The Legacy of Historical Revisionism in Japan in the 2010s

Abstract

The politics of historical memory constitutes a key factor that shapes the IR of East Asia today. This chapter focuses on the legacy of historical revisionism in Japan with a particular focus on two of the most salient issues with far-reaching foreign and security policy implications in the region and beyond, that is, the Yasukuni controversy and the “comfort women” (sex slaves) issue. I first provide an overview of the two issues in the postwar period and point to the fact that political efforts to reach settlements (if not solutions) were made from the mid-1980s (in the case of Yasukuni) to the mid-1990s (in the “comfort women” case). The background of such initiatives was a certain liberal/neoliberal, internationalist orientation that became dominant in the newly assertive Japan of that period. This was, however, followed by a revisionist backlash in Japan from the late 1990s that challenged and undid the fragile compromise with its neighbors as a revisionist, nationalist orientation took over. Finally, this article closes by placing the contemporary legacy of Japanese historical revisionism in the regional context and in relation to US policy, and points out that IR scholars and security experts who work on Japan largely failed to take sufficient note of the domestic political change in tide that has been taking place since the late 1990s—and that is why they were surprised to see historical revisionism increasingly trumping realism as a guiding principle of Japanese foreign policy since the 2000s, and they continue to fail to fully gauge the degree to which Abe Shinzo’s foreign and security policy agenda is driven by his deeply held revisionist views.