the international politics of history in East Asia, Hitomi Koyama

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On the Persistence of the Japanese History Problem
Historicism and the International Politics of History
By
Hitomi Koyama
Copyright Year 2018
Published August 13, 2020 by Routledge
168 Pages

Book Description

In Japan, people often refer to August 15, 1945 as the end of "that war." But the duration of "that war" remains vague. At times, it refers to the fifteen years of war in the Asia-Pacific. At others, it refers to an imagination of the century long struggle between the East and the West that characterized much of the 19th century. This latter dramatization in particular reinforces longstanding Eurocentric and Orientalist discourses about historical development that presume the non-West lacks historical agency. Nearly 75 years since the nominal end of the war, Japan’s "history problem" – a term invoking the nation’s inability to come to terms with its imperial past – persists throughout Asia today.

Going beyond well-worn clichés about the state’s use and abuse of discourses of historical modernity, Koyama shows how the inability to confront the debris of empire is tethered to the deferral of agency to a hegemonic order centered on the United States. The present is thus a moment one stitched between the disavowal of responsibility on the one hand, and the necessity of becoming a proper subject of history on the other. Behind this seeming impasse lay questions about how to imagine the state as the subject of history in a postcolonial moment – after grand narratives, after patriotism, and after triumphalism.

Table of Contents

• Introduction Rethinking Persistence in Impatient Times: The International Politics of History in East Asia,
• Chapter 1 On the Recursivity of the Politics of History, 
• Chapter 2 On the Rise and Demise of Civilizational History in Meiji Japan, 
• Chapter 3 The Assertion: Japan as the Subject of World History, 
• Chapter 4 On the Postwar Palimpsest Subject of History, Conclusion

Author(s)
Biography
Hitomi Koyama is a University Lecturer at Leiden University, The Netherlands.


ABSTRACT

One serves upward of forty to sixty men a day in a war zone where she does not speak the local language, thereby rendering her both captive and dependent. Some men use condoms, others do not; her vagina is swollen, and at the height of war she also had to serve as caretaker for these same soldiers who at times disparaged women’s bodies (Tanaka, 2002). These women endured the day’s transition to another night and day without the hindsight that we have today, that this would end in 1945.

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Introduction

Rethinking persistence in impatient times: the international politics of

history in East Asia

One serves upward of forty to sixty men a day in a war zone where she does not speak the local language, thereby rendering her both captive and dependent. Some men use condoms, others do not; her vagina is swollen, and at the height of war she also had to serve as caretaker for these same soldiers who at times disparaged women's bodies (Tanaka, 2002). These women endured the day's transition to another night and day without the hindsight that we have today, that this would end in 1945.

After 1945, they are abandoned amid the resumption of civil war in China or independence movements elsewhere, and for those who made it back home alive, there awaited patriarchy and the social shame of no longer being a virgin. Years of servitude and multiple forced abortions often rendered the bodies barren. Some tell their stories, whereas others cannot bear to.

The majority of these women came from impoverished families in Korea, which at the time of war was under Japan's colonial domination, and many oth­ers from the regions that fell under Japanese rule. They are called the "comfort women" (Soh, 2008; Yoshimi, 1995). Contemporary Japanese national history textbooks neither go into these graphic details nor reflect on the enduring conse­quences of what happened to these women since 1945 when accounting for the history of "comfort women", and this is if there is any mention at all.'

As both the survivors and perpetrators as well as those who experienced war in Asia are near the end of their biological lives, those who were born after 1945 in recent years have become visibly impatient with the persistence of what many have come to call Japan's history problem in the past few decades. The history problem in this context pertains to disputes both among and within mostly Asian states over how the past - especially Japanese colonialism and imperialism - is to be narrated and thereby acknowledged.

The impatience of those born after 1945 is symbolized in the phrase "final and irreversible resolution" deployed by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the December 2015 joint announcement with former South Korean President Geun-hye Park to resolve the "comfort women" issue for good .2 The surviving "com­fort women" in South Korea were never consulted by President Park (Maeda ed., 2016). On first glance, the phrase appears as the Japanese government's attempt at forestalling any future demand by the Korean government. Nonetheless, the term

2 Introduction

was inserted by the South Korean representative during the negotiation meeting that took place in January 2015 as a way to hedge the Japanese representative from backing away from progress made on the terms of the apology in the future ("Summary of Analysis of Japan-ROK Agreement on 'Comfort Women' Issue". Yomiuri Shinbun, December 28, 2017). In the undisclosed part of the agreement, the Japanese representative also demanded that the South Korean representative no longer use the term "sex slave" to refer to these women, and also sought to ask that the government withhold support of civic groups that seek to commemorate these victims in the world (ibid).

Against such sovereigns' claim over their rights to resolve the matters of his­tory, in December 2016 a South Korean civic group placed in front of the Japa­nese Consulate in Busan a statue that symbolizes the women who had to work as military sex slaves. This is in addition to a statue that was already erected across the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, which Abe had been pressuring Park to remove. The 1-ton statues materially defy the ephemeral nature of the human body and, therefore, upset those who are seeking to wait out for the remaining survivors to pass away from the scene.

In December 2017, a new statue was unveiled in the Philippines, a first for the country, to remember what happened.' This news came amid the move by the Mayor of Osaka to terminate its sister-city relations with the city of San Francisco for allowing a statue commemorating the "comfort women" to be erected. While this is not the only crime committed by Japan, the question of how to account for the "comfort women" in post-Cold War Japan has come to symbolize the persis­tence of Japan's history problem.

The solution appears simple. Many have asked why Japan cannot just apologize and move on, or to follow the German model with regard to the Holocaust sur­vivors. I have asked this myself. Technically, there are the Murayama and Kono statements on "comfort women" that express remorse for what had happened in the past, which the current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe claims to inherit from his predecessors.

When Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama sought to pass a Diet Resolution for the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1995, the content was rendered ambivalent by the time it passed through the Diet. The survivors who decided to accept monetary reparation from the Asian Women's Fund - a state and privately funded hybrid institution that began distributing money from 1996 and which has since disbanded in 2002 - also received letters from the Japanese Prime Minis­ter (Onuma, 2007). The letter begins with a carefully guarded wording that "in cooperation with the Government and the people of Japan, offers atonement from the Japanese people to the former wartime comfort women, I wish to express my personal* feelings as well" - the term personal was omitted from the 1998 ver­sions on, thereby navigating an ambiguous relation to the subsequent paragraph that states that "[a]s Prime Minister of Japan, I thus extend anew my most sin­cerely apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women" - the initial insertion and deletion of the term personal attests to

Introduction 3

the wavering figure of the sovereign representative practice, that is both personal and public, simultaneously.4

Nonetheless, what stands out within the Asian perception of Japan is a sense of inconsistency. Murayama's minister of environment Arata Sakurai made a statement a year before, in 1994, that the Greater East Asia War had no intent to invade. He then resigned shortly afterward. A few months before that, under Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata, the minister of law, Shigeto Nagano, stated that the Rape of Nanjing is a hoax. He too had to resign afterward.

On other fronts, bilateral initiatives between Japan and South Korea as well as with the People's Republic of China have been taken to bring together national historians from both sides to discuss how to write history. Issuing of state apol­ogy and inclusion of formerly excluded actors in history, as well as the addition of formerly silenced narratives in national history, while politically contentious, appear both rational and inevitable.

Yet while the periodic expression of apologies by Western states such as New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Canada over settler colonialism and massacres of indigenous populations and past colonial rule has prompted many to consider our age the "age of apology" (Gibney, Howard-Hassmann, Coicaud, and Steiner, 2009), apology alone is inadequate. As Lind demonstrates, it quite often backfires in the form of domestic backlash against attempts at coming to terms with the past, thereby further leaving "Japan's" stance ambivalent (Lind, 2010).

