The History Problem

Front matter

THE HISTORY PROBLEM

THE HISTORY PROBLEM

The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia

Contents

Preface vii

The Growth of Transnational Interactions, 1965-1988 48 Apologies and Denunciations, 1989-1996 74

The Coexistence of Nationalism and

Preface

The Asia-Pacific War ended more than seventy years ago. Yet, to this day, the war continues to haunt Japan’s relations with its two most important neighbors, South Korea and China. Can the three countries ever resolve the dispute over how to commemorate the war, and if so, how? This question motivated me to write this book.

I have no experience of the war, and I did not hear about it firsthand when I was growing up. My father was born after the war, and my mother was still a small child when the war ended. They have no memory of it. But they once told me that my paternal grandfather, a carpenter, had been conscripted as a technician to support Japanese troops in Manchuria, while my maternal grandfather, an elementary school teacher, had been spared from military service. This secondhand story about my grandfathers was my only point of personal, albeit indirect, connection with the war.

Growing up in Japan, however, I was exposed to many illustrated books and movies about the war at both home and school. I still remember learning about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through The Angry Bodhisattva (Okorijizo) and Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen), the bombings of Tokyo and other major cities through The Glass Rabbit (Garasu no usage) and Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no haka), and the Battle of Okinawa through The Tower of Lilies (Himeyuri no to) and Tsushima Maru. These books and movies made deep impressions on me because many of them depicted the suffering of children of my age. And yet, the war felt like a remote past, for I was sheltered in postwar Japan’s economic prosperity.

I developed a strong interest in the war or, more precisely, its commemoration, only in fall 2001. I had just entered the doctoral program in sociology at the University of Michigan when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened. I was shocked by the inhumane nature of the attacks, as well as by the US government’s aggressive response. The US government did not appear to care about collateral damage to civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. I saw a parallel between those civilians and the ones in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—all victims of a strain of American nationalism that did not recognize the humanity of people in “enemy countries.” So, I decided to write a historical critique viii Preface of American nationalism, examining how people in Japan had coped with the atomic bombings.

But I soon realized my naiveté. Many Japanese citizens commemorated the atomic bombings to articulate Japan victim identity in nationalist terms, discounting the sufferings that the Japanese military had inflicted on people in the Asia-Pacific. Indeed, while the US government waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, Japanese prime minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro repeatedly visited the Yasukuni Shrine, the sacred site for Japanese nationalism, causing an uproar in South Korea and China. The controversy was further intensified by the nationalist history textbook promoted by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform that glorified Japan’s past aggression as a heroic act of self-defense against the Western imperial powers. I was therefore disappointed with both Japanese and American nationalism.

As I researched more, however, I found that A-bomb victims had critiqued nationalism in the Japanese commemoration of the Asia-Pacific War, and they had spearheaded the effort to commemorate victims of Japan’s wartime atrocities. They were able to do so because their sense of victimhood was fundamentally cosmopolitan, recognizing the suffering of war victims irrespective of nationality. This led me to delve deeply into how other actors in Japan, including but not limited to activists, politicians, historians, and history teachers, tried to commemorate foreign war victims. Specifically, these investigations enabled me to discern the history of transnational interactions between Japan, South Korea, and China that had injected cosmopolitanism into Japan’s official commemoration at various times. This transnational perspective also helped me probe how nationalist commemoration in Japan was connected with its counterparts in South Korea, China, and even the United States.

Thus, I began to understand how multiple entangled factors had rendered Japan’s dispute with South Korea and China seemingly unresolvable: the contradiction between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the tension between commemoration and historiography, Japan’s dual identity as perpetrator and victim, negative feedback loops of nationalism in the region, and so on. I was aware, of course, that numerous books had already been written about Japan’s dispute with South Korea and China, but I decided to write this book because I felt the itinerary of my personal and intellectual biography could provide a unique perspective. Above all, I felt the urge to share the results of my research and reflections with people in East Asia and beyond—scholars, educators, students, and concerned citizens—to

Preface ix reexamine the causes of the dispute and explore the possibilities for resolution from the vantage point of the seventieth anniversary of the war's end.

