Asia and Japan:
Perspectives of History
A Symposium Record
Editors

Gyongsu MUN and Yasushi KOSUGIAsia-Japan Research Institute
Ritsumeikan University

AJI BOOKS

Asia and Japan:
Perspectives of History
A Symposium Record
Editors
Gyongsu MUN and Yasushi KOSUGIAsia-Japan Research Institute
Ritsumeikan University
ISBN 978-4-9911356-0-6 (Online)
ISBN 978-4-9911356-1-3 (Print)

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

AJI Editorial Office
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Email: aji-eb@st.ritsumei.ac.jp

Copyright © 2021 Asia-Japan Research Institute,
Ritsumeikan University
Note:
Authors’ names in this publication are ordered according to theirpreference and their surnames are capitalized.

Contents
Editors’ Preface
Gyongsu MUN, Yasushi KOSUGI ................................. v

Participants’ Profiles .................................................... 1

Session 1
Keynote Speech: The Afterlife of History and theImportance of Seeing Japan from the Sea
Professor Alexis DUDDEN
1. Introduction ....................................................................... 4
2. LDP’s April 2012 Draft Constitution ................................. 6
3. World View from Japan ......................................................9
4. Okinawa ........................................................................... 1 1
5. “People Doing”: Nature and Ogasawara .......................... 1 8
6. Shimizu Ryoichi .............................................................. 2 2
7. The Anthropocene and the Sea with No Name ................ 2 5
8. Conclusion ....................................................................... 3 2

Discussion
Professor Kozue AKIBAYASHI’s Remarks .................... 3 3Professor DUDDEN’s Response ....................................... 3 8

Questions and Comments ............................................. 4 3iii

Contents

Session 2
Keynote Speech: The Evaporation of History: History
Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the
Posthuman
Professor Norihisa YAMASHITA
1. Introduction ..................................................................... 5 4
2. The Long Swing to the Right ........................................... 5 6
3. The Deficit Model ............................................................ 6 1
4. Different Politics .............................................................. 6 4
5. The Dissolution of History ............................................... 6 9

Discussion
Doctor Miwa HIRONO’s Remarks .................................. 7 2
Professor Hiroyuki TOSA’s Remarks .............................. 7 7Professor YAMASHITA’s Response ................................ 8 0

Questions and Comments ............................................. 8 3

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

Editors’ Preface
It is our pleasure to launch the AJI Books series with this
symposium record. Asia-Japan Research Institute (AJI) at
Ritsumeikan University was established in December 2015 inorder to promote “Asia-Japan Research” in Ritsumeikan
University. The University identifies itself proudly as an Asia
Pacific university which aims at realizing multi-cultural coliving through international mutual understanding, as clearlystated in the Ritsumeikan Charter of 2006.
The University has been pursuing the values of peace anddemocracy for many decades and is striving to promote thesegoals in the Asia-Pacific as well as in the world througheducation and research.
The 21st century is often described as the “Asian century”.
With all its positive connotations, we would like to deepen our
understanding and studies on and in Asia. The naming of ourresearch field, “Asia-Japan Research”, is an attempt to indicate
what we aspire to. It is not Asian and Japanese Studies or
Research on Asia and Japan. By connecting Asia and Japan
with (-) we avoid expressing Asia and Japan as different entities,
since Japan is part of Asia. So, it indicates Asian Studies or
research on Asia, while Japan is firmly situated in Asia and canalso be a subject of such studies. However, basing our
educational and academic activities in Japan, we would like tohighlight the role of Japan in this research, without losing thesense of Asia as a whole.
The Institute has conducted interdisciplinary andinternational joint research projects with the ideas of“symbiosis”, “reconciliation” and “co-creation” under thevAsia and Japan: Perspectives of History

concepts of “understanding Asia deeply and profoundly” andcreating a “Gateway to Asia” in our campus.
The international symposium recorded in this volume
seeks to examine the achievements and the issues of historicalperceptions of Japan and Asia, and tries to explore a new
broader perspective of history.
Turning to the issue of “Asia and Japan”, we are
immediately reminded of the complexity and historicity of thisregion since the arrival of modernity.
In recent years, we have been observing structural changes
to Asia, or what we may call the “Asian World”, influenced bysuch phenomena as globalization, the rise of China, and theconflicts between Japan and South Korea over perceptions ofhistory. At this juncture, we are once again faced with thequestion, “What does Asia mean to Japan?”Presenting “Asia and Japan” itself suggests the problems
inherent in the history of this region after the arrival ofmodernity. As the Japanese word “Datsua”, that is, Going outof Asia [toward the West] symbolizes, in the process of
forming the modern Japanese nation, Asia was discriminatively
defined as “barbaric” from the viewpoint of both modern
civilization based on the Western model and the recreation ofJapan’s own tradition. As suggested by the presentation ofProfessor Alexis Dudden, Japan’s non-Asian nature remained
unchanged during the period of the war of aggression, when the“Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and “Five Races
Under One Union” were emphasized.
The disastrous experience of World War II could have
served as an opportunity for Japan to rethink its past and to bereborn as a member of Asia. However, despite the shock ofviAsia and Japan: Perspectives of History

Japan’s defeat in World War II, Japan’s critical self-recognition
as an “aggressor and perpetrator” in Asia, has not been widely
shared in Japanese society. Japan actually rehabilitated itself
after the end of World War II in the framework of the Cold War
between the East and the West, and has come a long way awayfrom the trend of the Asian world toward decolonization.
However, in the 1970s, when the Japanese economy
expanded widely to East Asia, the relationship between Japanand Asia, including its history, had to be reexamined. Japanwas confronted with the issue of its “wrongdoing” in the past
such as in the “Japan-China Joint Statement” (1972), which
expressed remorse for the war of aggression; the “Fukuda
Doctrine” (1974), which renounced Japan’s ever becoming a
military power again and advocated “heart-to-heart contact”;
and the “textbook issue” also occurred in the 1980s.
The changes in Japan’s international status in the post-Cold
War era and globalization have accelerated this problem of therecognition of history. In a foreign policy speech in Singapore
in 1991, then Prime Minister Kaifu Toshiki vowed to “reflectharshly” on Japan’s invasion of Asia. The review of history
included the “Kono Statement (Statement by Chief Cabinet
Secretary Yohei Kono)” (1993), which officially confirmed the“military involvement” of women who were forced into
prostitution for Japanese soldiers during World War II in theformer colonies and occupied territories, and the “Murayama
Statement (Statement by the Prime Minister of Japan)” (1995),
in which “colonial rule and aggression” was recollected
critically in a blunt tone. However, it was not until half acentury after the end of World War II that the Japanese people
began to reflect on their colonial rule and to realize that they
had been the perpetrators.

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

On the other hand, these changes have caused a backlashin the perception of history, which confronted them with asense of crisis. “Reflection on the past” is seen as a denial ofthe very “modernity” of Japan, and a sense of crisis that could
shake the identity of the Japanese is beginning to stir theundercurrents of Japanese society. The acceptance of othersrooted in globalization is always intertwined with the
opposition to others and produces a tangled current. In the
prolonged economic slump, which has been described as the“Lost 20 Years”, Japanese people have been tormented by asense of impasse, and the old-fashioned nationalism of nation,
tradition and patriotism is reviving. In this world of online
distribution where the number of plays is the basis of profits,“pleasing” discourses are more widely accepted as historical
truth than the actual facts of history. As Professor Norihisa
Yamashita proposes, such post-truth politics has penetrated theoffline world, and so-called historical revisionism has become
the mainstream of Japanese historical understanding.
In this way, Japan in the post-Cold War era, where
globalization has progressed, is increasingly seen as an arenain which the tide toward settlement of the past and the backflow
regarding the historical image of “Asia and Japan” areconflicting with each other over the perceptions of history.
Japan’s relations with other Asian countries, including South
Korea and China, are also affected by the wide gap between
such contradictory perceptions.
The COVID-19 crisis which has spread the sense of
emergency in 2020, and is still on-going at the time of the
publication of this volume, has also had enormous effects onhuman lives on all continents. Asia and Japan are alsoviiiAsia and Japan: Perspectives of History

experiencing unforeseen critical conditions. However, when
we are facing a crisis, it is important to pause and reflect on thepast, so that we can form clearer visions for the future.
The international symposium recorded in this volume
certainly offers food for thought. The entire discussion on what
the new perspective of history can be is intended to provide a
way beyond the conflict of historical perceptions.
We are also very grateful to Prof. Anthony Brewer for his
participation in the symposium and dedicated editorial support
for the record.
It is our sincere hope that this concise volume willcontribute in a small way toward a better perception of history
and the future of Asia.
October 2020

Gyongsu MUN
Yasushi KOSUGIix

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

Participants’ Profiles
Keynote Speech 1

Professor Alexis DUDDEN
Alexis Dudden is professor of history at the University ofConnecticut, where she teaches modern Japanese, Korean, andinternational history. She publishes regularly in print and online media
and is completing a book project tentatively called, The Opening andClosing of Japan, 1850-2020. Dr. Dudden received her BA from
Columbia University in 1991 and her Ph.D. in history from the
University of Chicago in 1998. Since 1985, she has lived and studied
for extended periods of time in Japan and South Korea.

Discussant: Professor Kozue AKIBAYASHI
Kozue Akibayashi is a professor at the Graduate School of Global
Studies at Doshisha University. She received her Ed.D in educationfrom Columbia University. Her research and activism have been on

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

feminist analysis of peace and security, demilitarization anddecolonization of security. She is an active member of Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom, the oldest women’sinternational peace organization that began in 1915. She was elected as
International President at WILPF’s 100th Anniversary Congress in2015 and served until August 2018.

Keynote Speech 2

Professor Norihisa YAMASHITA
Norihisa Yamashita is a professor at the College of Global Liberal
Arts at Ritsumeikan University. Some of his areas of research include
historical sociology, world-system analysis, and comparative
civilization. His most recent publication is Historical Literacy in theAge of Post-Globalization (in Japanese). This is one of theachievements of a very aspirational research project “The ‘Great
Divergence’ and the ‘Great Convergence’ ” in which he aimed to create2Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

a new history textbook that breaks away from a Eurocentric world
history.

Discussant 1: Doctor Miwa HIRONO
Miwa Hirono is an associate professor at the College of Global
Liberal Arts at Ritsumeikan University. She is an expert on China’s
international relations and has published widely on peacekeeping
operations. Other areas of research include disaster management,
cultures of humanitarianism in East Asia, China’s role in conflictaffected regions, and peacebuilding.

Discussant 2: Professor Hiroyuki TOSA
Hiroyuki Tosa is a professor at the Graduate School of Global
Cooperation Studies at Kobe University. He is an expert oninternational relations and political sociology. His recent works include
Anarchical Governance (in Japanese) and “The Pitfalls in the Projectof Overcoming Western Modernity: Rethinking the Lineage of theJapanese Historical Revisionism”.