A state-centric discourse invites attention to sovereign claims to exemption from external intervention. Tellingly, opinion polls in the immediate aftermath of a series of then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's sequential visits to the Yasu-kuni Shrine, indicated that national opinion was polarized between those who agreed with the statement that because such visits would upset Japan's neighbors, the Prime Minister should not go, and those who agreed with another statement that the Prime Minister should have the right to act as he sees fit because Japan is a sovereign state (2002: 461).

The latter logic, which equates Chinese and South Korean protests against prime ministers and high-ranking ministers visiting Yasukuni Shrine as an infringement of Japanese sovereignty, also informs the argument by right-wing commentators in Japan that the Chinese and South Korean states are merely instrumentalizing the history problem in the pursuit of respective national interests. In the process, the voices of the survivors are silenced, thereby reducing the ethical weight of the debates on how to talk about history. What this quick sketch shows is how those who seek to right history and to deny history both converge upon this consolida­tion of the state as the sovereign subject, though the former critique it, and the latter sanctify it.

In postwar Japan there has been a consistent attempt to rebut revisionist efforts to commandeer the history problem (lenaga, 2003 Takahashi, 2005). Nationalistic history in modern Japan has glorified war and colonial rule, and seeks to rectify the exclusion or euphemisms that have been deployed to whitewash the past. Against the logically consistent argument that what Japan did was wrong and hence must apologize until the victims forgive, the nationalist argument constantly invokes

4 Introduction

the geopolitically and historically specific predicament of Japan, that it exists under the "American shadow" (Kato, 1995).

The postwar constitution was written by dozens of Americans in a matter of days and imposed during the Occupation that lasted until 1952. Article 9 of this imposed constitution renounces Japan's sovereign right to use military force to resolve international dispute. With the advent of the Cold War, then Prime Minis­ter Shigeru Yoshida entered into a security alliance with the United States, thereby effectively locking Japan into a permanent state of dependency.

The United States also dictated who Japan could normalize relations with. So communist states were excluded from signing the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1952 by which the Western powers dictated Japan's geopolitical future.6 Much of this predicament is well documented in John Dower's classic work, Embracing Defeat (2000). To this, historian Toshikazu Inoue adds, "not only democracy, but even our post-war history is given by America" (2015: 5).

One can take a normative approach and reject this context and claim that such a predicament cannot absolve Japan from dealing with its past. Yet the two posi­tions, one asserting a moral response toward past wrongs, and the other empha­sizing the extenuating force of contemporary circumstances, are locked in a stalemate, even as the survivors dwindle in numbers.

The search for a solution often short-circuits into a technical discourse that reduces the history problem to whether the state is to offer apology or to placate those who object to such an approach as unreasonable or conservative and illib­eral. It normalizes the sovereigns' claim upon historical narratives and abnormal-izes the detractors in turn. Against these impatient moves, this book asks how the history problem between Japan and its neighbors persists, and what the persis­tence unveils about the broader contours of the politics of history in the contem­porary global context of a post-historical present, that is, to be after history.

This being after history implies multiple subjects and subjectivities - be they the state, the survivors, the Japanese - with one being pitted against another quite often. Depending on the kind of subject invoked, any argument could be turned on its head. For example, it might be argued that Japan cannot consistently apologize because it has evaded being a subject that could be held accountable in postwar years. This is one latent thesis, most notably posited by literary critic Norihiro Kato, that frames the postwar debates on the history problem.

Yet this thesis that emphasizes the need of a subject who may be held respon­sible betrays the expectation of others who consider, to the contrary, that there is no I without the Other. This raises a question: how does one being's assertion of being a subject in turn implicate others and vice versa, and what if these are juxtaposed against others, forming a cluster whereby between these cacophony of assertions, occluded histories are produced? In other words, how can we re-vision persistence beyond bilateral self-other relations, and instead as historically gener­ated clusters?

While I do not want to negate the symbolic import of building a national dia­logue over how to include the "comfort women" as a part of Japanese history, I do want to place the persistence in the broader context of how global existence and

Introduction 5

coexistence have increasingly been theorized after the model of a liberal sover­eign being the subject of history. This re-centers the state in an age when national­ism is understood to be a dangerous path to partake of, and grand narratives are no longer deemed viable or desirable. This is the purpose of this book.

This can be visualized in the way that the chapters to follow are organized, to show how histories are occluded by geopolitics within what Ann Laura Stoler calls the "conceptual, epistemic, and political architecture" of imperial debris (2016: 10). Stoler does not deal explicitly with the Japanese empire, but I find the metaphor of architecture useful to convey the contours of this book.

Imagine a building that collapsed after an earthquake. The remnant of the first floor is clustered against the second, and third. The construction of the pillars was temporally sequenced, the first had to be built first, and then second, yet the mate­rial blocks are set against one another in the present, in the state of simultaneity despite having their origins at different times in the evolution of the building.

Each part is built with different geopolitical formations in mind, and is marked by it. You hear a voice within the debris. To reach in is to consider the historicity of each of the components that are blocking the way toward the voice, to under­stand the history behind each of the materials at hand and to see how, in the pres­ent, they are compounded upon and against each other.

To come back to the issue at hand, my point is quite simple: what is meant by the "problem" in the "history problem" depends on the historical context and period. It is geopolitically informed at different scales and in different time peri­ods, and while differentiated, there nonetheless are impacts of the presence of these pillars in the debris.

To understand the impasse, we need to map out the architectural blueprint and the ad hoc additions that inevitably become incorporated into the blueprint, as ideas are put to practice on ground, to ask how the first floor was built, and then the sec­ond, how the pipe plan affected the bird's decision to build the nest, and how the attempted solution for the first floor may in fact be what is preventing the pillar on the third floor from collapsing completely. Plans and contingencies and the material limit of each component makes the architecture assume the form of what is built. Yet each is also implicated at different levels of ephemerality as well as endurance.

What I want to visualize through writing is how sediments of the past are rarely completely gone. And when we speak of a material, we may have many differ­ent assumptions about how this is to be used and to what ends. Sometimes, the issues faced at different time periods could be eerily familiar. Inoue's lament that even Japan's postwar history was given by the United States strikes a note similar to Ranajit Guha's indictment of the role of British history in eliminating Indian history (2002). What unites the two is the observation that a particular historical subjectivity is denied by the dominant power that writes history, be it in the name of the empire or the world - which are often equated.

The persistence of the history problem is often posed as a question of how to navigate and create consistency between national and world history through a rational account of the past. By contrast, this book attempts to show how this navigation is not so straightforward when world history is understood as being

6 Introduction

Eurocentric, both in the past at the turn of twentieth century in Westernizing Japan, and in the present post-Cold War East Asia.

I want to map out the clustering of geopolitical formations in the plural, and how those from different time periods are interlocked with one another, creating a shadow for some, and crushing others slowly, over time. This is why I conceive of the project as the politics of history, rather than over truth claims or facts - where truths and facts, by definition, are anti-political (Arendt, 1968). To see it as a history of the international politics of history is to further complicate the layered image of geopolitical formations. And to think of a ruin in the aftermath of an earthquake is to recognize how the past is never entirely in its past.

A particular passage written by Norihiro Kato anchors this study:

Since then [the Asia-Pacific War], sorrow no longer unites us . . . it shatters us apart. We are given a predicament by losing the war where unless we find another answer, we cannot go forward . . . yet behind this experience lies a kind of worldliness.

(2005:287)

I returned to the same passage over and over in the past decade, because I read it as an invitation to think of both the specificity of Japan's "history problem" and the ubiquity of the international politics of history in the broader postimperial and postcolonial context.