I was able to complete this book only because I received generous support from various mentors, colleagues, and institutions along the way. To begin with, I would like to thank Azumi Koya and Mark Gould, my advisers at International Christian University and Haverford College, respectively. With Koya's encouragement, I decided to go to the United States for graduate school. Mark also provided me with excellent foundations in social theory when I attended Haverford as an exchange student, and these theoretical foundations continue to help me analyze the complex realities of the contemporary world.

At the University of Michigan, I started thinking and writing about the politics of war commemoration under the guidance of three historical and political sociologists, Julia Adams, Michael Kennedy, and Howard Kimeldorf. They decisively influenced my theoretical, methodological, and professional orientations. The University of Michigan indeed offered the right graduate education for me—interdisciplinary and international. John Campbell, a political scientist, shared with me his detailed knowledge of Japanese politics, while Ram Mahalingam introduced me to cultural psychology, a key to understanding commemoration that is simultaneously collective and individual. I would like to thank Julia, Michael, Howard, John, and Ram for supervising my research. I am also grateful to the university and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/American Council for Learned Societies for providing me with fellowships and other resources to complete my graduate studies.

While an assistant professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 2011-2012. This fellowship allowed me to spend a year at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, collect primary and secondary materials for the book project, and produce the first draft of the manuscript. I am grateful to Suehiro Akira and Ishida Hiroshi, then directors of the institute, as well as Thomas Blackwood and Tanabe Shunsuke, for hosting me as a visiting research fellow. I also would like to thank Aoki Yoshiyuki, who was a doctoral student at the university, for translating Korean newspaper articles into Japanese.

In addition, I was fortunate to receive a postdoctoral fellowship from the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University in 2013—2014.

x Preface

The fellowship gave me the time and resources that I needed to prepare the manuscript for submission. At Harvard, I was fortunate to befriend two young historians, Mimaki Seiko and Tim Yang. I am grateful to them for reading the entire manuscript and helping me clarify my argument. I would also like to thank Thomas Berger, Alexis Dudden, Fujihira Shinju, and Susan Pharr for their generosity in spending an afternoon participating in intense discussion of the manuscript and offering me many insightful comments.

While a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, I also had the chance to participate in the Next Generation Japan Leadership Program organized by the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation. Participation in the program helped me carefully consider policy implications of my argument. Discussion sessions including Victor Cha, Chris Nelson, Sheila Smith, and Scott Snyder particularly broadened my perspective on the history problem vis-à-vis other issues and dimensions of international relations in East Asia.

Moreover, at various stages of writing this book, I received comments from David Johnson, David Leheny, Ivo Plsek, and Franziska Seraphim. Their comments were demanding but tremendously useful in refining my argument. I am particularly grateful to David Johnson for being such a wonderful mentor and colleague, along with Hagen Koo, at the University of Hawai'i at Mànoa. I would also like to acknowledge generous support from my editors: Susan Campbell and Kim Greenwell; Pamela Kelley at the University of Hawai'i Press; Michael Bohrer-Clancy at Westchester Publishing Services; as well as helpful feedback from the two anonymous reviewers of the University of Hawai'i Press. Their comments and editorial guidance made a big difference.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents, Saito Hideo and Fumiyo, and my wife, Miki. My parents not only exposed me to many illustrated books and movies about the Asia-Pacific War when I was a child, but also supported my decision to study abroad. My wife also taught me an important lesson while I was completing the final version of the manuscript—we can hope for a peaceful world only if we are peaceful ourselves, and the practice of peace begins with our daily life.

So, I dedicate this book to people in East Asia and elsewhere who wish to make the world a more peaceful place.

THE HISTORY PROBLEM

Introduction

In March 1976, Kurihara Sadako, a poet who had survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, published “When We Say “Hiroshima” (Hiroshima to iutoki).! The poem asked A-bomb victims, as well as the Japanese people as a whole, the following: “When we say “Hiroshima, / do people answer, gently, / ‘Ah, Hiroshima’?” Instead of such gentle expression of understanding, Kurihara heard “echoes of blood and fire” and angry voices against Japan for its past wrongdoings: “In chorus, Asia’s dead and her voiceless masses / spit out the anger / of all those we made victims.” But why was the anger of those outside Japan still so resonant thirty years after the Asia-Pacific War had ended? Kurihara’s answer was that it was because the Japanese had failed to adequately remember and atone for the atrocities that they had committed in the Asia- Pacific, while dwelling on their own victimhood. She pleaded, “We first must / wash the blood / off our own hands,” so that others might eventually extend solidarity to Japan’s A-bomb victims in their common pursuit of world peace.