3Session 1
Keynote Speech

The Afterlife of History and the Importanceof Seeing Japan from the Sea
Professor Alexis DUDDEN

1. Introduction
I want to begin by saying that my remarks are based on anunderstanding that Japan, like many countries, especially mine (USA)is deeply divided today. The book I am writing now, The Opening and

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

Closing of Japan, 1850-2020, examines this phenomenon, and,
although I cannot say what the Meiji moment felt like in 1850, I believe
it is fair to say that Reiwa Japan 2020, is as equally divided as Meiji
was, if not more so. This moment is a manifestation of deep divisions
within societies more than one of national group versus another andapproaching the moment this way allows for a far more complicatedportrait of identity to emerge.
Decades ago, my favorite historian of modern Japan, Amino
Yoshihiko, urged seeing Japan from the sea. For years, I didn't try tounderstand what he meant, staying instead on land. Increasingly,
however, I have come to realize the significance of Amino sensei’sobservation - and, oddly, it was the LDP’s 2012 draft for a new
constitution that made me begin to understand. I’ll come back to this.
Ten years ago, I was lucky to live for a year in Niigata with my then4-year-old son and to stare every day at the harsh and beautiful Sea ofJapan/East Sea (in Niigata, this ocean is called the Sea of Japan, butlater in my talk let me explain why I believe the dual-naming debate isan avenue for engagement). For a year, I stared at the Sea of Japan from
Niigata and was struck by how empty it appears, at least on its surface
and even the sky above it, given the sea’s rich resources and potential
for regional exchange. I discussed this emptiness with former Niigata
Governor Hirayama Ikuo (formerly Bank of Japan) who made clear
why decades of economic and cultural schemes planned for this region
remained challenged: “When investment groups want to make a policy
proposal, they have to go through five different desks at the Foreign
Ministry (in Tokyo): Russia, China, South Korea, North Korea, and theUnited States. You can imagine what happens.”5Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

2. LDP’s April 2012 Draft Constitution
Which brings me to the LDP’s April 2012 draft constitution which,to the best of my knowledge has not been changed since it was issued;
it is just not in the foreground right now because it is so extreme. This
document is not a revision of the constitution; rather, it is an entirely
new constitution, and some of its striking features include theredefinition of the emperor, the role of women, an obligation to honor
national symbols, and a preamble that denies the universalisms
definitional to Japan’s current constitution. In short, it is the documentof a divided Japan today. On top of all this, and entirely different fromthe current constitution and from the Meiji constitution, for the firsttime in Japanese history, this draft for a future Japanese nation would
constitutionally define Japanese territory ( 領 土 ryodo) by obliging
citizens to defend it.

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

What is claimed as “Japanese territory” which would oblige
Japanese citizen defense already compels American military protection
as defined in the terms of the US-Japan Security Treaty:
Article 5 obligates US forces to defend Japanese territory andterritorial waters in the event of an armed attack. So, these recent maps
made me wonder what the point of claiming territory that only Japan
claims as sovereign Japanese territory.

This map is the officially claimed space of Japan right now eventhough it is aspirational at best and confrontational at worst.

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

Japan’s 2014 Assertion of “Inherency” over the smallest fragmentsof an Empire it failed to hold onto means that the government of Japan
views these islands as integral to Japan’s national being. For historians,
the notion also introduces the idea that these spaces have always andforever been Japanese, which, in the case of these islands, could not be
further from the history involved. Finally, it is only since 2014 that theJapanese government has linked one territorial dispute to anotherthrough this policy. Any attempt by a Japanese diplomat to negotiatewith a Chinese diplomat over the dispute in the East China Sea would
risk losing Japan’s claims to Korea, let alone negotiations with Russia,
because China, Taiwan, Korea, and Russia are tied together in the same
policy vision for Japan.

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

3. World View from Japan
In turn, all of this draws attention to the particular worldview that
undergirds this view within Japan. The notion of territory articulated inthese governmental proposals at once denies Japanese history andrequires the international community’s agreement to such a worldview.
It is not “anti-Japanese” to draw attention to these trends; they are
Japanese trends, yet they are but one vision for Japan’s future; the onethat seeks to erase the history of the Japanese empire in modern East
Asia through claims to islands that are but mere shards of the formerly
vast imperial, territorial and oceanic space.
This new view of “Japanese territory” from the sea is actually aview from land and would stake Japanese identity on small pieces ofland that again only Japan recognizes sovereignty over, yet theapproach is not at all unique to Japan: it is a rigid, hard borders approach,9Asia and Japan: Perspectives of Historyof a piece with Donald Trump’s wall along the US-Mexico border orthis recent proposal for a floating wall shoring off Greece from refugees.
At the same time, more fluid understandings of Japan’s future basedon more open-ended understandings of Japan’s past equally exist, thosewhich see “borderlines” not “borders” but “borderlines” - in the sea
around Japan with which to define a vision for Japan open to productive
and peaceful engagement with its neighbors.

1) East China Sea
Currently, the East China Sea seems to have disappeared. Not
literally of course, yet only a few years ago around the World War One
centennial commemorations, talking heads named the body of water
between China and Japan as a likely spot for the outbreak of World War
III. Several islands in the East China Sea disputed among China,
Taiwan, and Japan had become a magnet for risky seaborne maneuvers,
and the air defense identification zones above them had dangerous
overlaps. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe intimated that his
country and China resembled Germany and France 100 years earlier,and Henry Kissinger wagered that a Tokyo-Beijing clash in thesewaters would be a catalyst for greater conflict to come.

2) South China Sea
Now, in the wake of centennial celebrations commemorating theend of the war that was supposed to end all wars, militarized activity inthe separate but connecting South China Sea has dominated theintervening years. At the same time, the issues that made the East China
Sea so volatile in 2014 have only deepened and intensified—and now
intersect with the South China Sea conflict making clear that “security”
as such has created a state of constant insecurity, with Okinawa and its
people at the very center.

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

4. Okinawa
The Ryukyu Islands have long found themselves and their people
central to questions of Japanese state-building, national identity andsovereign control. Matsushima Yasukatsu, a leading member of thecontemporary movement for Ryukyuan independence from Japan,
stresses that Tokyo’s decision to “discriminate” indiscriminately
against Ryukyu islanders during World War II - despite having forced
them to become subjects of the Japanese empire - and to “sacrifice theislands” outright at war’s end has made them and their history like amirror that shows images backwards to contemporary Japan’s efforts atnationalized control over them. Tokyo has repeatedly altered its claims
vis-à-vis Okinawa and its people since 1945, which in turn makes theislands themselves appear to shift in meaning for Japan.
With Okinawa, contemporary words reveal so much because theseislands have been inhabited for tens of thousands of years. About ten
years ago, workers building the new airport on Ishigaki Island
uncovered fragments of rib shards among other pieces of human bone
thought to be about 24,000 years old, and local and national papers
quickly declared them “the oldest Japanese remains.” Today, of course,
Ishigaki is Japanese territory, yet claiming these ancient skeletal
remains as “Japanese” is another matter.
Okinawan islanders continued longstanding agricultural andfishing practices as their livelihood through the end of the devastating
Asia-Pacific War (1931-45). In 1944, a Canadian man named E.
Herbert Norman, one of the greatest historians of Japan, wrote a reportfor the Canadian government detailing features of life throughout theJapanese empire that he viewed as critical for the Allies’ understandingof Japan for any meaningful and successful future postwar policy
planning for Japan. Norman was a son of Christian missionaries and11

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

raised in Japan, and at the time he wrote this report (November 1944) it
was still possible to emphasize the rudimentary nature of Okinawan life
and also to describe the islands themselves as relatively undeveloped,
something unimaginable today now that the islands hold such a central
and militarized place in America’s post-1945 world order. Norman
wrote:(The Ryukyu Islands’) loss to Japan would not be of any
serious economic consequence since the chief occupation of theislanders is fishing and Japan’s best fishing grounds are in
northern waters. (Norman 1944)

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

In the simplest terms, in 1944, it was impossible to foresee what
has become of Okinawa and Okinawans’ way of life today in the frontline of the US-Japan security arrangement.
Also revealing were Norman’s observations about who might
control Okinawa after the war’s end. It is worth remembering that China
at the time was an Allied nation. One of my colleagues has located mapsof ideas for dividing Japan into four regions after its eventual defeat
instead of Korea, but Japan was seen as a potential area for American,
British, Chinese, and Russian control, so that did not happen, yet in1944 Norman was able to write that:
Although these islands have been administratively part ofJapan since 1879, and their inhabitants are perhaps closer to Japan
than China in language and custom, the Chinese still have a caseto argue that they should be, by right, Chinese.

Norman understood that although Japan had incorporated theislands into its empire during the early moments of its overseas

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

territorial expansion, after Japan’s defeat China could make legitimate
claim to the islands in terms of the region’s lengthy pre-Japaneseimperial history; additionally, Norman’s notice indicates that the Allies’
postwar settlement with Japan would not collapse if Tokyo were toforfeit claim to Okinawa together with Korea and Manchuria (the planthat was already in the works). The reality, therefore, in 1944 forNorman’s analysis that the islands were economically and strategicallyof minimal consequence to Japan proper brings into relief how
profoundly American occupation of the islands after 1945 has changed
them and their people forever.
The United States would officially return Okinawa to Japaneseadministration and control in 1972, yet the overwhelming presence ofAmerican military personnel and weapons continues to renderquestionable the full dimensionality of this legal change. The statistics
are well-known, yet always bear repeating; Okinawa comprises lessthan 1% of all Japanese territory, a scant 0.6%; yet 75% of the total
number of US forces, civilian employees, and their dependents
stationed in Japan live and work there; and all roughly 30,000 of themtake up 20% of Okinawa’s territory.

Governor Denny Tamaki opposes the new base at Henoko andespecially Tokyo’s disregard for Okinawan opposition, maintaining

14

The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Seathat the Japanese government must express the will of his Japaneseconstituency to the United States (a foreign country).

Halting construction of the heliport planned for Henoko is apractical step with positive ramifications for efforts at peace in Korea
and de-escalating potential clashes with China.
As is increasingly being made public, and has likely been known to
the Alliance planners since 2014, the new base faces a structuralproblem in addition to the opposition of Okinawan people. There isn’t
enough soil in Okinawa to create the foundation for the heliports, soJapan is importing the dirt from the mainland. Tamaki and his
supporters maintain that if this base is so important to the safety ofJapan, then the Japanese government should authorize its construction
on the mainland in the areas from which soil is being imported to
Okinawa and dumped onto the coral reefs of Oura Bay.
The soil issue recalls a controversial incident from Okinawa’s pastthat brings the security nexus full circle. In 1958, a year before
Governor Denny Tamaki was born; a team from Okinawa was allowed

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

to participate in Japan’s annual Koshien baseball tournament in themainland for the first time since the end of the war. At the time,
Okinawa was still under U.S. occupation. When the Okinawan team
lost, they scooped up dirt from the mainland stadium to take home to
Okinawa.