How does history become a political problem? While historiographical approaches to the study of history is of import, this book looks at how Japan fits into what Robert Young calls the "problem of the Hegelian model, particularly of a histori­cism which presupposes a governing structure of self-realization in all historical processes" (1990: 3).

What specifically is the implication of performing a paradox where self-realization is structured, what becomes of its legacies and memories, and how do these in turn bind the present? How does the dominance of structure - be it local, regional, or systemic - impact the pursuit of responsibility, which, by definition, presupposes the free will and agency of a subject? As the function of the Introduc­tion is to introduce a subject, convey its stake, and invite readers to join this road less taken, I begin with an episode about the "twilight zone" of history.

The "twilight zone" of history and the discourse on decolonizing history

In The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (1989), historian Eric Hobsbawm begins with an account of how his mother traveled to Egypt, and met his father there, under the larger historical circumstance of the British empire. Had the British not occu­pied Egypt, Hobsbawm would not have been born. To study the British empire as a historian and as a British subject is to navigate through this "twilight zone between history and memory", where personal memory of family history and imperial history can never be fully dissociated (1989: 3).

Introduction 7

While he acknowledges that it is possible to cultivate a relationship with a past much further back in history, Hobsbawm nonetheless asks how this more immediate distance from the past tends to invoke intensive affect in the form of contentions over how to write the past on all sides. He observes that discussions of Stone Age history seem much more detached, whereas the debates on recent empires feels much more charged, tense, and intense.

It is charged because the personal and the political, and by extension, collec­tive history and collective memory short-circuit. And this concept and geography of the collective widely vary in the age of empire and its aftermath. Treatment of recent empires resides in this liminal zone. For Hobsbawm, it is the British empire. For me, it is the Japanese empire.

I was born in Tokyo. My family first moved to Virginia, then back to Tokyo, then to New York, and then to California in the 1980s and 1990s. My father worked for a large Japanese corporation, and this demanded that our family had to relocate at short notice according to the whims of the company headquarters.

Silicon Valley in the 1990s was on the verge of its boom and, given its strategic import, we were assigned to move there in the mid- 1990s after living in New York for less than a year. I joined a local art studio, and it was there that I met an elderly Taiwanese woman. Upon giving my name, a common one in Japan, she began speaking to me in fluent Japanese. She was visibly upset when I asked her where she learned the language, as this signaled my ignorance of Japan's colonization of Taiwan.

That was high school. I attended university afterward, taking courses on Japa­nese history along with courses in political science as a way to fill the lack that my question to the woman had exposed. What does it mean to speak about history as a Japanese in the postcolonial present? From the frequent moving I knew the category "national" was a highly problematic fiction to say the least. But I simul­taneously knew it also was not.

On finishing university, I took a course in Mandarin Chinese, and it was then that my parents revealed to me that my grandfather grew up in Taiwan, as the colonizer. While I was relieved to learn that he was too young to be drafted into the military, the news reinforced my unwillingness to rebut the question of how to respond to history with the claim that I was not born yet and, therefore, had nothing to do with the past.

My family offered me tuition support on the precondition that I take my grand­father back to visit the sites of his childhood memory: Taipei, and Taichung, in postcolonial Taiwan. To learn of my own heritage in relation to the problem of how to narrate and speak of history while being aware of the artificiality of the collective identity in question furthered the sense that I could not resort to double­speak in what I write. That is, I must place both my grandfather and the elderly Taiwanese woman in the intended audience.

To a significant extent, this book is my attempt at responding to the Taiwanese woman, and many more like her, about this "twilight zone" of history. Japan's "history problem", broadly put, is a problem of how to relate to this "twilight zone". But unlike Hobsbawm, I approach the twilight zone from a vantage point

8 Introduction

at the intersection of international relations, which presumes the nation-state as an agent-subject of history, and of the politics of postcolonial history that continually re-centers the state despite the awareness of how subject-centrism occludes the presence of Others, at the expense of historiography.

Globally, in the same decade that I encountered the elderly Taiwanese woman, in 1991, Korean survivor Kim Hak-sun, herself a victim of imperial sex slavery,

demanded that the Japanese government recognize its responsibility in running the wartime military brothel system. The abstract question of how to come to terms with the past and to critically engage with state control over the historical narrative assumed a concrete aspect in the image of her face, which was reprinted in millions of newspaper headlines, her eyes piercing through the camera lens. And this face demanded a response from none other than the "Japanese" in post-imperial, postcolonial, Japan.

The period in which I became cognizant of the question of how the past is to be remembered and spoken of coincided with the period when Japan's "history

problem" took a global - and no longer international - dimension. This distinc­tion is relevant. The term international presumes state-to-state relations, and in those terms, most of Japan's former victim states have normalized their relations with Japan. (North Korea is the sole country which has not normalized rela­tions with Japan to this day.)

The globalization of the history problem, in part, has to do with the demise of the Cold War framework. But it is also partially connected to the transnational diaspora and networks of advocacy groups that re-visioned the past in terms of human rights violations, thereby circumventing the language of the nation-state. Within Japan, the military presence of the United States has for long dominated the political imagination of war. Yet there is an inner self-reflection too, prompted by the awareness of Japan's complicity in the U.S. war in Vietnam.

In the 1970s there was a steady stream of writing aiming to come to terms with the past. But the domestic movement seldom had impact beyond its borders until

the mid-1980s and 1990s, when the democratization of Taiwan, South Korea, the

demise of the communist ideology in the People's Republic of China, the new­found international attention to wartime violence against women in the aftermath

of Bosnia and Yugoslavia, the attendant rise of the feminist discourse in newly

democratized nations, and the defusing of the military standoff between the two Chinas and two Koreas as well as the broader tension between the United States

and Russia spelled the end of the grip that "high politics" and politics among nation-states had over the history problem. Much of the regulation of the narra­tion of the past since 1945 has pivoted around the weighty presence of the United States in the Asia-Pacific, and this was beginning to change in the 1990s.

The term "history problem [rekishi mondai]" in the contemporary context refers to disputes among and within East Asian states over how the past - and

especially Japanese colonialism and imperialism - is to be narrated and thereby acknowledged by Japan in history textbooks as well as in symbolic practices by leaders. What appear to be mundane practices congeal into what Michael Bil-hg calls "banal nationalism" (1995), underwriting the implicit reproduction of

Introduction 9

colonial attitudes into a contemporary atmosphere that has become ever more receptive to (re)militarization (Shigematsu and Camacho, 2010).

Especially for Japan's neighbors, the Japanese attitude toward its militarist past is closely associated with how Japan is to act in the future. The assumption here is that if one does not learn from history, one is bound to repeat it. For centuries, major historical texts in East Asia contained in their titles the Chinese character for minor. Therefore, how the Japanese state treats its national history is closely scrutinized not only for the interest in the past, but also for the future.

Japanese textbook authors must undergo an evaluation process conducted by the Ministry of Education, which is now renamed Ministry of Education, Cul­ture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), and school districts are to choose from several state-approved textbooks for their respective curricula. Given state involvement in the evaluation process, regardless of the actual adoption rate of the specific textbook, Japan's neighbors see the approval of controversial textbooks as state endorsement of the content.

One of the textbook controversies that took place in the 1980s concerned the Asahi News report that the authors were asked to alter the term "invasion" to "advancement" in their description of Japanese imperialism in China (Narita, 2012: 214). The lexical change was understood to water down the gravity of Japan's crimes. And it is not only the content of national history textbooks that is being problematized by China and South Korea.