In spite of Kurihara’s plea, “echoes of blood and fire” continue to haunt Japan’s relations with its neighboring countries. Especially with South Korea and China, Japan has been embroiled in intense controversies over the commemoration of the Asia-Pacific War. To name but a few points of contention: interpretations of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, apologies and compensation for foreign victims of Japan’s past aggression, prime ministers’ visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, and Japanese history textbooks. Collectively, these controversies have become known as the “history problem” (rekishi ninshiki mondai) in East Asia.

The history problem escalated to an unprecedented scale in 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the Asia-Pacific War’s end, when Prime Minister

Koizumi Jun'ichiro visited the Yasukuni Shrine that honors war dead as well as wartime leaders who were prosecuted as war criminals. In the same year, the Japanese government approved a highly nationalistic history textbook produced by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho wo Tsukurukai) for use in junior high schools. Responding to these events, the governments of South Korea and China strongly criticized the Japanese government, and dislike of Japan among South Koreans and Chinese spiked.? The Chinese reaction was particularly intense, as large-scale anti-Japanese demonstrations caused damage to the Japanese Consulate in Shanghai and Japanese-owned stores in major Chinese cities.

Although the history problem temporarily calmed down after successors of Koizumi refrained from visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, it remains a formidable obstacle in Japan's relations with South Korea and China. Opinion polls in 2014 showed that about 70 percent of South Koreans and more than 80 percent of Chinese viewed Japan negatively? In August 2015, the media and citizens in the two countries also made critical remarks on the statement that Prime Minister Abe Shinzo issued on the eve of the seventieth anniversary of the war's end.‘ In turn, the percentage of Japanese who did not feel friendly toward South Korea and China exceeded 60 percent and 80 percent, respectively, according to the 2014 government opinion survey?

In fact, the history problem has become potentially more explosive thanks to its intersection with the growing territorial disputes over Dokdo/ Takeshima and the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, amid the changing balance of power in the region. In August 2012, for example, South Korean president Lee Myung Bak visited Dokdo/Takeshima after the Japanese government refused to discuss compensation for South Korean victims of Japan's past wrongdoings. Lee's government also launched a campaign to publicize the territorial dispute as part of the history problem—Dokdo symbolizing the Korean nation victimized by Japan's past aggression.’ Moreover, when the Japanese government proceeded to officially own the Senkaku/ Diaoyu Islands in September 2012, the Chinese government cancelled events to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of normalization between the two countries. Chinese citizens, too, staged anti-Japanese demonstrations in major Chinese cities in mid-September, marking the anniversary of the Mukden Incident, Japan's invasion of Manchuria, which had taken place in Septem-

As evinced by these events, the territorial disputes are inextricably tied with memories of Japan’s past aggression for many South Koreans and Chinese. The disputes have also been stimulated by the rising stature of South Korea and China in international society. No longer weak, as they once were in the aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War, the two countries have become more confident and assertive toward Japan, and national pride has increased among their citizens.” The Japanese government, in turn, has emphasized the importance of patriotism to its citizens to compensate for the economic and political stagnation since the 1990s. Most recently, Abe Shinzo's government reinterpreted Article 9 of the constitution to expand Japan’s military capability in September 2015, stirring anxiety among people in South Korea and China who still remember Japan’s past wrongdoings. Thus, whether and how the governments and citizens of the three countries can resolve the history problem has crucial ramifications for the future of East Asia.

But how did the history problem become such a point of contention in Japan’s relations with South Korea and China? Can the three countries resolve the history problem and, if so, how? This book aims to answer these questions, crucial for the governments and citizens in East Asia whose activities are increasingly intertwined at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The History Problem as a Collision of Nationalist Commemorations

In essence, East Asia’s history problem is a set of complexly entangled controversies over how to commemorate the Asia-Pacific War. But “the Asia- Pacific War” is itself a complicated term. Historians who adopt the term disagree whether it should refer only to the Asia-Pacific theater of World War II (1941—1945) or include the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937—1945).'? Some Japanese historians also advocate “the Fifteen-Year War" (1931-1945) as an alternative term to capture the connection between the Mukden Incident in Manchuria (1931-1933), the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Asia-Pacific war theater. Others think that “the Greater East Asia War” (1941—1945) is historically most accurate because the term was used by Japan’s wartime government. Above all, people outside Japan understand the historical period differently in terms of their own sense of temporality based on histories of resistance against imperial aggression and fights for independence that preceded and followed “the Asia-Pacific War."!!