Citing the United States Plant Quarantine Act, American officials
in Naha barred the team from bringing the “unclean” soil to Okinawa.
For decades, Okinawans would continue to bear the burden andhumiliation of being somehow less than Japanese.
The imposition of yet another US military base in Okinawa in thename of securing Japan - and Tokyo’s tactic of throwing dirt at the
problem - only reinforces Okinawan subordination.

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

By ending the construction of this base, the United States could
begin to atone for its past conduct, take into consideration the
democratic desires of Okinawans, and begin to think more broadly
about peace in the East China Sea and beyond. And, as this slide shows
the issue is now as much Japan versus US as Japan versus Japan. Whichbrings me to the next topic.

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

5. “People Doing”: Nature and Ogasawara
We do not really know why what we now call the Ogasawara
Islands were uninhabited when sixteenth and seventeenth-century
Spanish and Japanese seafarers first visited. However, from what we doknow of the ancient stone tools and pottery shards discovered there in
the twentieth-century, Pacific Ocean voyagers had long known about
these islands and had left their mark on them at intervening moments intime.
No one was there in the 1820s when various American and British
whaling captains arrived, a condition that paved the way for ahistorically-curious thirty years during the mid-nineteenth century
when an American, an Englishman, and a Croatian declared
sovereignty over the islands and ran them as their own country.
Eventually - following some dicey incidents in the 1850s and 60s at thedawn of US-Japan relations involving ownership over them - in 1875
the newly established Meiji government in Tokyo claimed the islands
as Japanese territory, making them the second overseas addition to thenascent Empire of Japan (between Hokkaido’s 1869 incorporation andbefore Okinawa’s 1879 annexation). With the key exception of atwenty-three-year hiatus after Japan lost World War II and the 48
million-year-old islands became American-occupied territory andreverted to their earlier name, the “Bonin Islands”, the Ogasawara
Islands have remained under sovereign Japanese control unlike otherimperial island additions that Japan contests with neighbors today(although some official US government maps still prefer the name“Bonin,” and the southernmost island in the chain, Iwo Jima/Ioto, is ofquestionable sovereignty since only Japanese and American militaryplanes land there).

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

A total of 2,415 Japanese citizens live on the Ogasawara Islands
today. Mapping these islands’ place into modern Japanese history as
well as their broader environmental possibilities is of a piece with anumber of compelling studies are underway about the Fukushima crisis
that draw attention to the modern/contemporary distinction between“life” and “lifestyle”/ “livelihood” (inochi versus seikatsu). Helpful inthis regard is a reconsideration of the eighteenth-century philosopher,
Ando Shoeki’s, brilliant parsing of the Japanese word for nature -自然(shizen) as “hitori suru” (literally “an individual doing/making”).
Notably, Shoeki viewed a world with no distinction between humanhistory and natural history precisely because he understood that suchdichotomies generated the social ills surrounding him (as a physician innorthern Japan, he came to understand and demonstrate among otherthings that famine was politically created and sustained - a highly
advanced observation for the time and for world history).
The most visible debate on Ogasawara today is about whether or
not to open a commercial airport on Chichijima. An equally important
challenge is on resulting from the June 2011 establishment of the
Ogasawara Islands as a UNESCO World Heritage Natural Site after
which ongoing effort began by officials involved to revert some of theislands to what some describe as their “pre-people” state of being.
Japanese citizens are not being removed, yet the first order of businessfor many in achieving this imaginary “pristine environment” is theculling of non-human invasive species ranging from a host of plants andfungus to goats, rats, and domesticated cats. The irony of this unfolding
simultaneously with the ongoing March 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis
is not lost. As one young mother of two explained to me while shopping
at a small supermarket on Chichijima: “They want us to import tainted
beef from the mainland while they kill our goats. Our goats are thecleanest meat in Japan!!”19

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

The paradoxes inherent to Japan’s twenty-first century attempt at anationally organized, internationally-sanctioned, scientificallyengineered “pre-people environment” on the Ogasawara Islands areclear, heightening the significance of the basic contours of “peopling”
them in the first place. Within the chronological frame of what we teachas modern Japanese history (roughly the demise of the Tokugawa
system to the present, or, 1820-2020), the Ogasawara Islands reveal inreal time at once globally and nationally significant histories: theviolence inherent to establishing permanent human residency in settler
colonies anywhere in the modern world and also one of the most visible
multi-racial/multi-ethnic origin stories within the mythicallyhomogenous Japanese nation-state.

Fast forward to the present and the 2011 UNESCO designation of
the islands as a World Heritage Natural Site, and the impetus towards
an imaginary “pre-people” past becomes important on multiple levels.
For example, spaces devoid of modern humans and their necessary flora

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

and fauna such as onions and goats would enable erasure of the islands’
historically blended beginning as well as a complete “Great Leap”
through the disastrous chronicle of the end of the Japanese empire there
in 1945 (American military strategists tricked the Japanese command
stationed on Chichijima and Hahajima in the spring of 1945 by going
instead west to Okinawa after the battle for Iwo Jima; in addition to thedevastating record of starvation conditions for the over 30,000 Japanese
troops and Korean slave-labor involved in building tunnels on theseislands similar to those better known in Iwo Jima’s Mount Surabachi,
Chichijima holds the distinction confirmed at the war crimes tribunalsof demonstrated instances of cannibalism of captured American pilots).
An imaginary “pre-people environment” would also circumvent
dealing with the record of nuclear weapons stationed there through the1968 reversion (Okinawa was and is America’s “first line” of defense;
Ogaswara, the “second line” [its weapons are now on Guam]; wastematerials remain). Perhaps most important to the present and future,
however, the effort towards a “pre-people” space on the Ogasawara
Islands sustains the Japanese state-directed ruse of the meaning of“environment” juxtaposed with the nation’s most significant
environmental history unfolding today and into the future: theFukushima crisis.

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

6. Shimizu Ryoichi
Here I’d like to introduce the lifework of Shimizu Ryoichi and his
family. Dismissible perhaps by some as a hippie surfer, Shimizu
Ryoichi could be described instead as an astute businessman
comfortable with living in nature. Following a childhood spent as aJapanese “high growth economics” kid with abundant consumer goods- yet an existence comparable to an American military kid in terms ofthe numerous physical relocations necessary to sustain the father’s“livelihood” (seikatsu) - Shimizu arrived on Chichijima in 1983 as a
tourist and stayed. Considered the most knowledgeable sea kayaker andtrekker on Chichijima (here what Amino Yoshihiko urged weunderstand as a “hyakusho” in Japanese history could be helpful - morethan a “peasant” an individual who does “one hundred things” forsurvival), Shimizu has built his family’s house and a profit-generating
guest house from the materials on the land he purchased. It’s solarpowered with composting toilets, and he calls the elaborate tree-house
like structure by an Indonesian word of unknown etymology: “Pelan”(gathering place). He learned the word while on a surfing trip and

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decided he wanted to bring people together from around the world withhimself and his family in the middle of it. (Here, Amino’s “muen”[unconnected place] resonates, too). Pelan’s stated aim is the globally
meaningful, American Indian instruction to work for seven generations
to build a better planet: “7 世代後に美しい地球を!”
It is simple, on the one hand, to see that the state would reduce
Shimizu Ryoichi, his wife, Chika, and their two children at best to“alternative lifestyles” within Japan today or at worst “irrelevant.” On
the other hand, the Shimizu family fully participates in the nation: they
pay taxes; their children attend the island school; they sing Kimigayo atsporting events. They define themselves as one hundred percent
Japanese. At the same time, Shimizu family life endeavors for a Japanthat currently does not make space for how they live nor how theyenvision the nation’s future: through awareness and action in nature
instead of erasure and avoidance. Their commitment to living life innature in a sustainable manner connects them to a “peopled
environment” and demonstrates the possibilities of what Shimizu’s“pelan” can offer on a national level, too. Soon after the March 2011
crisis began, they posted notice on their guest house website that anyone
afflicted by the triple disasters (noting both those affected by theearthquake and tsunami and also specifying those choosing to leave
because of the nuclear plant meltdowns) would be welcome to live forfree at the guest house for the first 30 days; should they wish to staylonger and to relocate to the Ogasawara Islands, they would be charged
half the usual fee (generally about 4500 yen per night; 90000 per
month). Today, the advertisement remains, although the terms havechanged slightly (the fee is half price from the start but comes with aprogram to help transition to life on Chichijima). While the Shimizu
family copes with efforts to cull the family goats and cats to force animagined “pre-people environment” into existence (Chika has

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confronted municipal officials sent from Tokyo by asking whether she
could prepare some goat stew for them; the kids hide their cats), thedichotomies of human and natural history endure.
The recent human record on Ogasawara - and likely its distant one,
too - demonstrates people choosing how to live in nature and how “tomake” and “to do” their lives in nature. Today, its place in Japanese
history and the Pacific Ocean offers unusual ways to broaden thediscussion of who counts as Japanese and also reveals meaningful
approaches Japanese citizens are taking to address the Fukushimaradiological crisis. Premising the Ogasawara Islands in this fashion,
however, demands a “peopled environment” in the past, present, andfuture that is welcomed rather than shunned by state-led directives.

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7. The Anthropocene and the Sea with No Name
The final example I want to consider involves thinking about theanthropocene, or the “Great Acceleration”, a new geological momentthat measures human impact on the planet. That is, human activity is
now part of the rock record. Ando Shoeki arguably did see humans
violating nature, yet it would have been difficult even 300 years ago topredict how quickly we would begin to destroy ourselves. And yet here
we are in a historical moment in which climate change is now seen as
negatively destructive force as are nuclear weapons.
So I’ll turn to the decades-long naming dispute at the International
Hydrographic Organization centers on the body of water between Japanand Korea. Oceanographers refer to this sea as one of the northern
Pacific Ocean’s “marginal seas”, and depending where you stand along
its spiky coastline, it is variously known as the Sea of Japan, Korea’s
East Sea or simply the East Sea. I am not advocating one name inpreference over another, and ideas for new names regularly appear.
During the first decade of this century, for example, a Japanese woman
thoughtfully suggested, ‘The Blue Sea’, while a former president ofSouth Korea proposed the ‘Sea of Friendship’ or the ‘Sea ofUnderstanding’. Agreement on a new name is remote, however, leaving
international news broadcasters such as CNN to explain regional
military tensions taking place in ‘waters off the Korean Peninsula’.
For millennia, a steady stream of human traffic has crossed overthis sea’s northern and southern openings, largely from the Asian
continent moving eastwards to what is now called Japan. Thus, thename East Sea originated as a directional term (literally, 東海), with thefirst known written record of it carved into an early fifth-century stele
commemorating the life of King Gwanggaeto the Great, the nineteenthmonarch of Goguryeo, northernmost of Korea’s ancient dynasties.