Statements made by high-ranking ministers and the decision of the Prime Min­ister of Japan to visit the Yasukuni Shrine (a Shinto shrine which since 1987, in theory, includes the souls of Class A war criminals, therefore rendering any visit thereafter a defiance of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial) have all been subject to scrutiny by victim states. The shrine visits have been met with Chinese and Korean protests, and the discontent over how history is narrated in Japan has led to cancellations of summit meetings and anti-Japanese demonstrations at the turn of the century.

In this way, historical memories of what Japan had done and how Japan has yet to come to terms with its imperial past continue to constrain regional politics to this day. The end of the Cold War and the rise of the human rights discourse further meant that questions of how to deal with history are no longer the sole province of the sovereigns. Despite the recent joint announcement by Prime Min­ister Shinzo Abe and President Geun-hye Park to resolve the issue "irreversibly" in December 2015, mutual distrust between Japan and South Korea and Japan and China continue to be anchored in this thorn called the history problem.

Furthermore, it is not only the democratization of former authoritarian states that adds complexity to the history problem. Both Japan and Germany were democratized immediately after 1945, so within these respective states, too, the relationship between the state and history have undergone decades of interven­tions by historians and civil society. After World War II, there is a worldwide effort at demythologizing the state in school textbooks and curriculums, most notably in Germany and Japan and in the so-called First World (Schissler and Soysal, 2005).

10 Introduction

Within Japan, historian Saburo lenaga's three-decade-long critique of state control over education is anchored in his remorse that history writing, in part, was responsible for sending his students to the war front (2003). Historians, educa­tors, and ordinary Japanese have continued to seek ways of coming to terms with, and to also, thereby, judge the past (Narita, 2012). This is to say that the "who" who constitute the subject of history in postwar Japan has diversified to include women and children, to acknowledge the agency of the formerly excluded and the poor (Nagahara, 2003).

The proliferation of subjectivities in turn implicates the role of the state, both decentering and re-centering the state as the sovereign subject of history. The amplified question is this: what does it mean to speak of the state of history? The term "state of history" is strategically left ambivalent. It could be read in two ways: the sovereign nation-state as depicted in history, or as the state of history's relationship to the state.

Furthermore, how do we speak of the state of history after philosophy has begun to deconstruct the notion of the subject (Cadava, Connor, and Nancy, 1991)? The association of "who" and the subject is by no means straightforward in philoso­phy. It is even less so in the discipline of international relations. Depending on the analytical method deployed, the state could be either a unit following behavioral law or a supposedly conscious agent-actor that is the subject (Schroeder, 1994).

To be sure, the concept of sovereignty itself is relational and to a significant degree dependent on recognition from other sovereigns, as well as the population within the territory the sovereign claims control over (Bartelson, 1995; Howland and White eds., 2009). In international politics, the sovereign nation-state is pre­sumed to be the unit or the agent-subject of history (Hobson, 2000).

The rationale for such a presupposition and how it became ubiquitous cannot be understood apart from the history of the breakdown of the hold of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire (Spruyt, 1994) and the expansion and "discovery" made by the European powers. These occurred in tandem with European imperialism, as well as the ways in which sovereigns proclaimed independence from the Holy Roman Empire by drawing a line between the traditional and the modern (Fasolt, 2004; Osbourne, 1995; Young, 1990).

Edward Said observes that it is in the age of empire "in which the novel form and the new historical narrative become preeminent, and in which the importance of subjectivity to historical times takes firm hold" (1993: 58). For Ranajit Guha, too, the appropriation of history by the West is part and parcel of Western domi­nation of the world (2002). The implicit dichotomy here is the contrast between the West and the non-West, or the rest, where Japan is sometimes presumed to be Western, and at other times, non-Western.

While the positioning of Japan remains unresolved, the fact that Japan was an imperial power stands. But so does the notion that Japan at the turn of the twen­tieth century sought to assert agency in history in response to Western denial of Japan as an equal partner in world politics. What is then needed is a questioning of how efforts at resisting the West ironically replicates the same structure of vio­lence it originally sought to critique.

Introduction 11

The relationship between imperialism and assertion of the state as the sover­eign subject of history in turn raises the conundrum of how to engage with the question of norms. This is to ask how to theorize the responsibility of a state that claims to be the sovereign subject of history toward its past as an empire when the tide of post-1945 politics of history has been to de-link the two.

While Alexander Wendt's influential formulation (with caveats) of the "state as a person" (2004) continues to inspire recent studies on ontological security and insecurity which emphasize the role of identity and recognition, not all theorists share this premise. As Roxanne Doty aptly puts it, Wendt's formulation of state as person is informed by "desire all the way down", - that is, the desire to see the world in orderly and, therefore, order-able manner (2000: 139).

To take this further, a normative discourse needs a coherent state. In more prac­tical terms, the victims' turn to the state and legal measures to seek redress re-centers the state (Brown, 1995). This is because to speak of responsibility for war, the state must be imagined as an agent-actor, a subject. Here, the demand for the specificity and concreteness of the state as an agent-actor, the subject of world history, is pitted against the decades-long movement to deconstruct the state.

What is a state? Behind this benign question lies the politics of epistemology and ontology that the presupposition of the state as an agent implies. Namely, what is the nature and property of the agent, and what is its relationship to the structure (Wight, 2006)? Indeed, everyday language reinforces the usefulness of seeing the state as an actor in social relations rather than a unit in a system.

Not a day passes without hearing phrases like "Russia will be advancing.. ." or "South Korea will respond with a. . .". This book is no exception in this respect. Yet I argue that attending to the persistence of Japan's history problem elucidates the general limit of leaving this empirical as well as ontological question off the hook. What I explicate in later chapters is the necessity of considering the agent-structure relationships and presuppositions in the discipline of international rela­tions (IR) because of their ethical implications.

Historically, too, the scope of the "who" has varied, and sociologists, anthro­pologists, and historians have effectively documented that the nation-state is a social construct (Anderson, 1991). While the myth of the homogenous nation took root immediately after decolonization (Oguma, 2002) and manifested in the form of Nihonj in-ron (the idea that Japanese are unique and different), sociologically, Shunya Yoshimi observes that, at least by the 1990s, the concept of "Japanese" could no longer be presupposed within the geographical confines of Japan (2010).

It is this inability to presuppose who the Japanese are that vexes alike both conservatives, such as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and those who stand for rec­onciling with Asia. The collective phrase, "as Japanese", was, and continues to be, suspect, "externally". Many in Asia - notably the two Koreas and the People's Republic of China as well as Singapore - continue to fear the resurgence of Japa­nese nationalism, yet the response to the history problem has to come from none other than those who identify with Japan.'

Furthermore, this demand to respond "as Japanese" all too often has compart­mentalized the question of how to think of national history and whether to offer or

12 Introduction

withhold state apology. While apologizing is of import, the focus on the national question in turn has effectively led the stories of the survivors to become captive to

the state, thereby reducing their stories to state instrumentalization of the past as a "history card" (Nakanishi, 2005). On the one hand, the appeal to the state appears to empower the nationalists, yet on the other, the accusation that the state has a self-interest in using the past denies the ethical claims of the survivors.

The rationale for reconstructing the history problem as an architectural debris is threefold. First, it is a constant reminder to think beyond binaries, and, rather, to

see a constellation of overlapping geopolitically informed concepts, where some

are older than others, but nonetheless coexist in the present. Second, the key con­cept that I trace is the place of political agency in time that informs different argu‑

ments over the notion of historicism in different historical periods - the image of layers of clusters jutting against one another here is more apt than to posit a linear succession of events that smoothens out the texture and effaces the frictions that arise from clustering.

The association of sovereignty with historical subjectivity takes place differ­ently in different geopolitical contexts as Edward Said has lucidly demonstrated.

This is to take both time and place into account, to add local color to the con­cepts at hand by historicizing them. Third, the differentiated idea of how politi‑

cal agency is implicated in the different historicisms being posited by different actors is crucial in historicizing the ways in which JR presupposes the state as agent-subject.