In this book, I use “the Asia-Pacific War" in a broad sense, to refer to the Mukden Incident, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Asia-Pacific war theater. This is because when people both inside and outside Japan speak of Japan's “past wrongdoings” (kako no ayamachi), they often refer to events that happened between 1931 and 1945, such as the invasion of Manchuria, the Nanjing Massacre, and the military “comfort women” system. Thus, using either “the Asia-Pacific War,” in the narrow sense, or “the Greater East Asia War" would leave out important points of contention from my analysis of the history problem. I also prefer the broad version of "the Asia-Pacific War" to "the Fifteen-Year War" because the former better captures the geographical scope of the history problem. Of course, "the Asia-Pacific War," even in the broad sense, risks downplaying the South Korean perspective on the history problem that includes Japan's colonial rule (1910—1945), but I believe that this risk is minimal so long as Japan's wartime atrocities against Koreans are fully understood as coterminous with its colonial rule.

Just as "the Asia-Pacific War" is a complicated term, the “history problem" is a complex phenomenon and hard to pin down because it consists of multiple controversies dealing with diverse issues, ranging from the Yasukuni Shrine to history textbooks, that have political dynamics and historical trajectories of their own. In this sense, it may be more appropriate to translate rekishi ninshiki mondai as “history problems" in the plural. Nevertheless, these multiple controversies are historically homologous—tracing back to Japan's actions during the Asia-Pacific War—and inextricably entangled to form a more or less bounded domain of public debates and policy problems.

Moreover, the controversies are structurally homologous in the sense that they pertain to commemoration, an act of remembering the past to construct what sociologist Maurice Halbwachs called "collective memory"? On the one hand, collective memory is internal and psychological, consisting of mnemonic schemas or tacit understandings of what to remember about the past and how to remember it. On the other hand, collective memory is external and material, encoded in mnemonic objects that include, but are not limited to, archives, memorials, museum exhibits, and history textbooks.'? A variety of commemorations, such as anniversary celebrations and memorial ceremonies, aim to align participants mnemonic schemas with mnemonic objects surrounding them in order to institutionalize a certain form of collective memory of their purportedly shared past.

In this process of constructing a collective autobiography, however, commemoration eliminates ambiguities from historical facts. As philosopher

Tzvetan Todorov observed, “While history makes the past more complicated, commemoration makes it simpler, since it seeks most often to supply us with heroes to worship or with enemies to detest.” Even though commemoration oversimplifies and even distorts, it is indispensable to social life because only through it can people appropriate something as vast and complex as history in order to articulate their collective identity. As a result, when different groups come into contact with each other, they are likely to notice disjunctions in how they commemorate the past. These disjunctive commemorations can then become sources of controversy and even conflict between the groups precisely because the foundations of their collective identities are at stake. In this sense, a history problem is not unique to East Asia but commonplace around the world.

But controversy and conflict over commemoration of the past become intractable when they intersect with nationalism, a political doctrine and cultural idiom that divides the world into discrete national communities.” When people commemorate the past according to the logic of nationalism, they focus on their conationals, whether heroes or victims, without sufficient regard for foreign others. This exclusive focus on conationals manifests most clearly in nationalist commemoration of an armed conflict, which of ten elevates fallen soldiers to immortal heroes of the nation while disregarding what these soldiers might have done to foreign others—the moment when one’s own nation becomes sacred above all else, as political scientist Benedict Anderson pointed out.'° Moreover, nationalism excludes foreign others from commemoration in another sense: the principle of national sovereignty prohibits foreign others from participating in the process of shaping the content of commemoration. When a government plans a memorial ceremony for war dead at a national cemetery, for example, it typically does not allow foreign governments to influence the content of the ceremony. History education is another example wherein national sovereignty over commemoration continues to be asserted, authorizing only historians who are citizens of a given country to write “national history.” Indeed, nationalism was the most dominant logic of commemoration during the twentieth century—to the extent that Max Weber once defined the nation as a “community of memories"—Aand much of the historical and sociological research on collective memory assumed the nation as a unit of analysis."