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Although modern technologies have replaced earlier days of sail,intense north winds make this sea notoriously difficult to cross. Most
ancient navigators headed along its coastlines to the few straits thatoffered a better chance of safe passage: the Korea or Tsushima Straits,
the Kanmon Straits, the Tsugaru Straits, the Soya or La Pérouse Strait,
and the Strait of Tartary. Very little river water discharges into this sea
barely one percent of its volume - and today places called Russia, North
Korea, South Korea and Japan contain its 978,000 square surface
kilometers. Russia claims almost half of this sea’s total 7,600-kilometercoastline even though Russian explorers were the last to show up in theregion. The Russians’ seventeenth-century designation for the sea, ‘theJapan Sea’, named the area to which they were heading and appears tohave relied on or was coterminous with Matteo Ricci’s 1602 map of theworld that, for the first-time historians are aware of, designated thisbody of water in Chinese characters as ‘ 日本海’ (Japan Sea).

Notably, the ‘Japan’ piece ( 日 本 ) as understood in European
translation derives from Marco Polo’s famous thirteenth-century
phonetic transliteration of China’s name for the country: ‘Ciapangu’ (as26The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

it appeared verbatim on Martin Behaim’s astonishing 1492 globe). And
we know from Amino Yoshihiko’s work that we should understand 日
本 from the sea itself:… (Writing and texts) came to Japan via the sea, whichfunctioned as both a transportation route and an obstacle to intercourse.’
The name ‘Japan’ (日本), Amino further explains, literally translates
as the ‘source of the sun . . . reflect(ing) a strong consciousness of theTang empire on the Chinese mainland . . . (And, moreover, unusually)
the name 日本 signifies a natural phenomenon or orientation and . . .
is neither the name of the place of origin of the dynastic founders northat of a dynasty or tribe.’

The word “Ciapangu” ultimately Europeanized as Giappone in
Italian, Japon in French and Yaponskey in Russian, as it would thus
appear to name the sea on seventeenth-century Russian maps:Японское море (Yaponskey More). There seems to be no evidence that
any Japanese used the name Sea of Japan in print before the lateeighteenth-century until the painter and illustrator Shiba Kokan printed
it on his 1792 map of the world (the famous ‘Chikyu Zenzu’: 地球全図).

In 1928, when the International Hydrographic Organization agreed
to Japan’s request for the sole name, ‘Sea of Japan’, Korea could not
object because it was under Japanese occupation. That said, thecollection of early modern European maps that current international
arbitration tribunal's favor seems equally divided between references to
the Sea of Japan and East Sea/Korea’s East Sea. Thus, Korean
geographer Ryu Yeon-Taek explains that the Korean government today
prefers a dual naming scheme for this sea until all parties involved –27

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

including Russia and indigenous groups – settle on an alternative newname. Any Neolithic-era name that may have been in play among theindigenous Nivkh, Orok and Ainu people - whose few descendants still
live along the thin stretches of water where mainland Russia breaks off
towards Sakhalin Island - failed to make the grade of modern maps,
although they treasure their ancestors’ boots and clothes made of
salmon skin hides. Fishing formed the basis of these communities’
existence, and at least for the Ainu, a god of the sea that storytellers call
Repun appears in drawings either as a whale or as a male figure with aharpoon. Legend relates tales of Repun’s beneficence in fish catches
when the hunt on land was meager, yet none of the storytelling groups
seems to have had a specific name for the ocean that Repun makes
bountiful, nor, however, did they have writing.
Exploring this sea’s richness via spots along its coastlines andislands - rather than one nation at a time or time period after time period- helps create a sense of this oceanic history as a connective place forthe region and beyond as well as its future possibilities.
To begin, this body of water’s vital and unusually warm current is
its most crucial thread. Over the course of the past fifteen to twenty
million years that the Japanese main islands have been back-arc
spreading from the Asian mainland and tectonically creating thephysical space for this body of water to come into being, this famous
ocean current also known as the Japan Current - has brought fish larvae,
plankton and other food to the myriad creatures inhabiting this sea. In
short, as the nineteenth-century English geographer and hydrographer
Alexander George Findlay described, the Kuroshio is ‘a remarkablestream’. At 46 degrees north latitude, Japan’s life-giving Kuroshio
Current even makes for pleasant swimming during summer months at
the sea’s northernmost reaches on the beaches of the lush, tiny island ofMoneron, off the southern tip of Russia’s Sakhalin Island. Moneron is
the only landmass in the Straits of Tartary, and its astonishing diversity

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makes it the Russian Federation’s first national marine park. The
island’s name originates with the French navigator Jean Francois de La
Perouse’s 1787 visit to the region who named it after his expedition’schief engineer, Paul Merault Monneron (although the island is spelled
without two ‘n’s’). The French name stands today even though the great
Japanese cartographer, Mamiya Rinzo, and his colleagues visited andmapped it during their great 1808-09 expedition north through Sakhalinand eastern Siberia. Japanese called the island Kaibato until 1945,
reworking the Ainu name Todomoshiri into Chinese characters literally ‘place of sea lions’ in both Japanese and Ainu. In August 1945,
the Soviets reverted to the French name when they subsumed control of
it together with all of Sakhalin. Moneron’s human population comes29

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

and goes with the transient Ainu and vanished Japanese having given
way to equally nomadic Russians, today arriving as eco-tourists tofrolic with the island’s resident sea lions that sunbathe on basalt
boulders or browse among sea stars and anemones underneath thewaves.
Forking in two at the tip of the Ryukyu Islands in the East China
Sea, one trajectory of the Kuroshio heads north around Tsushima Island,
splitting in two again into the Tsushima Current and the East Korea
Warm Current, which together bring southern saline-charged nutrients
across the sea to the Tsugaru Strait, between Hokkaido and Japan’s
primary island, Honshu.
There, the currents recombine and break free into the Pacific torejoin the current’s southern branch in the North Pacific gyre. Withinthat great whorl - the largest ecosystem on earth - the Kuroshio conveys
its warmth to the southern islands of Alaska and the coastline of British
Columbia before heading back again across the Pacific. Unfortunately,
today this means that the current contributes to one of the planet’s
greatest challenges: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a man-madecollection of insoluble plastic and chemical particulate gunk, mostconservatively estimated to be the size of France, although likely larger
than the United States.

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The Kuroshio’s warm northerly branch makes Vladivostok
Russia’s only ice-free Pacific port and home to the Russian Pacific fleet.
Distressingly, throughout the Cold War Russia took enormous licensewith its control over these waters and dumped astonishing amounts ofradioactive waste up through the 1990s, including two nuclear reactors
off the coast of North Korea in 1978. Today, North Korea maintains
several nuclear facilities along this ocean’s coastline, while South
Korea operates three. For its part, Japan operates the world’s largest
nuclear plant, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa facility, south of Niigata, an
area of Japan known in earlier times as Echigo, this coast’s central port
and critical to the country’s early modern economy for rice, fish, timberand salt, among many other goods. Merchants along this coastline
perfected a near shore trade route known as the ‘Kitamaebune’ (literally
the ‘northern bound ships’), which operated annually from the midseventeenth century through the advent of Western schooners in theregion. Although the sails on these ships remained too weak in the faceof this sea’s ferocious northerly winds to accomplish more than one trip
per year, the ‘Kitamaebune’ trade was integral to the calculus of the31Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

world’s first commodity exchange at Osaka (in 1800 Osaka rivaled
Paris in manifold ways, especially in terms of market economy). Ships
departed from Osaka’s ports on Japan’s southern face into the Inland
Sea and headed west through the Kanmon Straits dividing Honshu andKyushu, and from there cruised along Japan’s northern coastline towhat is today southern Hokkaido. This greatly added to the process ofbringing the ‘barbarian lands’ ( 蝦 夷 ) into Japanese consciousness,
which in 1869 were renamed Hokkaido and colonized as the first pieceof Japan’s modern empire. Throughout such discordant human histories,
the 360 currently known fish species in this sea do their best to thrive,with herring and sardines the most lucrative commodities, and giant
octopus and squid holding the greatest mystery. In terms of what humanactivity is doing, however, this body of water has one of the mostprecipitous fish depletion rates currently being measured.

8. Conclusion
My remarks have tried to see Japan from the sea in order tointerrogate Japanese society’s relations to security, nature, and theenvironment in hopefully helpful and new ways. While certain politicalforces would try today to barricade Japan in the sea, opening up Japan’s
oceanic borderlines more productively engages Japan with Japan, with
Asia, and with the world. It also is a more honest approach to Japanese
history.

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

Discussion
Professor Kozue AKIBAYASHI’s Remarks
I would like to thank Professor Mun and others for giving me thisopportunity to talk about Professor Dudden’s studies. I am sure others
are grateful too. I’m fascinated by her illustration of history and I am
overwhelmed to make comments. I would like to continue the privilegethat I had earlier today when Professor Dudden and I traveled here
together from Kyoto station. We had a short conversation starting withthe episode when we missed each other last summer when we wereenlisted on the Peace Boat together. The Peace Boat did the Japan cruise
for the first time in thirty years; I was on the first half of the tour, andProfessor Dudden was on the latter half of the tour. It gave us an
opportunity to look at the ocean which surrounds Japan.
Through Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, afeminist peace activists’ movement in Okinawa, my colleagues and I
are trying to grow a global movement to achieve demilitarized security,
and Professor Dudden is also familiar with this movement. These
women and I have been doing this for the past twenty-some years andtrying to figure out what research and activism can do together. Thiswas part of the conversation earlier so I would like to ask this question
from me to you, and I would like to give a bit of a background to these
activities. OWAAMV will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
You might recall the incident of the 1995 sexual assault by US soldiersin Okinawa that many will probably be referring to later this year. That
led to the island wide movement challenging what Professor Dudden
described as ‘insecurity created by the very territorial idea of security.’
I have argued that these feminist peace activists spearheaded the
movement to put forward fundamental criticism of security discourse

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and policies. Their analyses come not only from the territorial issue but
also the long history of sexual violence by US soldiers starting in 1945
in Okinawa.