How these are necessarily tied to the question of whether one is a passive or active maker (agent-actor) of history that could be held responsible for "its" past

(at the expense of contingency) invites one to re-view the international politics of history in a new light. This is to ask with Jean-Luc Nancy how to "do justice to identities - without giving in to their delusion, to the presumption that they are, substantially, identities ('subjects' in this sense)" (2003: 279).

To resist the delusion is to historicize. Here, I use the term historicize as Fou­cault defines it, as "insurrection of subjugated knowledges . . . because histori‑

cal contents alone allow us to see the dividing lines in the confrontations and struggles that functional arrangements or systematic organizations are designed to mask" (2003: 7).

While this book is by no means a historiography of the history problem, what I sketch out is the historical contents that enable a re-viewing of what its per‑

sistence elucidates, to show the political architecture produced by the cluster of histories of geopolitically formed and informed struggles over how to talk about history and agency.

As the central thematic is to ask the place of state as an agent-actor, that is, the subject of history, I focus on the term historicism instead of History, or his‑

tory, or historiography. The term historicism is by no means singular in meaning,

either. Yet because a differentiated meaning of historicism is contingent upon how the place of political agency is theorized in time, as the main framework of the

chapters which are to form the cluster, as a clearing caricature, I work with two ideal types of historicism: one which, in the name of the law of history, denies political agency for those considered backward, and second, one which asserts

Introduction 13

endogenous agency in the name of history against such a structurally determined thesis of history.

Chapter 1 elucidates the rationale for this move. The subsequent chapters show how these have come to interrelate, globally, in the specific geopolitical formation of Japan-West relationships and Japan-Asia relationships, over time. By present­ing these as clusters, I then show in Chapter 4 how the impasse is constituted as debris. The central concern that constitutes the arc of this book is how the notion of the state as the sovereign subject of history is to be spoken of after the war.

This book is an intervention in the instrumentalization of history by the states in the postcolonial and postimperial present. But to find out how it got here, we must reexamine a longer duration of history than the postwar period. We must also sus­tain a nuanced account of the international politics of history that acknowledges that there are multiple meanings associated and remembered with regard to the use of history that are clustered, layered, sedimented and, at times, in conflict with one another.

Multiple actors have, toward divergent ends, spoken of history differently. The common term history conveys the impression of a scene where all the actors are speaking of the same event. Yet some invoke it to endow timeless authority, as in the way medieval religious authorities did, some to discredit the claims of others in the name of irrefutable truth, and yet others to predict the future by excavating timeless laws from history. The irreducibility of what history means by one stan­dard definition is reflected in the plethora of names given to the "history problem" in postimperial Japan: as shukan (subjective view), ninshiki (recognition), educa­tion, revisionism, responsibility, and politics.

I, therefore, take my definition of history from J.D. Salinger:

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them, if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, some­one will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history.

(1979:208-209)

What I have to offer is what I learned from select records of troubles kept, records which continue to grow in number every day. Many, many women and men have been sickened with history, and this is not limited to Japan. Many are sickened, yet we talk past one another, sometimes on purpose, but oftentimes not.

A brief note on scope(s)

In terms of the scope of reference, oftentimes, the history problem is compart­mentalized into a question of what happened during wartime. In Japan's case, this would refer to the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), Japan's invasion of

14 Introduction

Taiwan (1895), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), the Japanese invasion of China beginning in 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1931, and World War 11(1941-1945). Yet as Lisa Yoneyama elucidates, such modes of punctua­tion effaces violence legitimated in the name of history outside of the context of warfare (2016).

Commenting on the plethora of terminologies that have been in use in Japan since the end of war in 1945, philosopher Tetsuya Takahashi observes that most terms pertained to wartime responsibility or education or as cognitive dissonance. Yet he considers the term "history problem" useful since one is able to cast the scope to also include the interwar and colonial period as well as Japan's moder­nity at large, when the Ainu indigenous group and the people of Liu'qiu (present-day Okinawa) face internal colonialism (2002).

In other words, it pertains not only to wartime events but also to Japanese modernity/Westernization (which are intertwined) and its evaluation of how this had implications for Asia as well as Japan at large. Japanese Sinologist Yoshimi Takeuchi continued to grapple with the meaning of modernity and its implications for Japan and Asia or, rather, what the "advent" of modernity in Asia bequeaths upon those who are named by the West as being part of the East (Takeuchi et al., 2006). This book also takes the history problem in the spirit of Takeuchi, who refused to stop thinking about Asia in postimperial Japan.

This inclusion of the meaning of modernity as a backdrop also differentiates this book from other works whose main thrust has been to compare postwar Japan with Germany, as this comparative approach has restricted the scope to ques­tions of war memory and history. Numerous studies that contrast postwar Japan with Germany have upheld the German model of atonement as the ideal standard. Franziska Seraphim characterizes this tendency to compare Japan with Germany within academic and U.S. media representation of Japan's history problem as nothing less than a new form of Orientalism.

This is because Germany and the rest of the West here are cast once again as civilized figures who deal with history rationally, whereas Japan is backward, irra­tional, and uncivilized. This is evinced in Seraphim's quote from the Economist: "Japan is still a nationalistic nation despite its great international economic ties, and is trying to hold its culture in place without influence from western nations" (2008:205-206).

Such a cultural explanation, which echoes the stadial view of history and civili­zation, while appearing respectful of a multicultural approach to the use of history, reduces the persistence of the history problem in Japan as an anomaly to be cor­rected by following, once again, the West. Instead of asking what the persistence of the history problem in East Asia might tell us about the potential and limits of decolonizing history - that is, making history inclusive and open - the persistence is explained as a consequence of a Japanese cultural trait (Seraphim, 2008).

The pairing of Germany with Japan seems like a natural choice. Both were part of the axis powers, both were defeated, and both committed abhorrent war crimes. Yet such a comparison discounts the different historical trajectories that Germany and Japan followed, in part for geopolitical reasons, but also in part by American

Introduction 15

strategists' presupposition about the non-viability of a multilateral framework in East Asia as opposed to its viability in Europe. Those in Asia were not deemed mature enough to participate in a multilateral framework in contrast to the "civi­lized" brothers in Europe (Hemmer and Katzenstein, 2002).

But what if one were to comparatively study the politics of history among for­mer empires and, as a question of decolonizing history, place it in conversation with Guha and Said? In a recent edited volume, which examines the politics of memory in France, Japan, Portugal, Italy, and other former imperial powers, dif­ferent authors have asked how former empires deal with how to remember its imperial past.

This is a shift from a war-centric framing of the history problem to one in which the colonial period and imperial pasts come into the fold. If one were to consider the issue of "comfort women" - also known as military sex slave victims - it is true that these women were forced to serve the Japanese military during wartime.

Yet to restrict the scope to wartime is to neglect the underlying effect of the transformation of the Korean political economy under Japanese colonial rule. The majority of the "comfort women" came from impoverished classes, and less so from the educated elites. While this is not to dismiss the violence committed dur­ing war, nonetheless, there is a stake in framing the scope of the history problem beyond the question of how to talk about war.

It has been pointed out that the comparison of Germany and Japan that focuses on the act of war, and thereby the category of wartime and postwar, occludes the ways in which the advent of U.S. hegemony in East Asia has produced the "dominance of the 'good war, bad war' binary focusing on the Second World War.. . [disabling] a more rigorous critique of the inter-imperial cooperation that continues today" (Fujitani, 2015: 163). The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, led by the Allied powers, centered on war, and by doing so, left the longer term exploitative relations of all the advanced capitalist nations with their colonies and their other imperial victims beyond the scope of reach (Fujitani, 2015: 154).

