Re-presenting the Nanjing Massacre in Postwar Japan and China' in Takashi Fujitani et al. (eds),
Perilous Memories. The Asia Pacific Wars (Durham, NC 2001), 50-86.
50 See the articles in positions, 5, 1 (1997).
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Joumalof ContemporaryHistoryVol38 No I
nationalist public spheres in the production of historical knowledge'.51The
multiplication of actors and the discursive coalitions across national boundaries
attest to both the centrality of memory politics in contemporary Japan
and to the crucial role of 'Asia' in the context of Japanese identity formation.52
The history of memory is part of an entangled and transnational history.
Debates about the past bear the traces of a globalizing world which are deeply
engraved in what is often still perceived as the realm of the uniquely national,
of a peculiar mentality and mindset. The various exchanges and interventions
across national boundaries introduce multiple temporalities into an arena
where these conflicting narratives of the past are negotiated. At times, interventions
from without have delimited the discursive space within which the
past can be remembered (e.g. the occupation); in many instances, however,
they have helped to decentre dominant narrativesof a nationalized history and
have thus contributed to a pluralization of the past, to what Kan San Jun has
termed the 'civil war of memory' in contemporary Japan.53The complex
dialectic of remembering and forgetting - as indeed history itself - is not
confined to the territory of a nation state.
A perspective that foregrounds the transnational embeddedness of memory
production may contribute to a more complex interpretation of the different
trajectories of West German and Japanese interpretations of their 'evil' pasts
which have frequently been clouded in the myth of national character. This
perspective suggests that an allegedly more self-critical way of coping with its
wartime experience in West Germany has to be situated within a process of
European integration and multiple forms of discursive exchange. At the same
time, it helps to explain the 'explosion' of Japanese debates about the war in
the 1990s beyond a convenient narrativeof repression, amnesia, and eventually,
critical mastery. A transnational perspective, moreover, suggests that the
changed terrain of Japanese memory production may be associated with what
I choose to call the return of 'Asia' into Japanese discourse.
This is not to deny the importance of internal conflicts and heterogeneity
within a given society, which, in turn, can always be contextualized within a
larger transnational arena. But as long as Ruth Benedict's dichotomy of
'cultures of guilt' and 'cultures of shame' continues to serve as a shorthand
explanation for an alleged German learning process in contrast to Japanese
denial, the focus on 'entangled memories' may serve as a necessary complement.
Given the central role of memory in definitions of a national Self at the
turn of the twenty-first century, this perspective suggests that national identity
51 Lisa Yoneyama, 'Transformative Knowledge and Postnationalist Public Sphere. The Smithsonian
Enola Gay Controversy' in Fujitaniet al. (eds), Perilous Memories, op. cit., 323-46.
52 See Norma Field, 'War and Apology: Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth, and After', positions, 5
(1997), 1-50.
53 Sekai (1997), 188.
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Conrad:VersionsofthePastinGermanyandJapan,1945-2001 99
itself is the product - and not the precondition - of processes of transnational
interaction, exchange and entanglement.
Sebastian Conrad
is Assistant Professor of History at the FreeUniversity of Berlin. He
is the author of, amongst other things, Auf der Suche nach
der verlorenen Nation. Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland
und Japan 1945-1960 (G6ttingen 1999), and co-editor (with Shalini
Randeria) of Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven
in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt2002). He is
currently working on a project entitled '"German Work".
Circulation, Globalization, Identity 1880-1918'.