Actually, the Japanese Empire Map study that you showed at thevery beginning was the very same map of the scope of the locations of“comfort stations” used by the Japanese imperial military during the
Asia-Pacific war.
When the Okinawa women formed their activity against military
violence in 1945 their fundamental criticism was questioning themilitary and the belief in militarism and that, as some of the feminist
international relations scholars have argued, is the basis that underlies
the territorial security policy, the assumption that the military is what
protects the territory on the borders. Okinawa Women Act Against

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Military Violence are critical not only of the direct and more visible
impacts of the military presence in Okinawa, but also have analyzed
that the idea of militarized security has caused insecurity in the hostcommunities of US military in Okinawa. There are gaps within
Okinawa too, some people are safer and not affected as much as others
are, and those, for example in Henoko and Futemma and other areas are
the ones who are more affected. I think that the differences within
Okinawa itself should be noted. It's not only Japan versus the UnitedStates and Japan versus Japan but we could also say Henoko versus
Naha for example. There are layers, and by seeking out the layers of
oppression and the burden we may be able to contribute to different
perspectives of the history.
When Okinawan women felt disappointed at the Japanese mainland
women’s movements for their lack of understanding of the situation in
Okinawa, they started to look for closer relationships with feminist
peace activists in communities hosting US military in places other thanJapan, especially the Philippines and South Korea because theircolonial backgrounds are very similar to that of Okinawa. Moreover,the proximity of the US military activities and presence in their daily
lives and the direct connection with sexual violence, including the sex
industry as a part of the exploitation by soldiers, have led them to createa closer connection with the women’s groups in those communities.
Perhaps you know women’s groups like Durebang in the US militarycamp towns in South Korea or women’s groups in the Philippines aswell. They are also trying to expand the scope of their policies on
security to environmental destruction by the military presence and otherissues. These international feminist peace network’s activities haveilluminated the colonial history that was shared by the communities in
Guam and in Hawaii and overlapping with the military occupation in
those areas as well as the annexation and the colonization of indigenous
communities in Guam and Hawaii.

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I would argue that there have been activities on the ground,particularly from my areas of expertise, feminine peace movements,
working for creating or sharing a new perspective of history in theregion. Significantly, a group from this International Network of
Women Against Militarism has joined a more specific action. That wasa vision of closing the Demilitarized Zone on the Korean Peninsula byfirst crossing the DMZ, starting in 2015. The action is called Women
Cross DMZ. We were a group of about thirty feminist peace activists
from sixteen countries, South Koreans could not take part because they
could not cross, nor Zainichi Koreans because that was too risky forthem.
This international group of women from different areas wanted tointernationalize this issue of the Korean War that is still going on.
Professor Dudden briefly mentioned the US occupation and the Allied
Forces’ plan that resulted in the division of the Korean Peninsula andargued that it’s not so much a problem between North and South as aproblem of the international community, namely the neglect of
responsibility of the international community to end the Korean War.
The effort of Women Cross DMZ has also been continuing precisely
because we share such a view. We are facing probably a better situation
now than in 2015 when the tension on the Korean Peninsula was muchhigher, but our movement is still struggling to eliminate the DMZ. In
2015 we actually did cross the DMZ from the North side to the Southside. We wanted to cross at Panmunjom because that would be very
symbolic, but we figured that it was too much. Well, we tried. We
negotiated with the North Korean Government and the South Korean
Government and the UN Command, meaning the United States and theUN. We tried all these channels, but we couldn’t cross in the
Panmunjom area and instead we crossed at the Kaesong area. This year
is the fifth anniversary of the crossing of Women Cross DMZ, and weare trying to do it again, maybe to cross the other way, from the South

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side to the North side. However, this Coronavirus situation is somethingthat we didn’t expect, and it could be a difficult obstacle to our purpose.
These are actual activists’ activities we are doing. Also, we aretrying to address the national history narrative and as a part of that weare collecting the direct experiences of women being colonized or being
militarized. We are utilizing these oral histories to formulate our own
narrative of the history of the region and share a common experience ofthe history. We are not only sharing but trying to build solidarity toeffect change, to decolonize, and maybe, to remove the DMZ on the
Korean Peninsula, and also bring about gender equality because webelieve that DMZ or US military occupation, the insecurity created by
security, also has a commonly underlying sexism and misogyny in its
structure.
So I am ending my comment here and I already placed my firstquestion so as a committed historian, could I ask you to maybe to give
us some suggestions in the way you were talking about languages thatcan be understood by the regular people or policy makers?
Thank you very much.

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Professor DUDDEN’s Response
Thank you for your really thoughtful and challenging comments. I
would define myself as a pacifist realist. I’m sitting next to a very active
humanist and I would describe us all as humanists, and the first question
I would like to answer is: “Do you want to have hope?” which I do
appreciate and to which I would reply that I have to have hope. I am ahistorian, and I don’t get paid enough not to have hope. It is all I have,but also I am a teacher and a mother, and I don’t mean to glamorize
motherhood as the answer, rather, I am responsible for a fourteen-yearold and if I don’t have hope why should I encourage him? I get chills
when I say that but that is why I continue to be honest with myself andso I have to come up with something that I think I am doing to makethe planet better. I don’t know what it is yet, but I want to address what
(both) of you said, and I want to say that you both have very interesting
points of convergence on your expression of camouflaging
international law and I think that’s great. The camouflaging of Henoko
in the sense that both of these tricks of the state, in particular the
deploying of troops without following international law as you rightly
say absolutely occludes, makes everybody blind to the violence
endemic to international law. Putting Henoko offshore, even if it’s notgoing to happen, is a complete distraction from the violence of daily
life for Okinawan women and girls, as highlighted by the 1995 rape tobegin with. The idea that to atone for that rape we would build anothernew base, but one that we wouldn’t be able to see - which is part andparcel of these offshore disputes where we can test each other’s resolve
without having to see them - that the violence builds on land behindthem both.
If I could begin, I would like to address things individually today. I
have two specific answers for each of you. But I will propose to you

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Seathat in 2020, with the anniversary of the rape, I wasn’t thinking in thoseterms, thank you for reminding me, and maybe I should be thinking of
the seventy-fifth anniversary, we have this year. Already Vladimir
Putin is throwing the biggest party in May to celebrate the end of
W.W.II, but we all know when we sit in the Asia Pacific region that infact, the war has three more months to go and they were theexceptionally violent ones that began the nuclear age. I would also
propose that we think of 2020 not as the end of W.W.II, but as theseventy-fifth anniversary of the US occupation of Japan, and I think thatit does not make me a radical leftist to use this language, but for many
years it would have defined me as a radical leftist. Here I’m thinking
how D. H. Norman in 1944 did not see what Okinawa would become
today, and in my research there is not a single US military planner in1945 who saw the US occupation lasting for seventy-five years, and if
we start using that language in everyday life maybe we can draw
attention to something.
I know John Dower tried very recently to draw attention to Japanand Manchuria, in comparison to America and Iraq, and because the US
is not yet ready to call itself an empire, in spite of everything that iswrong with the US, the book got trashed and it shouldn’t have gotten
trashed, it's an excellent book; but we just need to start saying that theUnited States has never stopped trying to occupy Japan militarily. If wewant to figure out how to have agency and independence and autonomy
as Japanese people that’s a separate discussion, but the United States’
military occupation of Japan for seventy-five years makes this thelongest. It’s about a third of my country's history, in terms ofchronology, and when you put those numbers out there it is rather
alarming. It’s the permanent basing, the permanent industrial/militarycomplex that’s probably more keenly felt in Okinawa than anywhere
else on the planet.

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Increasingly, Guam with very similar colonial relations and postcolonial histories is heading in the same direction, and this brings me
to an essay which I believe Wada Haruki has recently published. He
gave a talk in Seoul in November in which he said: “We cannot keep
calling the San Francisco Treaty a peace treaty. It is not a peace treaty;
it is the creation of a permanent state of war in East Asia.”
So words do matter, and when you ask what I can do actively, I
wish I had your courage sometimes; I mean I’m not sure I would havethe courage to do what you do all the time. I try, but the courage that I
would have as an activist is through words, and this is what all of us inthis room are privileged to have; I mean Donald Trump may be aftermine and maybe after yours but we still have freedom of speech, and I
don’t mean to sound like a silly child when I say that. We have freedomof speech, but we know how rare that is, and so it is incumbent on allof us to use it.
I really appreciate your discussion of the need to talk about thehistory of international law instead of simply accusing nations ofviolating it, the US being the largest violator of that bar none. With theterritorial disputes it certainly helps in the current discussions of treaties
about slave labor or slavery issues. In both instances we can discuss
how international law itself has changed, particularly with people, lessso with territory. I think that what we’re seeing is a sort ofreterritorialization of sovereignty but I will definitely try to engage withyour language and, to quote you, this is camouflaging how internationallaw is itself a history and it is generative and changing.
So, thank you very much for that point, and what I will do is try towrite more proactively, and I think the Ogasawara case is a good
example.

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

Benjamin Savory

Let's to go back to Nathaniel Savory's son. I didn't talk about thepeopling as much as I would have liked to today but what I wanted toemphasize is mythical homogeneous model nation-state of Japan. Of
course it began as a multi-ethnic multi-racial, multi-cultural society
about 38,000 years ago, and it’s always forever been multi-ethnic eversince the origins of Japan.
On Ogasawara we can see it in modern times. We can see it inmodern times because Maria de los Santos y Castro is Benjamin
Savory’s mother who was Nathanial Savory’s forced wife; and I am notusing this term lightly because the way that there were people on the
Ogasawara islands after Nathaniel Savory showed up in 1830 was an
instance of forced sexual slavery. I’m not using the terms “state
sponsored” or “militarized”, but in 1830 Nathanial Savory and his two
friends on the island of Hawaii kidnapped 13 girls. They were Filipina,
Samoan, and Hawaiian, and I found the documents. They took 13 girls
and women from Hawaii to the Ogasawara for the express purpose ofbuilding a population. Two of the girls escaped on whaling ships backto Hawaii, several of them went insane and ran into the woods andcreated ghost stories that still live on the Ogasawaras; so when you hear

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the wind at night it’s one of those girls. The others decided for whateverreason to stay with these men and they had more children.
So, to answer, the beginning of the violence in Ogasawara connects
itself to the violence in Okinawa and other militarized spots but it’s also
the colonial history around the empire. In that sense sometimes
historical research can be connected to activism to deepen what activists
in the present are trying to show is going on. I think it does help toconnect our work and so thank you very much.
My one final question is one that the wonderful professor Norma
Field always asks: How much are you personally prepared to pay in acapitalist society? What are we as professors prepared to give up forwhat we do? And she’s really clear on this point. Are you prepared togive up your house? Are you prepared to give up your car in order tobe the activist you believe yourself to be? I’m not questioning you
personally; I’m directing this to myself. Am I willing to give up being
here? I can be honest and say: “I don’t think so”; but I am also notwilling to hide behind this privilege and that’s why I think it’s okay to
be called names on the internet, and to stand up against things in writing.
This counts as activism increasingly now that this new form ofcommunication called the internet has taken over. I think there arethings that we can do to turn what we know into a broader form ofactivism, but then we still have to rely on your physical labor, on youractual physical crossing of the DMZ and breaking down that border, forwhich I am incredibly grateful. I think we all are doing this together, so
this does connect us. I also appreciate your mentioning of the languageof camouflage and hiding it.
Thank you both so much.