The issue of colonialism and imperialism was left out because the Allied pow­ers themselves were colonial powers. The rehabilitation of Japan under U.S. hege­mony, therefore, meant that while the de-warring of history may have effectively taken place - especially as symbolized in the blotting out of any militaristic pas­sages in school textbooks - the decolonization of history did not take place.' This is why the study of the politics of history prior to war and imperial formation is also of import for the purpose of understanding the contemporary condition.

The scale of the collectivity in question has varied widely in the span of two centuries in East Asia as the Sinocentric tributary system became dismantled,' and various modes of solidarity and anti-colonial, as well as anti-Western, regionalism were attempted and disavowed. This layered complexity also calls for historiciz-ing the nation-state as a political category in relation to empire and colonialism as a frame of reference to think of the past and the present. We cannot comprehend the persistence of the history problem solely on the basis of the nation-state.

Thus far, I have argued for a broader take on the history problem that goes beyond the war/nonwar binary by attending to imperial formation and history before World

16 Introduction

War II. Let us step back and map out the even broader contour of the vexed relation between Japan, history, and colonialism so as to make sense of why the persistence of the history problem could be understood through the lens of the de-colonial proj­ect of international history. In philosophical terms, this underscores the issue of the continuity principle in theorizing state responsibility on the one hand, and more importantly, in the context of international relations, the extent to which the state could be theorized as the agent-subject in history. The two points are conjoined.

The continuity principle in theorizing political responsibility, simply put, is the question of whether I am the same as the I from yesterday. In the context of Japan, this culminates in the debate over whether there was a revolution in 1945 that gives credibility to the claim that the state prior to 1945 is different from that after 1945. Many point to continuity rather than discontinuity, mostly on the basis of the U.S. Occupation's decision to retain the emperor and not indict him in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Dower, 2000).

Because the state of history since 1945 has been heavily shaped by the U.S. presence in Japan, directly until 1952 and indirectly through the U.S.-Japan Secu­rity Treaty, much of the postwar debate on history writing cannot but address the United States. This focus on the United States, along with the stubborn impression that the war was lost to the United States, but not to the rest, in turn also efface the presence of the Asians.

Furthermore, the remnants of geopolitical tensions and Cold War divisions con­tinue to shape and constrain each state's politics of history differently, as we see in the different approaches to Japanese colonial history by the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China. Economic wealth and the viability of state support for the victims also alter the responses.

Filipina survivors of the "comfort women" system accepted the Asian Women's Fund's reparation money, whereas the South Korean survivors rejected the mon­etary compensation and sought to go further. This was partially enabled by the South Korean government's support to these women. It is for these reasons that the history of the altering shape of states as the subject of history matters so much.

The other rationale for approaching the history problem at the crossroads of JR theory and the history of East Asian interstate and postcolonial relations is to elu­cidate the implied assumption of agency. The question of whether the state could be considered an agent-subject in global politics arises from the need to consider what it means to be historically responsible. Logically, those who do not act with volition cannot be held responsible for such acts.

On the basis of this point, I differentiate types of approaches to history in this book and take a layered and overlapping approach to re-view the ways in which the history problem is caught in an impasse. This also necessitates that the scope of the book extends even further back and away from the Far East into the Renais­sance and Enlightenment periods of Western history, when the concept of politi­cal autonomy and agency become intertwined with the politicization of history (Ankersmit, 2002; Fasolt, 2004).

While the scope is vast and the run feels wild, it is a necessary exercise to see and feel the political architecture and its collapsed aftermath. The scale and span

Introduction 17

of the discourse covered is ambitious - for each and every point could easily have led to another chapter, another book. One might ask why not cover only what took place after 1945? In lieu of an answer to that, here I want to reflect on the conten­tions over how to periodize history.

The term "Greater East Asia War" was introduced on December 12, 1941, a few days after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor (Narita, 2010: 42). Prior to that, for prac­tical purposes, what went on between Japan and China was deliberately called "incident" and not "war". This was because if it were declared a war, embargo would ensue. It was also after the attack on Pearl Harbor that the war as a righ­teous campaign was openly announced. Prior to that, Japan's colonization and invasion of Asia was difficult to legitimate let alone theorize.

Media reports on Asia mostly took the form of fragmented documentary, but after Pearl Harbor, the films viewed in Japan came to emphasize the event, in rela­tion to larger narratives, as history (Narita, 2010: 59). With the attack on Anglo-Saxon power (Japan attacked both Hawai'i and British Malaya - therefore, also spelling the end of the British influence in Asia), the atmosphere at that time, according to Naoko Itagaki, a scholar of Japanese wartime literature, was that of the beginning of a "new world picture that includes Japan as part of the East" (Narita, 2010: 43).

After December 15, 1945, on the orders of General Headquarters, the term "Greater East Asia War" was banned from use in public statements. The term intro­duced instead was "History of War in the Pacific", which periodizes the span from the Manchurian incident in 1931 to surrender in 1945, covering the "Manchurian Incident", "Sino-Japan Incident", and "War in the Pacific" (Narita, 2010: 66).

Despite the inclusion of Asia in such historiography, the main emphasis was on the war in the Pacific after 1941, which means that the war in Asia is occluded, and so is the fact of Japan's colonization of Taiwan and Korea, which began much earlier. In this sense, even the inclusion of Asia, by calling the war the "fifteen year war in the Asia-Pacific", fails to address the larger intertwinement of dis­course on enlightenment and colonization in the name of the "civilizing mission".

Specifically, for Asia, the progressive history associated with the Enlightenment entails a peculiar predicament: here history begins from the stagnant "Orient" and culminates in the mobile "Occident". Geography becomes tied to temporal hierar­chy, thereby giving the East-West relation a political significance. The publication of "Theory Affirming the Greater East Asia War" by Fusao Hayashi in 1964-1965 takes the scale of history under consideration far beyond the fifteen years to a "hundred years war" (Narita, 2010: 171).

In this schema, the beginning of war dates to when the Western powers forcibly opened Japan with gunboat diplomacy in the mid-nineteenth century, ending the centuries of "peace" sustained under Tokugawa rule (ibid). Depicting this hun­dred years as pure power politics between Japan and the West, and for escaping rule by the white powers, Hayashi takes a revisionist stance toward the interpreta­tion of the Manchurian incident and the meaning of war (Narita, 2010: 172).

While I do not necessarily concur with Hayashi's thesis, I nonetheless deem this challenge of examining the politics of history beyond the fifteen years, to

18 Introduction

the hundred years before 1945, as a layered conundrum over how to contend with progressive history, the wovenness of geography to temporal hierarchy, and resistance entailing the assertion of an agentic sovereign subject to understand the impasse in the present, a necessary task.

A road map

Chapter 1, "On the Recursivity of the Politics of History", makes a case for dif­ferentiating between two versions of historicism: agency-denying historicism and

agency-enabling historicism. Employing an abductive method, I critically engage with Chakrabarty and Guha's writings on history writing and show that their defi­nition of historicism as being part and parcel of colonialist knowledge that denies non-European agency is indispensable, yet is also inadequate in understanding modern Japan's engagement with historicism.

To better understand the shift in the way in which historicism has been employed by Japanese thinkers in different periods of modernization I argue that instead of

collapsing British liberal thought with German political thought, as Guha does, we should attend to the differences among different Western powers and contextu-alize historicism. By placing historicism in the European context, I show how the divergent meanings of historicism developed in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe pivot around the question of how to conceive of agency in time.

In Britain and France, the study of history was likened to the study of nature and the history of mankind was subject to objective rational study. In Germany,

building on Kant's application of the organismic metaphor to the theorization of the body politic, an alternative conception of historical development, as the "unfolding" of individual culture, manifested in rebellion against the Enlighten­ment. Both kinds of historicism place the world in relation to historical develop­ment, but each does so to a different end.