By doubly excluding foreign others from the content and process of commemoration, the nationalist logic prompts people to embrace a certain version of the past as a foundation of their national identity. Not surprisingly

B Introduction then, if nationalist commemorations confront one another, intense controversy can result. A collision of contradictory versions of the past, each predicated on the negation of the foreign other, is a recipe for escalating mutual distrust and denunciation. This is how a historical problem, which is rather commonplace in itself, becomes an intractable point of contention in intergroup relations. Put another way, East Asia’s history problem is not primarily about scholarly, historiographical disagreement among historians in Japan, South Korea, and China over the evidential validity of historical materials and the plausibility of historical interpretations; rather, it is about emotionally charged disagreement between the governments and citizens in the three countries over how to construct autobiographical narratives as foundations of their national identities.

This fundamentally relational nature of a history problem calls into question the orthodox explanation of East Asia’s history problem, popular outside Japan as well as among left-leaning Japanese. This orthodox explanation attributes the history problem squarely to Japan—the seeming inability of its government and citizens to acknowledge their country’s past wrongdoings—by showing how the Japanese government was dominated by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) during much of the postwar period.'® As the result of this nationalist domination, the orthodox explanation goes, the Japanese government not only refused to commemorate foreign victims but also justified the war as a heroic act of self-defense against Western imperial powers. While I agree that the orthodox explanation has much merit, I also argue that it fails to fully explain the dynamic and trajectory of East Asia’s history problem. For example, when Japan normalized its relations with South Korea and China in 1965 and 1972, respectively, government leaders on both sides in each instance decided to prioritize political and economic interests over issues of apology and compensation. Similarly, a downward spiral of mutually reinforcing criticisms between Japan and its two neighbors intensified the history problem in the early 2000s.

Thus, I argue that the cause of the history problem cannot be attributed to Japan alone and that it needs to be carefully examined in terms of Japan’s interactions with South Korea and China, as political scientists Thomas Berger, Yinan He, and Jennifer Lind have each demonstrated in recent work.” To understand the evolution of the history problem, then, it is crucial to trace how nationalist commemorations in Japan as well as in South

Korea and China have interacted with one another to produce mutual antipathy rather than affinity.

Cosmopolitanism as a New Logic of Commemoration

By itself, the interaction of nationalist commemorations does not adequately explain the dynamic and trajectory of East Asia’s history problem, especially in recent decades. This is because nationalism is no longer the only logic of commemoration available today. As sociologist Ulrich Beck and his colleagues have argued, cosmopolitanism, an orientation of openness to foreign others, is increasingly institutionalized in a variety of human practices in the contemporary world, thanks to the globalization of human-rights discourse and the growing sociocultural interactions across national borders.”° Cosmopolitanism presents a new logic of feeling, thinking, and acting that takes humanity, rather than nationality, as a primary frame of reference. Drawing on the logic of cosmopolitanism, people can doubly include foreign others in commemoration: they remember what happened to foreign others as members of humanity, but they also invite those others to contribute to shaping the content of commemoration. As Beck put it, cosmopolitan commemoration involves “acknowledging the history (and the memories) of the ‘other’ and integrating them into one’s own history, . . . where the national monologues of victimization that are celebrated as national memory are systematically replaced by transnational forms and forums of memory and dialogue, which also enable the innermost aspects of the national realm—the founding of myths—to be opened up to and for one another.”*! Cosmopolitan commemoration thus allows people to extend identification beyond national borders and engage in transformative dialogues with foreign others that critically reflect on the nationalist biases in their version of history.’?

Cosmopolitan commemoration has been promoted most systematically by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Currently, UNESCO runs the World Heritage site program. Launched in 1972, the program aims to preserve natural and cultural sites around the world as shared heritage for humanity as a whole. While cultural sites consist mostly of ancient castles, temples, and monuments, they also include sites related to slavery, the Holocaust, the atomic bombing, and other forms of extreme human suffering. UNESCO also established the Memory of the World Programme in 1992 to protect historic documents, relics, and works of art as focal points for remembering world history. This program also includes projects to preserve historical documents related to negative aspects of world history, such as the Holocaust. These two UNESCO programs encourage people around the world to commemorate events that happened to foreign others as fellow human beings. Along with UNESCO, other United Nations (UN) organizations have promoted cosmopolitanism for more than half a century, because political leaders espoused it as a new principle for creating a more peaceful world in the aftermath of World War II, which had brought so much suffering to millions of people. Since cosmopolitanism, embodied by human rights and other UN conventions, has been adopted by national governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) around the world, the horizon of commemoration appears to be extending beyond national borders.