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Questions and Comments
Moderator: Thank you. Now it’s time for questions and commentsfrom the floor on the keynote speech or the discussion we have had.
Questioner 1: From the viewpoints of seeking co-existence andreconciliation in Asia, what kind of factors exist behind the divide
according to your interpretation?
Professor Dudden: In a word, money.
Questioner 1: Well that’s closely related to the second session.
Professor Dudden: Well let me give an example. I think it is also
related as you said to the second session. I think in the 1990s the sort ofthe beginnings of the extremes of wealth and power that came fromglobalizing economies or actually from multi-national corporations
which come in the wake of the collapse of the so to say bipolar order
have given very similar dislocations around the world and we are seeing
in so many societies so many populist surges. However, I think eachsociety manifests what it’s going to target differently, and on this point,
I admire the work of Professor Nakano Koichi and I have learned a lot
from him.
When Prime Minister Abe returned to office, the first thing he did
was announce that he was going to target the Kono statement and I
really didn’t understand why he would pick that because as a historian,militarized sexual slavery, the comfort women are one balance ofhistorical product and the Nanjing Massacre is another. So, I thought;
why are you picking that one and not that one? It just didn’t make sense,and I naïvely thought it’s because Korea is easy and China is scary, this43

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of Historyis what I was thinking, so I asked Professor Koichi: “Is it because Korea
is smaller and weaker?” And He replied, “No. Abe wants to get rid of
the Asahi Shimbun”. And you can agree or disagree but that’s whatmade me begin to reflect, and the consistent tearing apart of the freepress in Japan under the Abe administration has been very remarkable.
It is definitely happening in the US now but it’s interesting that this iswhat Abe in his second term went for first. Pierre Bordeaux, thewonderful French sociologist said that censorship is most powerful notwhen people are not allowed to say something but when everybody
ends up saying the same thing. That’s what we’ve been seeing in Japan.
What do I think caused all of this? I am enough of a historical
Marxist to believe that it’s the economy. There were dislocations andhow are we going to deal with these social dislocations? I think eachsociety is picking a different object and I think that one thing that was
unforeseen in Japan’s moment has been the Fukushima meltdowns. I
have no way of proving it, but I do not think it’s an accident that the
territorial disputes and especially the militarization of the territorial
disputes really began to ratchet up after Fukushima. Anything to turnthe public’s view away from the nuclear reactors is valuable to thegoverning power, and so in the mix, the groups that were questioning
Fukushima needed to be silenced quickly, and so that’s what I see. Howthat manifests in other societies is different but it’s for similar reasons.
I wish I had a better economics answer, and I’m thinking of Joseph
Stieglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents and works like that. We
are seeing the 1% growing wealthier in Japan, as we see the 1% growing
wealthier everywhere, and watching populist surges that are being left
behind while they think they are being brought along, and that’s thesimilarity I see from France to Turkey to Japan to the United States.
Questioner 1: Would you like to interpret the situation? Maybe thisbad situation began since around 1995 with the collapse of the “casino

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

economies” and in addition the most important thing is that around1995 is the time that Abe and the right-wing politicians tried to make aplan to promote a backlash against those kinds of things. Maybe it’sbased upon the hatred created by radical nationalism, as in the historicalnarrative of the Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference) in 1997?
Professor Dudden: Yes, I completely agree with you that they are thesurface effects, absolutely.
Questioner 1: So around mid-1995 the right-wing got the hegemonyand now we are faced with a terrible situation.
Professor Dudden: Yes. I completely agree.
Questioner 1: I have a comment about seeing Japan from the sea. It is abeautiful concept, like the open waters, or like a cosmopolitan idea ofspace; but on the other hand, expressing these ideas is a little bit
dangerous. For example, the Americans are realists who emphasize thesea. They found Japan as a sea power which contains land powers. Now
China may also be seeing Japan from the sea as another kind of view.
Professor Dudden: Yes, and no. I am a sailor, and I find that a lot of
people who write about the ocean have never actually been on waterand so they think it’s very easy to have these borders and theseborderlines which is completely impossible when you are on the water,and so it’s always amusing to me. But I don’t disagree with you. The
United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea has in many respects
created a lot of these problems not only through exclusive economic
zones but also the continental shelf regimes. It’s totally legal to extend
the nation-state 350 miles into the ocean, that’s the pink map of Japan,
and one way of thinking about it is if you are in this room and you are45

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

planning to have grandchildren, by the time your grandchildren are ourages there will be no blue on a globe. It will all be pink or yellow or
green to match the nation-state that’s claiming it, because that’s thetrend in international law. So, I definitely see a track into an oceanic
pursuit on the one hand and on the other hand the ocean is the last spaceon the planet over which to claim national dominance. How thatnational claim is being claimed is still being mediated.
If we take the hard border approach to the ocean, which Donald
Trump is doing by this Indo-Pacific notion and all of the posturing in
the South China Sea, we are setting the United States up for a coming
war with China. I mean China is developing a blue water navy, all of
the language of this is set to have W.W.III. It’s a very similar part of
the world, the Pacific Ocean again and the Chinese are following Japan
in 1915 now, picking little islands and the United States has its little
islands and the parallels are all there.
At the same time the activism is also there to push back. In very
compelling ways, largely fueled by climate change because the islands
are sinking, the fish are disappearing, and increasingly there are legal
mechanisms to defend against that and so it’s a question of how toswitch the discourse away from complete national, nation-state,
rapacious empire building.
In my book I’m trying to say that the twenty-first century is an ageof ocean empires, but very different from the sixteenth century of Spain
and Portugal. This is nation-states claiming the open ocean as territory.
If that can be pushed back or mediated before a territorial dominanceof the seas that surely is where climate change comes in, because thewater rising is the push back, the actual physicality of the ocean ispushback. I do have hope, I have to have hope that throughunderstanding the ocean from the perspective of a refugee is how wehave to move forward, because if you’ve got people trying to escape a

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The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

war zone only to get to the Aegean Sea and come up against a wall inthe sea what does that mean?

Is this really the future of the planet? Because that does mean that
we are destroying ourselves! So again, it’s not an answer but I do think
there are two approaches that can be taken to the ocean, one is a fluid
borderline and the other is the rigid approach.
Questioner 2: Thank you very much, that was fascinating. I really likethe idea that we take an honest approach to history. I agree with that,
but at the same time I would like to ask: What would you say if I say
that are you romanticizing history? Are you beautifying history? There
ought to be some sort of negative heritage of “fluid Japan” in the pastthat didn’t really come out. I’m from a political science background,and I felt that your talk is so fascinating and so interdisciplinary that itshould have a lot of implications for policies. So, what would be thepolicy implications of your discussion? How can we use this history as
a lesson to form a hopeful future? Can you elaborate a bit more about47

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

what kind of hopeful future you’re hoping for based on the historical
discussion?
Professor Dudden: On the one hand it’s fine if I romanticize history
but I don’t want to beautify it. That is to say I believe that the only value
history has is to show a moment where a choice was made, because
history is always about a decision, and if we can learn from a decisionthat went terribly wrong, then maybe we don’t have to make that(wrong) decision again, and we can think of countless examples.
Let’s take an example from American history. When the Africanslave trade ended in the early nineteenth century, it was technicallypossible for the United States to have ended the practice of slavery then,but instead, even though slavery as in the transatlantic importation of
bodies was illegal, it got worse, because the practice was kept legal, andso from the moment that it became illegal to import Africans slave,owners started peopling their plantations by raping the slaves. They
turned the plantations into body producing factories of totally free (asin monetary free) labor to the extent that before the American civil war
in the 1860s the value of all African American slaves in the UnitedStates was greater than the value of all American manufacturing andproduction because it was free labor, which is just an astonishingstatistic. Fifty years earlier had the decision been made to end slavery,
the United States today might have a very different understanding ofjustice and equality. Instead we have huge human rights problems
related entirely to the post moment, those 50 years.
So, what I’m saying is that I don’t mean to romanticize history, but
I believe you have to examine that past in order to open up the
possibility of a different future. Perhaps that’s romantic but it’s not
beautiful. That would address the history of rape and pillage andviolence and it would address the history of lynching and terror and say
this is not acceptable.

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In terms of a policy description for what I’m working on, I thinkit’s already on the books. I mean I’m not against there being a United
Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, but there has to be
enforceability, because this beautiful body of law does absolutely
nothing except for the opposite of what’s intended. It was created sothat we did not destroy the world’s oceans. The man who created it,
Maltese Ambassador Arvid Pardo, gave the most beautiful speech at
the United Nations about how the oceans are the womb of life and that’s
why we have salt tears because we as human creatures come from theocean - it was a really beautiful speech. He gave this speech precisely
because he saw oil companies and fishing companies tearing apart theoceans and depleting all of the resources. He died a very unhappy man
in 1997 due to the advent of the exclusive economic zone, because thepoint of the plan was sharing, but it’s become complete private property.
If we go to some of the provisions in the law, the joint development
agreement for example, which China and Japan used until 2009 in the
East China Sea, until maybe historical impulses or jockeying with eachother for power came into being. Then immediately the
Senkaku/Diaoyutai gets described as a resource war but it’s not aresource war; there is very little liquid natural gas and oil in the East
China Sea. In fact, I think somebody’s run the numbers - if you take allof the fossil fuel out of the East China Sea it will electrify Beijing for
one week. That is not worth going to war over. I mean it’s just notenough, so it’s not a resource war. Also, there are very few fish left inthe East China Sea, so if you’re a fisherman in Okinawa you have to go
fight in the Philippines for survival.
However, if we go back to what the law says there are codes on
piracy and theft, but there’s no enforcement for it, because of the private
possibility, and that’s the thing about capitalism - is it possible at thisstage to imagine completely overturning capitalism? Or are we reallytalking about lessening the extremes? So, I guess my policy prescription