The first kind of historicism presumes the comparability of different social groupings in different stages of development. The second kind of historicism

rejects the existence of the implicit standard which makes the act of comparison possible in the first instance. By examining the discourse of historicism in Ger­man political thought I make the case that there is more than one meaning attribut­able to the term historicism.

The divergent meanings of historicism have political implications when they are used to understand a particular condition in world history. In Chapter 2, "On

the Rise and Demise of Civilizational History in Meiji Japan", I examine how Jap‑

anese intellectuals initially were receptive to agency-denying British and French historicism that viewed world history as civilizational history and how this was

inflected in the shift in Japan's relationship with China and Korea. In identifying

the new center of civilizationlzhonghua/41 4!i as Europe instead of Qing China,

Japan decenters Qing China from the interstate political landscape.

This in part has to do with how in East Asia the question of who was civilized was only loosely associated with racial difference, in contrast to the discourse in West­ern civilizational history, which increasingly associated whiteness with civilization.

Introduction 19

Because civilization was presumed to be open and inclusive and having little to do with racial identity, leading Japanese intellectuals, such as Yukichi Fukuzawa, Tikichi Taguchi, and Kunitake Kume, sought to engage with Guizot and Henry Buckle's progressive and scientific history and make world history more inclusive.

Yet, by the 1890s, civilizational history and the implicit standard of civiliza­tion are used by Western powers against "backward Asia", including Japan. As a consequence of this awareness of Eurocentrism in civilizational history, the Meiji state altered its relationship with historicism, toward a model closer to agency-enabling German historicism. This resulted in the politicization of history writing toward nationalist ends, bolstering the influence of emperor-centered historians.

Agency-denying historicism presented Japan with the dilemma of how to over­come its "backward" status within Eurocentric civilizational history at the beginning of twentieth century. The reconfiguration of history writing as agency-enabling his­toricism manifests in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of the convergence of three global currents: (1) a sense of crisis over the meaning of civilization, even within Europe, at the end of World War I. The atrocities and massive scale of death on European soil, instead of in faraway colonies, brought about in Europe a criti­cal reflection on the meaning of civilization. (2) the search, outside Europe, for alternatives to civilization as the basis for envisioning a different kind of global order; and (3) the earlier emergence, within Germany, of the concept of kultur as a key term for envisioning and asserting historical agency, in response to French and British influence.

In Chapter 3, "The Assertion: Japan as the Subject of World History", I exam­ine how, as a result of and response to the convergence of these global intellectual currents, Kiyoshi Miki, the head of the cultural division of Prime Minister Fumi-maro Konoe's think tank Showa Research Association, provides a blueprint for legitimating Japanese imperialism. This was done in the name of the Greater East Asia Cooperative Body (Toa kyodotai) and in the name of asserting Japan as the subject/agent of history.

This Greater East Asia Cooperative Body theory later became a basis for Konoe's declaration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the 1940s. Miki's treatise on historicism, which drew heavily on Kant's writings conceiv­ing of culture as the site where freedom can be actualized, provided a systematic legitimation of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s. Here, culture, as the site of resistance against civilizational historicism/agency-denying historicism and method with which to overcome the West, proved to be violent.

With the end of the Fifteen Years War in the Asia-Pacific'° in 1945 and the advent of the U.S. Occupation, Japan as a subject of history becomes a palimpsest: the subject is both there and not there. In Chapter 4, "On the Postwar Palimpsest Subject of History", I show how this palimpsest history continues to haunt Japan's history problem in East Asia. With the thawing of Cold War tensions, Asian vic­tims' demands for Japan to take responsibility surged in the 1990s, prompting a reexamination of the role of history writing role in international politics.

In this context, literary critic Norihiro Kato pointed out in (1995) that the absence of Japan as the subject of history since 1945 made it possible for postwar

20 Introduction

Japan to evade being held responsible by Asian victims. Therefore, in Haisen-goron [After Defeat] he posits the thesis that, in order to apologize to Asia, Japan must constitute a subject of history which can be held response-able. This thesis provokes an allergic reaction within Japan because Kato's call to constitute the agent/subject of history eerily resembles the movement of the 1930s and 1940s, when Japan asserted itself as the subject of history and, in the process, subju­gated Asia.

I suggest that in light of the more recent memory of the violence committed in the name of agency-asserting history in the 1930s and 1940s there is a reluctance to constitute Japan as a subject of history once again. Differentiating the two types of historicism and their effects on how Japan sees itself in relation to the world enables us to see that the dilemma posed by the history problem is not over "how to grapple with progressive history", but rather, "after historicism(s), what might one have to say about history".

In conclusion, I argue that the persistence of the history problem between Japan and Asia shows that both agency-denying historicism and agency-enabling his­toricism reshaped the East Asian international order in significant ways and the legacy of this engagement with the two versions of historicism continue to haunt the region. If both versions of historicism have proven to be violent, this also sug­gests that we must break out of a formulaic paradigm where we assert ourselves as the sovereign subject of history in response to being denied historical agency. We must consider why, after decolonization, we continue to equate and fetishize becoming sovereign to becoming a subject of history.

By this point, I hope to have elucidated (1) why a re-view of the persistence of the history problem entails tracing history's relation to agency, (2) why dif­ferentiating between kinds of historicisms enables us to understand the postimpe-nal impasse over history and what the stakes of straddling different disciplinary approaches to the politics of history are, (3) on the basis of differentiating the two types of historicisms how the history of Japan's engagement with world history could be more fine-tuned, and why I chose these particular thinkers, and (4) how these moves can tackle the conundrum about history that often goes unnoticed, yet continues to fracture efforts to forge solidarity toward attaining historical justice.

While the segment on Japanese history of history is more or less in chronologi­cal order, the chapter plans are crafted with an eye to identifying the theoretical dilemma that is both particular and ubiquitous to those whose identities are his­torically constituted by being called "backward" or "less developed". This is a theoretical starting point toward rethinking what modernity means. As alluded to earlier, the familiarity between the discourse of 1930s Japan and Dipesh Chakrab-arty's call to "provincialize Europe" renders this project of interest to those who may not necessarily be readers of Japanese international relations.

Instead of confining Japan's "history problem" to an issue peculiar to East Asian international politics, I place the persistence in the larger context of the global interconnection of ideas about how to assert agency in history. In a sense, I am working backward, as any discussion of war responsibility must logically engage with the state of history and its agency. While this unconventional approach is not

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Introduction 21

to discount the objective view of the past altogether, I posit that a contextualized reconstruction of the conundrum regarding history at different periods can eluci­date both the difference and the eerie familiarity of the troubles faced.

This book not only seeks to identify the ways in which history oppresses, dom­inates, and naturalizes existing inequality and injustice, but also considers the problem of subject formation that cannot be elucidated and thought apart from these structures of domination. This is to probe the tension of the moderns who politicized and depoliticized history toward divergent aims - aims which, none­theless and by definition, must plot toward afuture. It is in this sense that we mod­ems are trapped between the desire for and disavowal of a linear sense of time.

