Imagining Japan in Post-war East Asia: Identity Politics, Schooling, and Popular Culture.
Authors: Paul Morris, Naoko Shimazu and Edward Vickers (eds).
ISBN: 978-0-415-71399-3
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2013
Reviewed by Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, Professor of History and Co-director of the Global Asia Program, Pace University in New York City, USA
“All history is contemporary history,” the modern Italian thinker Benedetto Croce (1866—1952) once stated, suggesting that history is interpreted to reflect many of today’s preoccupations. Undoubtedly, we all too often view the past through the lens of the present, and this is particularly true for the treatment of Japanese imperialism in history textbooks across Asia.
Imagining Japan in Post-war East Asia is a timely publication that rigorously problematizes the transmission and reception of both official and popular media discourses of Japan in selected Asian societies. The thirteen essays differ in research scope and interest. Using the portrayal of Japan as an analytical category, the contributors set out to examine how these places came to grips with the wartime experience with Japan after 1945, how they assessed their understanding of Japan from the Cold War to the present, and how the manifestations of different images of Japan revealed the complexities of nation-building and identity-formation in these countries.
The opening essay in part 1 by Paul Morris, Naoko Shimazu and Edward Vickers identify four distinct modes of portraying Japan in the post-war era. The first approach is to rationalize Japan as a model of state-centered modernization with strong Asian characteristics. The second one is to tap into the wartime anti-Japanese sentiment and hysteria, and demonize Japan as a hostile threat to its neighbors. The third image portrays Japan as an alternative Other, using it to legitimate a post-independent state against its former colonial masters and contemporary competitors. The last one treats Japan as an obscure and distant neighbor, and pays little attention to the history of military confrontation.
The following five chapters in part 2 deconstruct the imagination of Japan in popular media after the Second World War. Simon Avenell reviews the state-launched “Learn from Japan Campaign” in Singapore during the 1980s. Calling Japan a model of modernization, Singaporean rulers sought to nurture a generation of “productive, patriotic, and compliant Singaporeans” and to legitimate Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s authoritarian governance and neoliberal economic policies (p.45). I-Yun Lee and Christine Han study the changing images of Japan in Taiwan. The half a century of Japanese colonization (1895—1945) created a sense of affinity with the Japanese culture among native Taiwanese elites. Even though the Nationalist government had launched a top-down project of demonizing Japan and promoting a Sino-centric identity since the late 1940s, the regime failed to eliminate Taiwan’s Japanese colonial heritage and undermine the popular demand for Japanese cultural products.
A more sympathetic view of Japan is shown in media culture in China and the Philippines today. Kinnia Yau Shuk-Ting looks at recent commercial and art-house films in Mainland China, and shows that some talented filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Jiang Wen have subverted the old cinematic discourse of China’s victimization at the hands of Japan, and depicted Japanese characters in a more sophisticated manner. Karl Ian Uy Cheng Chua investigates the portrayal of Japan in the medium of popular komiks (comics) in the Philippines, and reveals an attitudinal shift from antagonism against Japan to admiration for a booming Japanese economy.
It is only in South Korea where the memory of Japanese imperialism continues to haunt the nation today. Jung-Sun N. Han refers to the widely reported demolition of the former Japanese governor-general building in downtown Seoul during the mid-1990s. As South Korea experienced a transition from military dictatorship to liberal democracy, its elected officials and cultural elites were determined to decolonize the history and legacy of Japanese colonial rule.
Part 3 critiques the conflicting representations of Japan in history textbooks across the region. According to Caroline Rose, many Chinese high school history textbooks have reduced much coverage of the Anti-Japanese War, and erased references to the joint Nationalist-Communist resistance. The drawback was that such an abbreviated version only highlights the brutality of Japanese soldiers and gives rise to anti-Japanese sentiment among China’s youths. Paul Morris and Edward Vickers shift the focus of discussion to Hong Kong. While this postcolonial city sought to re-socialize local students as patriotic Chinese, the Chinese and world history textbooks have changed from portraying Japan as a model of westernization to a source of tensions and conflicts in East Asia. The political subtext is to condemn Japan as militaristic and to rationalize China as “a pillar of peace and stability” in regional politics (p.166). A similar development can be seen in Alisa Jones’ study of Taiwan. As the island became increasingly democratized in the 1990s, its history textbooks refashioned the Japanese colonial era as one of modernization and emphasized the local Taiwanese struggle against a hegemonic Han Chinese polity.
In Southeast Asia, interethnic relations often complicated the interpretation of history. Helen Ting compares the Malaysian Chinese and Malay-majority history textbooks. The former refer to the Japanese invasion as a key event that politicized the Malaysian Chinese and motivated them to organize militias against Japanese invaders. The latter appropriate the same history event to highlight the rise of Malaysian nationalism, and to avoid mentioning the postwar traumas of interethnic violence between Chinese and Malays, and the Malaysian Chinese communist insurrection. The local politics in Singapore, as Khatera Khamsi and Christine Han explain, led to the contradictory images of Japan as both an historical enemy and a developmental model. The Japanese military occupation of Singapore was constructed to disregard the efficacy of British colonial government and to promote the discourse of self-governance under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew. Mark Maca and Paul Morris look at the Japanese-funded cultural projects in the Philippines, and discover an ideological shift from seeing Japan as a militaristic threat to portraying it as a friendly neighbor in the Filipino textbooks.
Guopeng Shi critiques a seminar among history teachers from China, Japan, and South Korea. The teachers in the Chinese delegation was handpicked by the Communist authorities from a few elitist schools in Beijing, and their seminar papers were heavily censored. The Chinese officials even seized the seminars as a platform to propagate the official views on Japan and Korea, and the Chinese professional teachers had no say in the discussion. Unless political system dramatically changes in China, it remains impossible to have a genuine dialogue with local educators about the comparative pedagogies of history education.
Two interesting lessons can be learned from these case studies. Conceptually, the idea of bringing history education, popular culture, and identity politics together in an interactive dialogue about Japan’s relations with various East and Southeast Asian societies is quite original and refreshing. However, it would have been more helpful if the contributors had drawn on some interviews and testimonies to reveal how this controversial subject has been understood by teachers, students, and cultural consumers in these countries.
Equally significant is the ongoing negotiation between state and civil society over controversial issues in history. In these societies, government officials, historians, textbook producers, cartoonists and filmmakers are more interdependent than have been acknowledged in the scholarly literature. When the state is authoritarian, these cultural elites often participate in the making of the national imagination of Japan. But as the state becomes more liberal, the intellectuals revert to their original autonomy and assert their critical understanding of wartime and post-war Japan in the public domain.
In short, this essay collection contains rich empirical data and theoretical insights for historians, education specialists, and political scientists interested in the role of Japan in contemporary Asia.