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is, let's all re-read the international laws, the United Nations Conventionof the Law of the Sea, and let’s figure out how to police it. Konishi
Hiroyuki has a really interesting policy proposal for Japan for the Jieitai(Self-defense force). He says: Okay, Japan has a Jieitai, we know wehave a military force, but do we have to fight America’s wars? Why
don’t we use our Jieitai to become the world’s first major humanitariancrisis response team? Why don’t we make the Japanese militaryresponsible for climate change problems so that Japan is called into thePhilippines, so that Japan is called into China, as a positive force? Weknow from the last series of typhoons that a militarized response isneeded to counter climate change catastrophe. Why can’t Japan’s
marine self-defense force become the police that actually enforces
UNCOS instead of falling prey to the United States? They say: “Ohwell you’ll get more, you’ll get more”, and we’ll destroy the planet thatway so I’m just saying it’s already there on the books, we just need toact together instead of from selfish greed.
Questioner 3: You were saying that if you get part of the law it’s notvery helpful, but the rest of the law is actually very helpful.
Professor Dudden: The easy addition of open ocean as territory andthe nationalization of the continental shelf are really bad, so we could
get rid of those, but the other initial thing that Arvid Pardo proposed
was that because the ocean was a common state, the profit fromanything taken out should be used to eradicate poverty on land. That
totally did not happen, and if it had the IMF or the World Bank would
look very different today. That is why he said we can control this sothat there is enough to go around. A land-locked state like Mongolia,
doesn’t have any rights to the ocean. They have to lease their fishingrights from North Korea, even to be allowed in the sea. The ocean has
enormous potential for everyone as long as we don’t say the ocean is50

The Afterlife of History and the Importance of Seeing Japan from the Sea

mine, not yours. The number one rule of being on a boat is you help
another boat in distress. It doesn’t matter what the flag is; otherwise,
you’re dead.
Questioner 4: I understood that, from the Professor Dudden’s
expressions, we have a current situation where the strong men who
support the dominant political forces are too powerful in comparison to
the weak opposing political forces. The different voices empower thestrong man. It’s a very challenging situation right now, so please
explain what you mean by differences of policy to open a more possible
future.
Professor Dudden: If you look at this sketch of Japan’s claimed
territorial waters this is all technically exclusive Japanese space – that’s
upheld by law. However, what is not, but is being claimed here are theSouth Kuril Islands (Hopporyodo), the Dokdo/Takeshima andSenkaku/Diaoyutai, which technically doesn’t exist. This partOgaswara, does. Okinotori is not really an island, it shouldn't quite bethere, it’s Japanese, it’s Japan's rock, but so there are some parts of thismap that don’t exist. So I’m not trying to take any territory away fromJapan, I don’t mean it that way, but here, here, and here are possibilities
for a negotiation, and first of all these are tiny spaces compared to therest of what Japan gets. Ogasawara is 100% Japanese, so it gets a hugeamount of the Pacific and with Minamitori-shima a huge amount of the
Pacific. With that space Japan is technically the world’s sixth or seventh
largest nation - which is currently India- so that amount of ocean goingto Japan makes Japan huge. Meanwhile, those little dots that Japan isclaiming because of its history problems doesn’t actually add a wholelot.
Instead, we could go back to joint-ownership. I admit that I’mliving a pipe dream; this is crazy talk. No one’s going to share. Is

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Russia's going to share? No way, but they did share in the past. Since
1945 they shared, and it’s only since 2014 when this really hardline
policy connected each of these points together for the first time both asforeign and domestic policy that they stopped sharing. This decision by
Japan has meant that there’s no ability to go and create a second
agreement here, in which we can propose that maybe the Chinese
fishermen can be there, and the Russian fishermen can be there, because
now it’s all one policy that defines the Japanese State so that and if you
give anything you give up all of it. So, I’m just suggesting.
When I was in Kyoto, Minshuto took out a full-page ad in the Asahi
newspaper, and probably every other paper for the election and it used
the word ‘Borderline’. It said we will protect Japan’s borderline and it
wasn’t saying Japan is weak and may be taken over, but we have tohave this border, or we will cease to exist, and Japanese citizens must
defend this territory. However, instead of claiming this, we could saythat these are points of convergence, because Japanese modern history
happened first on these little islands, then on the larger land area. But
these claims do not make sense in terms of how those islands became
Japanese territory in the first place. On a 1905 map for example: Where
was Sakhalin? To say that Karafuto (South Sakhalin) should be claimed
if Takeshima is claimed, just does not make historical sense. So, theseare places that you know for a more possible acceptance of Japan in
Asia.
Hatoyama Yukio’s vision which was not ready to happen but saw
Japan back in Asia is the conversation that increasingly needs to happen
again. I believe that through pulling back on this map, we could,
without giving up the safety, not the security but the safety of being
Japanese in Japan, there could be progress.
I am not asking Koreans to give up Dokdo. That would be suicide,
it’s just not going to happen, but at the same time to have to always takesuch a militarized approach only sustains the legacy of empire rather

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than overcomes it. And the United States must leave Okinawa. All I am
asking is that we be honest about how things happened in the first place,instead of camouflaging it and pretending that it’s always been Japanese
territory. Hold on to this point.
I’ll end with this point; the United States does a terrible job on Ioto.
Now, if you are a Japanese and if your parents or grandparents areburied on the South Kuril Islands (Hopporyodo) which are Russian
territory or at least administered by Russia, and you want to makehakamairi (pay respects at one’s ancestors graves) you can do so.
However, the United States government doesn’t allow Japanese to do
hakamairi on Ioto, and that is bad US policy, because if you need toconnect territorially, it’s not because you need to wave a flag, it’s
because you need to pay your respects to your ancestors, and so I think
there are points of convergence that could be made into policy if history
were actually looked at honestly.
Thank you for your attention.
Moderator: This discussion session has been really fascinating and I
have understood a good deal. I am not so knowledgeable in this area as
I specialized in the western part of Asia, but as an ordinary Japanesecitizen I share your concerns. Well, I think we all have more comments,
and this discussion could continue but time is up so let’s conclude thissession by thanking our presenters and all of you for participating.
Thank you very much.

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Session 2
Keynote Speech

The Evaporation of History:
History Communication in the Age of the
Post-truth and the Posthuman
Professor Norihisa YAMASHITA
1. Introduction
Many commentaries and analyses about the use or abuse of history
have already been accumulated during the recent rise of rightwing/nationalist discourse in Japan. In the vertical perspective, this canbe located in the history of “Issues of Historical Perceptions” between
Japan and other East Asian countries traced back to 1980s, especiallythrough the “History Textbook Controversy” and the “Comfort Women
Issue”. However, in the horizontal perspective, it can be interpreted as
one of many instances of “the campaign against established knowledge”
in the transformation of the public sphere boosted by digital media.
Not a few Japanese historians have been deeply concerned with therising popularity of right-wing revisionism/denialism and have been
trying to refute those discourses abusing history basically by showing
the academically established views. However, their efforts seem largely
unsuccessful, or rather counter-effective in reducing the popularity of
the revisionist/denialist discourses. This problem shares, it can beargued, the same structure as what the Science and Technology Studies

54

History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the Posthumancharacterized as the “deficit model”, the limit of enlightenment by theexperts which aims to fill the “deficit” in scientific knowledge among
the lay people. To the extent that this analogy is relevant, what would
be called “History Communication”, a peculiar kind of Science
Communication between the academic historians and the public,
appears to be demanded. The problem is how we should appropriately
communicate history given that while it shares the same structure oftension between expertise and democracy; history is classified underhumanities unlike disciplines of natural science.
In my presentation, I will try to locate the problem at theintersection of post-truth politics1 in the contemporary society and theposthuman2 turn in the humanistic academia. History Communication
has to take an even narrower path than Science Communication,
through which, I would suggest, the conventional conceptualization ofhistory may transform, if not lose, its demarcation both in terms of whowrites and what makes the history.

1

A political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected fromthe details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals
are ignored.
2
Posthuman is a concept originating in the fields of science fiction, and philosophy that literallymeans a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human.

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

2. The Long Swing to the Right
The following list of abuses of history in Japan indicates that thisissue has not suddenly sprung out of nowhere but has emerged over alonger time and goes much deeper.
1982 History Textbook Controversy (歴史教科書検定問題)
1985 PM Nakasone’s official visit to Yasukuni Shrine
1987 Sekihoutai (赤報隊) Terrorism Attack on Asahi Shimbunsha(朝日新聞社)
1989 “The Japan that can say No” published1991 Kim Hak-sun ( 金学順 )’s first testimony as the victim ofJapanese Military Sexual Slavery
1992 “Gomanism” Manifesto (『ゴーマニズム宣言』)
1995 “Marco Polo” incident (holocaust denialism)
1996 Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform ( 新しい歴史
教科書をつくる会)

1997 Parliamentary Group on History Textbook Affairs ( 教科書議連)1997 Japan Conference (日本会議)
1999 Shintaro Ishihara elected as Governor of Tokyo Metropolis
2001 PM Koizumi’s official visit to Yasukuni Shrinec.2005 Dokdo/Takeshima Controversy, Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands
Controversyc.2000-2005 “netto uyoku” （ 「 ネ ッ ト 右 翼 」 ） began to be
circulated
2006 Abe Shinzo Cabinet (first)

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History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the Posthuman2006 Zaitokukai （在特会）2006 The Eternal Zero (『永遠のゼロ』)
2008 Toru Hashimoto elected as Governor of Osaka
2012 Japan Restoration Party (日本維新の会)
2012 Abe Shinzo Cabinet (second)(1) Global Parallels
This trend is not just something peculiar to Japan; its context isshared globally. We can see many illustrations of the so-called “Retreatof Liberal Democracy” all over the world for example, and we canobserve tides of populism almost everywhere, such as the Alt-right(Dark Enlightenment) in US, Brexit, the Radical Rights in Europe, theFN in France, the AfD in Germany, the PVV in Poland, and Lega Nordin Italy as well as the return of authoritarian regimes such as in Hungary,Brazil, Turkey, almost everywhere. In fact, Japanese Prime Minister
Abe himself is a front runner of this trend, and the issue at hand is thislong and wide context of this dilemma which is shared globally today.
(2) Academic Fronts of History
In this longer and deeper and wider context, what have the Japanese
historians been doing? There are multiple fronts but I would like toconcentrate on just two of them.
1) First Front
This includes the following:a) Criticism against the “National History” in Japan and all over theworld. This is a constant theme in Japanese historiography. The
most frequently cited work on this topic is Yoshihiko Amino

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History( 網野善彦 ), “Social History ( 社会史 ) the lineage of social
history in Japanese historiography” which emphasizes theinternal heterogeneity in Japanese history. Japan is not amonolithic single national society; it contains much morediverse internal heterogeneity.
b) The lineage of Regional/Maritime History ( 地域史／海域史 ):Shosuke Murai ( 村 井 章 介 ) and many other historians inJapanese history who emphasize the openness of Japanese
history or the contextuality in the wider regional settings.
Shosuke Murai jointly edited the six-volume work on Japanese
history in Asia published from 1992 to 1993 that describes thelayered external contexts and cross-border relationships
between Japan and Asia.
c) The theme of Post colonialism: “Deconstruction of Nationality”(酒井/伊豫谷/ド・バリー）by Naoki Sakai et al. published inJapan in 1996. The theme is Japan as a colonial empire fromthe second half of the 1990s, a quite lively issue in Japanese
historiography.
2) Second Front.
As a global trend the Linguistic Turning in historical studies is quite
conspicuous in Japanese historiography too. It is a skepticism against
the historical facts which has had quite a wide and deep negative impact
on the popular appreciation of Japanese history.
(3) Limits of Enlightenment