Notes

1 While there also is a history problem between China and Korea over the ownership of the land which Korea traces back to their dynasty, the issues garnering the most

attention are the Nanjing  Massacre and the Japanese imperial army's use of military

sexual slavery - euphemistically known as "comfort women". Less acknowledged are

the massacre of Koreans which took place after the Great Kanto Earthquake; the mas‑

sacre of Okinawans by the Japanese imperial army, who suspected that Okinawans

were American spies, thus forcing a group suicide in the last year of the war; the

use of forced labor in Japanese factories, the most notorious case taking place in the

Hanaoka region; and the military unit's use of vivisection to obtain data for biological

weapon production. Cf. Tak Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama eds.,

Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham and London: Duke University

Press, 2001); Joshua A. Fogel ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiog‑

raphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morris Low, Leonid Petrov, and Timothy Y. Tsu, East Asia beyond the History Wars: Con­fronting the Ghosts of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2013); Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter eds., Ruptured Histories: War, Memory and the Post-Cold War in

Asia (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007); Gi-Wook Shin,

Soon-Won Park, and Daqing Yang eds., Rethinking Historical Injustice and Reconcili­ation in Northeast Asia: The Korean Experience (London: Routledge, 2007); Thomas

U. Berger, War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2012). The number of textbooks that include mention of the "com­fort women" have briefly increased in 1990s, yet under the current Prime Minister,

Shinzo Abe, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - Japan's textbook evaluators - have increasingly asked textbook authors who seek to discuss the "comfort women" and Rape of Nanjing to alter the term "rape" or to retract the statement that "many of the 'comfort women' died en masse during war" from textbooks.

Cf. Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan, Comment on authorization system: www.mext.gojp/a_menu/shotou/kyoukasho/kentei/03062201/ 14-75.htm (Accessed October 28, 2017).

2 The New York Times, "Japan and South Korea Settle Dispute over Wartime 'Comfort Women", www.nytimes.comI2O 15/1 2/29/worldlasialcomfort-women-south-korea-japan. html (Accessed November 29, 2017).

3 Walter Sim, "Comfort Women' Issue Can't Be Swept under Rug", The Straits Times, www. straitstimes . comlasialeast-asialcomfort-women-issue-cant-be-swept-under-rug (Accessed December 25, 2017).

4 Asian Women's Fund, "Letter from Prime Minister to the Former Comfort Women", www.awf.or.jp/e6/statement-12.html (Accessed January 10, 2018).

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24 Introduction

Kato, Norihiro. Haisengoron [After Defeat]. Tokyo: Chikuma Bunko, 2005.

Lid, Jennifer. Sorry States. Apologies in International Politics. Ithaca and London: Cor­nell University Press, 2010.

Maeda, Akira ed. 'lanfu 'Mondai no Genzai: 'Paku Yuha Gensho 'to chishikijin ['Comfort Women 'Issue 's Present: 'Yu-ha Park Phenomenon 'and the Intellectuals]. Tokyo: San-ichi Shobo, 2016.

Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, Moms Low, Leomd Petrov, and Timothy Y. Tsu eds. East Asia beyond the History Wars. Confronting the Ghosts of Violence. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Nagahara, Keiji. 20 Seiki Nihon no Rekishigaku [The Japanese Discipline of History in Twentieth Century]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2003.

Nakanishi, Terumasa. "China Plays Its History Cards." Japan Echo 32, no. 4 (2005): 18-23.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. A Finite Thinking. Edited by Simon Sparks. Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni­versity Press, 2003.

Narita, Ryuichi. 'Senso Keiken' no Sengoshi [Postwar History of 'War Experience 7. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2010.

Narita, Ryuichi. Kingendai nihonshi to rekishigaku [Modern and Contemporary Japanese History and Historiography]. Tokyo: Chuko Shmsho, 2012.

Oguma, Eiji. A Genealogy of 'Japanese' Self-Images. Translated by David Askew. Mel­bourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002.

Onishi, Norimitsu. "Decades after War Trials Japan Still Honors a Dissenting Judge." The New York limes, August 31, 2007. www.nytimes.comJ2007/08/31/worldlasia!3lmemo. html (Accessed December 20, 2017).

Onuma, Yasuaki. 'Janfu' mondai to wa nandattanoka [What Was the 'Comfort Women' Problem About?]. Tokyo: Chuko Shmsho, 2007.

Osbourne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London and New York: Verso, 1995.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Salinger, Jerome David. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1979.

Sang-Hun, Choe. "Japan and South Korea Settle Dispute over Wartime 'Comfort Women'." The New York Times, December 28, 2015. www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/worlcl/asia/ comfort-women-south-korea-j apan.html (Accessed November 15, 2017).

Schissler, Hanna and Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal eds. The Nation, Europe, and the World: Textbooks and Curricula in Transition. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005.

Schroeder, Paul. Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe. New York: Paigrave Macmillan, 2004.

Seraphim, Franziska. "Negotiating War Legacies and Postwar Democracy in Japan." Total­itarian Movements and Political Religions 9, nos. 2-3 (2008): 203-224.

Shigematsu, Setsu and Keith L. Camacho. Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Sim,  Walter. "Comfort Women' Issue Can't Be Swept under Rug." The Straits limes, December 15, 2017. www. straitstimes.comlasialeast-asialcomfort-women-issue-cant-be-swept-under-rug (Accessed December 25, 2017).

Soh, Chunghee Sarah. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcoloniai Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Spruyt, Hendrik. The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis ofSystems Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

22 Introduction

5 Both statements were formulated by Yomiuri news agency, which conducted the opin­ion poll.

6 Signed by forty-eight delegates in September 8, 1951, the San Francisco Peace Treaty (SFPT) formally ended the state of war, recognized Japanese sovereignty, ceded con­trol of Okinawa and Bonin islands to the United States, relinquished territories obtained under Japan's expansion, and the decisions of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, otherwise known as the Tokyo Trial) were to be accepted. Geo­politically, the United States' decision to exclude the People's Republic of China, even against British insistence,  has resulted in Japan signing a bilateral treaty with Taiwan in 1952, resulting in partial peace. Both Taiwan and China were not invited. India rejected the invitation in light of how the treaty was tied to the U.S.-Japan Security Alliance, an alliance formed under unequal relations between the two. Burma did not participate given the problematic reparation clause in the treaty. Both North and South Korea were excluded in light of U.S. concern over Korean communist agitation in Japan. As a result, Koreans remaining in Japan had no access to the benefits other Allied civilians were given. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were still under French colonial rule. Indo­nesia signed a separate peace treaty in 1958, and the Philippines reserved ratification, leaving Ceylon (as Sri Lanki was then known) and Pakistan the two countries in Asia that straightforwardly supported SFPT.

7 Japan's relationship with other states in Asia are inflected with diverse geopolitical restraints as well as ironic appropriations. Take, for example, the 2007 visit made by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the descendant of Indian Judge Radhabinod Pal in India (Onishi, 2007). While Judge Pal wrote his dissenting opinion in the Tokyo Trial in order to contest the lack of justice shown by the Allied powers in Asia, a statue of him has been erected in the Yasukuni Shrine in 2005 with the objective of supporting the idea that Japan's war was a Holy War to save Asia from the West. Quite often Tai­wan's stance toward Japan over history is deemed as less hostile in contrast to China, yet this is more about postcolomal Taiwan's "internal" tension between the population that arrived with Chiang Kai-shek after he lost the civil war and those Taiwanese who lived under Japanese colonial rule.

8 Nonetheless, this does not mean that demilitarization effectively took place, either, as the continued presence of the United States military in Japan attests, along with the existence of the Japanese Self-Defense Force, whose military expenditure has been on the rise under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Cf. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Min­neapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

9 The classic take on the Chinese World Order is given by John Fairbank (1968); a more recent account is by David C. Kang (2010). On anti-Westernism, Pan-Islamism, and Pan-Asianism, cf. Cemil Aydin (2007) and En Hotta (2007).

10 There are contentions over how to call this period - some refer to World War II, yet this would emphasize the European theater and Japan's war against Western powers at the expense of occluding Japan's invasion and colonization of states in Asia. Others who seek to hold a more balanced view call it the Fifteen Years War in the Asia-Pacific.

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24 Introduction

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Introduction 25

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