Heisei historiography

Abstract

This chapter traces changes in academic and public history during the three decades of the Heisei era. The central question is whether the death of Emperor Hirohito (posthumously Showa Emperor, r. 1926–89), the monarch on the Japanese throne during World War II, triggered any changes in Japanese academic history and in public discourse regarding war responsibility and war legacies. The first section looks at how Japanese historians addressed sensitive historical topics such as war responsibility and war crimes, including the comfort women issue and the Nanjing Massacre. The second section analyses how public commemoration of the war and the public presentation of history, for example, in history museums, have changed. It also takes a look at the emperor's speeches regarding history during the Heisei period and contrasts those with the right-wing currents of historical revisionism emerging since the late twentieth century. The third section asks whether the often-cited ‘internationalization’ and ‘globalization’ of Japan from the 1990s onwards had any influence on Japanese historiography. The paper concludes that the influence of right-wing historical revisionism has considerably grown in public discourse but remains a marginal phenomenon that continues to fail to reach its objectives.