Competing Visions of History in Japan
History debates in today’s Japan often focus on factual interpretations. In this innovative study, Hitomi Koyama offers an alternative: a contextual or “historicist” perspective in the contrasting positions of a number of Japanese historians, philosophers, novelists and commentators. Surveying the evolution of Japanese historical scholarship since the late 19th century, Koyama highlights how competing notions of agency and modernity have colored the discourse about individual and collective responsibility in Japan.
Late 19th and early 20th century Meiji Japan writers such as Yukichi Fukuzawa and Ukichi Taguchi espoused an Enlightenment vision of history based on a vision of modernity as linear progress initially embraced by Japan. Framed in Western “civilization” terms, this implied an inevitable process in which states and actors had limited agency. By contrast, 1930s Showa-era thinkers such as Kiyoshi Miki and other nationalist historians offered a vision influenced by German idealist and romantic thought, stressing national culture and organic historical change that assigned much more agency to individual actors.
Both views have sharply influenced Japan’s preand post-war relationship with the West and Asia, and the historical responsibility debate. History in today’s Japan, given its reliance on the US and the limited agency of state and citizens, is, in Koyama’s view, less about neo-nationalist versus universal interpretations and more about identity politics. Reviewed by John Nilsson-wright, Senior Lecturer, University of Cambridge, Senior Research Fellow for Northeast Asia, Chatham House, and a regional editor for Global Asia.