Consistent with the worldwide trend, the Japanese government began to incorporate cosmopolitanism in its official commemoration in the early 1990s. When the LDP, a defender of nationalist commemoration, was temporarily ousted from power, non-LDP prime ministers such as Hosokawa Morihito of the Japan New Party and Murayama Tomiichi of the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) officially apologized for Japan's past wrongdoings. Concurrently, Japan’s Ministry of Education approved history textbooks that expanded descriptions of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, “comfort women,” and the Nanjing Massacre, among other negative aspects of Japan’s past. These gestures of contrition expressed the cosmopolitan logic of commemoration and, during the last few decades, Japan’s official commemoration has come to exhibit a complex mixture of nationalist defiance and cosmopolitan contrition. Even Koizumi Jun'ichiro, whose visit to the Yasukuni Shrine sparked so much controversy in the early 2000s, followed Murayama’s precedent and officially offered “sincere apologies” for victims of Japan’s past wrongdoings.??

Cosmopolitan commemoration, however, is not replacing nationalist commemoration in a zero-sum manner. Instead, the relationship between the two is open-ended because nationalism continues to operate as a central organizing principle in the contemporary world. As Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider put it, “Cosmopolitanism does not only negate nationalism but also presupposes it.”*4 While UN organizations promote human rights, national governments are still responsible for implementing them in education systems and other societal institutions. Similarly, even though membership in humanity is emphasized, national citizenship continues to structure access to socioeconomic resources and political rights.” Since both nationalism and cosmopolitanism are legitimated, this creates what sociologists call an “institutional contradiction,” wherein contradictory but equally legitimate logics clash with each other.?6 This institutional contradiction serves as a focal point of political struggles for the legitimate commemoration, and these struggles are likely to be intense and protracted because all sides, subscribing to nationalism and cosmopolitanism differently, have reasonable claims to legitimacy.

Put another way, the dynamic and trajectory of the history problem cannot be attributed simply to particular groups, such as the LDP, that promote nationalist commemorations, for the problem is built into the very “institutional environment” in which these groups operate.?? The crucial questions, therefore, are how different groups organize and justify their own commemorations by drawing on nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and why some commemorations achieve dominance over others. In short, how does the politics of commemoration play out?

Toward a Field Theory of the History Problem

Politics has been a central concern in the sociology of collective memory since Barry Schwartz, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, among others, pioneered research on “difficult pasts."?? These sociologists focused on “morally ambiguous” events that divided members of society, ranging from the Vietnam War to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and examined how different groups mobilized to legitimate their versions of the past. Although much of the research on difficult pasts took the nation as the unit of analysis, a growing number of sociologists, historians, and cultural theorists have recently adopted transnational perspectives. They have argued that commemorations of difficult pasts, most notably the Holocaust, now travel across national borders through multiple media of communication and influence each other in various directions.*° In this regard, East Asia’s history problem exemplifies the politics of commemoration at the transnational scale, where disjunctive commemorations of the Asia-Pacific War— the difficult past—in Japan, South Korea, and China interact with one another, competing for legitimacy.?!

To analytically disentangle the politics of East Asia’s history problem, I propose to use field theory. Originally developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, field theory was imported into collective memory studies by American sociologist Jeffrey Olick, who sought to emphasize the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of collective memory.? According to Olick, constructing collective memory occurs in multiple fields—artistic, social, political, and so on—each with its own distinct rules of engagement. Actors compete to legitimate their own commemorative positions by deploying different strategies and mobilizing different amounts of resources at their disposal. While different fields produce different collective memories, they are also interdependent: dynamics and trajectories of fields are shaped both internally and externally. Moreover, relations among fields are structured hierarchically: the political field tends to dominate other fields because its struggles revolve around the government, which has the power to define an official commemoration as a parameter for struggles in other fields. To put it in Bourdieu's own words, the government is able to "exercise power over the different fields" because it "establishes and inculcates . . . social frameworks of perceptions, of understanding or of memory" among citizens.’ The political field is therefore “a sort of metafield" in relation to other fields of collective memory.*4