Reporting the 2001 textbook and Yasukuni Shrine controversies: Japanese war memory and commemoration in the British media

Abstract

In the summer of 2001 there were two major controversies concerning Japanese memory and commemoration of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific: a textbook controversy triggered by the nationalist group, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Tsukurukai) and a row triggered by Prime Minister Koizumi's worship at Yasukuni Shrine. This article presents a critique of how the two controversies were reported in the British quality media. It argues that the British media's reportage was a representative example of the ‘orthodox’ interpretation of Japanese war memory. By focusing on ‘newsworthy’ controversies, the stance of the Japanese government and diplomatic confrontation between Japan and China/South Korea, the British media's reportage presented a largely stereotypical and biased version of Japanese war memory that under-represented its complexity and contested nature. The media's reportage is critiqued using the theoretical frameworks of media theory, war memory theory and orientalism, as well as Japanese accounts of the crises.

KEYWORDS:

• Pacific War
• Japan
• textbooks
• Yasukuni Shrine
• war memory
• stereotyping

Philip Seaton is a lecturer (gaikokujin kyōshi) in the Institute of Language and Culture Studies, Hokkaido University. He is currently researching war-related commemorative programmes on Japanese television and undertaking an oral history project focusing on how members of the post-war generations have reacted to knowledge of relatives' war experiences. He may be contacted at [email protected].

Notes

1. I concentrated on the BBC's reporting of the textbook issue because the controversy unfolded over a six-month period and, unlike the BBC, the broadsheets did not give detailed coverage over the whole period. By contrast, the Yasukuni issue was focused into a narrow time frame and allowed for comparisons in broadsheet reporting. Coverage in the tabloids was patchy so I have focused on the broadsheets.

2. Representative ‘orthodox’ texts include: Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996); Erna Paris, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2000); George Hicks, Japan's War Memories: Amnesia or Concealment? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997); Nicholas Kristof, ‘The problem of memory’, in Foreign Affairs 77(6), 1998, pp. 37–49; Peter Li (ed.), Japanese War Crimes: The Search for Justice (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003). While no scholars, to my knowledge, have explicitly challenged this ‘orthodox’ literature for its methodological and empirical flaws concerning Japanese war memory, there are a number of scholars whose detailed depictions of Japan's contested war memories do not support the orthodoxy: Laura Hein and Mark Selden (eds), Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2000); Caroline Rose, Interpreting History in Sino-Japanese Relations: A Case Study in Political Decision Making (London: Routledge, 1998); James Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001); Beatrice Trefalt, Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950–1975 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004).