58

History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the PosthumanAs a starting point, what I want to emphasize is the limits ofEnlightenment. The “Long swing to the Right” is quite conspicuous;
many historians are deeply concerned and they have been engaged inpushing back against this swing to the right for four decades.
However, the result is just as you can see today - a big failure forthe efforts of the historians. Perhaps one reason for this failure is thatthe weapon of the historian has been appropriated by the enemy. I havetermed this the appropriation of the logic of the cultural left byrevisionism/denialism.
1) “Alternative” Perspectives of History
From the late 1980s or the 1990s on, the new generation ofhistorians came up with a series of “alternative” perspectives of history
again and again, and that cultivated a sense that any kind of historicalperspective is fine; a sense that anything goes in a postmodern sense
was cultivated through these historians’ endeavors.
This transformed the debate from the “Battle of Facts” to the“Battle of Interpretations”. It’s not about facts anymore, it’s just a
matter of interpretations, so there is this overall skepticism against thehistorical facts and the linguistic terms have a strong tendency to fuelthis trend.
In a wider social context, the market moralism of neoliberalism isspreading wider and wider, and historical works have become more andmore considered as “history as commodity”, so that it is the history
which sells that is taken to be “history”. This particular trend is
propagated by the revisionists and denialists.
2) Counter-Attacks by Concerned Historians Against
Revisionism/Denialism
The Japanese historians tried to push back against the tide ofrevisionism/denialism, but it has become quite a biased and unfair game.

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

There is a huge asymmetry between the academic historians and the
popular writers of revisionist/denialist versions of history. This isbecause historians bear the burden of following the due process inhistorical academia while the popular revisionists and denialists justproduce whatever they want to say.
The outcome is a huge disparity between academic historians andpopular writers of revisionist and denialist versions of history which has
resulted in the failure of historians to reach a wider readership.
This is a general explanation of what we are seeing today and it’s
not only the case with history. There is a link with the concept known
as the “Deficit Model” in science and technology studies.

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3. The Deficit Model(1) Public Skepticism
The so-called deficit model has arisen from public skepticism or
hostility to science and technology, which has resulted in a lack ofunderstanding among the populace, due to a lack of information.
Up until the 1980s most science and technology experts believed in
the deficit model and when they encountered public resistance inaccepting some kind of scientific truth or technological merit, they tried
to enlighten the populace. In other words, they tried to propagate thecorrect information in order to enlighten the people, to persuade themto accept the scientific truth or technological rationality.
This attempt at enlightenment was always believed to be theremedy within the deficit model, but in practice it never worked. A
well-known instance would be the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform
Encephalopathy commonly known as “mad cow disease” in Britain.
The scientists tried to persuade the general public that the beef in theirsupermarkets was actually safe to eat, but nobody would believe them.
So now in the field of scientific studies there has been a radical shift
from the deficit model to a more participatory model in which thescientific truth or technological rationality has to be released throughjoint participation by representatives of both the experts’ side and thelay people’s side. So that’s what happened in the field of science andtechnology, and now the experts emphasize the value of Science andTechnology Communication and so civic engagement with technology
assessment has become very important.
These attempts have resulted in the “Science café”; an environment
where the moderators, facilitators and scientific experts are trying tocommunicate with the lay people. The “consensus conference” has also61

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

become an important political device to create agreement between the
powers, the experts, and the lay people.
(2) Trans-science Model
The term “trans-science” was coined by Alvin M. Weinberg, thenuclear physicist, in the early 1970s. This term can be defined as adomain of “questions that can be stated in scientific terms but that are
in principle beyond the proficiency of science to answer”.
(3) History Communication
As this deficit in science communication is analogous to the deficitin history communication, so I believe the “trans-science” model canbe applied by a kind of analogy so that historians can endeavor to
enlighten the populace to counter revisionism/denialism. In other words,
historians should shift to a more participatory approach when
disseminating knowledge to non-experts.
We might call this “trans-history” as a variation of trans-science,and in this way we can think about a more democratized process in thesense of audience participation in the reading and writing of history.
Trans-history, as an offspring of trans-science, is already being
practiced, even in Japan, and in Sendai some historians have formed ahistory café that provides a meeting place for historians and lay people.
So it’s already happening, and in recent years there have been many
publications about public history which invite known experts to write
history so there is a convergence of readers and writers in the field ofhistory in parallel with science communication which we would call
“history communication”.
(4) School Textbooks
One of the most conspicuous events about the swing to the right isthe so-called schoolkai textbook and there has been much civic

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History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the Posthumanengagement in textbook selection after the schoolkai textbooks wereauthorized, but there is still the process of actually implementing those
textbooks and there are several local initiatives which counter the actualuse of those textbooks. There are many significant implications inschool textbook production, and this is an ongoing discussion. The
Japan/China or the Japan/South Korea joint history researchcommittees have made efforts at negotiation but these take place only
within the experts’ community so it’s not really history communication- but in some sense it’s a more democratic process of reading andwriting history so these are just lesser examples of this practice.
However, the analogy between science and history models ends
here. We can’t just apply the science communication model to history
because the political structure is quite different.

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4. Different Politics
There are two dimensions of differences in politics, the “post-truth”
front and “posthuman” front. The first point is relatively simple toexplain but the second point is more complicated. Let me begin byexplaining the first. The second, the “posthuman” front is a nested
problem of trans-history within history as such.
(1) “Post-truth” Front
Let me begin by saying that the power relation between historians
as experts and lay people is not really similar to the relation between
scientific or technological experts and the people.
In the case of trans-science, as you can see in the diagram below
there is an overlap between trans-science and the field of publicdecision making, and in this trans-science field, the demos, thepopulace, has to be invited.

The scientific and technological experts and the public decision
makers are in alliance and in power, so the power relationship is vertical
here. There is a circle between the science and the public decision-

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History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the Posthumanmakers and the demos are excluded so it’s quite a democratizing
process when the demos are invited to be in the field of trans-science.
That is why we can say that science communication in the domain oftrans-science is basically democratized.
In the case of trans-history the structure is the same. There is thefield of the academic historians, and there is the field of trans-history,
and in the place of the public decision-makers there are the hegemonytransformers. Now in most cases many historians are making counter
hegemony against the hegemony formers so the power relation is
actually horizontal, and now what is happening is that the hegemonytransformers are inviting the demos to suppress history. So, the power
relation is quite different, and if we simply repeat the same tactics ofinviting the demos into the domain of trans-history it is just fueling theties of popular revisionism. Due to this difference in power relations,the strategy of history communication as an analogy of science
communication doesn’t really work. So, what can we do?
(2) Defense of Humanities
The political difference between trans-science and trans-history isintertwined with the problem of the “usefulness” of humanities. In thecase of trans-science, science is aligned with public decision making
because science is useful for making money, reinforcing an order, andso on.
Actually, the discipline of history used to be useful in the 19th
century. When the nation-states were being formed historians were
employed to legitimize the history of the nation-states, so history was
useful, but it is already a while since this record became the target of
historical criticism and as I have pointed out the sheer academic
interests of the academic historians are actually pitted against thenational history, so now that former usefulness has gone. Actually, thevector is opposite and so today, for the hegemony formers, history is

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not useful and that is why the power relations are different and actually
there is no plus/minus balance between the experts in history and thehegemonists. Of course, there are a few conspicuous exceptions likethose historians who sell through the media in alliance with the politicalpowers.
So, the difference between science communication and history
communication lies in the different power relationships between the
two and that is intertwined with or contextualized by the problem of theusefulness of humanities and as history is a human science it is now
considered as not useful by hegemonists.
So, we can conclude here that what is necessary is to retain the real
substantive usefulness of history and maybe the conceptualization of analternative form of solidarity as a mission of trans-history.
I think that this tentative, interim conclusion in this presentation issomehow shared with the first presentation today when Professor
Dudden talked about hope and beautifully presented the threealternative imaginations of nation to cultivate another form, a different
form of solidarity from the territorial sovereign national state type.
This is one tentative interim conclusion, but the discussion doesn’tstop here because we have the more challenging issue about the
posthuman front.
(3) Posthuman Front
Already in the first presentation we have heard the word
“Anthropocene”, as a new geological moment that measures humanimpact on the planet, dissolving the dichotomy between nature andsociety and nature and human, and actually that is the theme of theposthuman turn in humanity, so the impact of the posthuman turn inhumanistic disciplines is quite ambiguous, and I will try to think it
through in a very basic way to simplify the argument.

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History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the Posthuman1) Humanizing Non-Human
There are two opposing impacts of the posthuman turn. One isrelatively positive; it is the expansion of democracy into the non-humanagencies, the humanizing of non-humans. Conventionally, modern
history assumes that humans are the only subject of history, that humans
make history and that non-humans are just materials to be used, to be
exploited, by the humans in making history. Actually, the effect ofhuman substance is much more limited, and we are just adapting to theenvironment and being nudged, pressed and guided by the surrounding
substance. Therefore, we should be incorporating all these non-humanagencies which contribute to making history, so the posthuman turnactually opens our eyes to those non-human agencies that participate in
the making of history.
2) Erasing Historical Fault Lines
This expansion of democracy into non-human agencies is active inhumanizing non-humans and opens our perspective when we write orread history, but on the other hand there’s another deduction of the
impact of the posthuman turn in humanistic disciplines, especially inhistory, that is the erasing of historical fault lines within humanity.
When we talk about the posthuman turn or especially when we aretalking about the Anthropocene, we take humanity as a whole, as a kindof single monolithic agent and we erase the fault lines within humanity.
As a result, when we speak about the humanity’s responsibility over theenvironment we erase the uneven responsibility that different humans
have for example in the case of carbon emissions. Some people may
say this is a human responsibility on the planet as a whole, but different
groups of people have different responsibilities in the historical record.
In this way, the posthuman turn tends to erase the historical fault
lines between the North and South, the East and West, all thosehistorical fault lines within humanity, and these two trends are taking

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place at the same time, which means that the ontological distinctions
between humans and non-humans are blurred. We must be careful,because if we erase all the historical fault lines in humanity, we may
end up dehumanizing humans.

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5. The Dissolution of History
There are two opposite deductions from the impact incurred by the
posthuman turn in humanistic disciplines and this dichotomous impact
repeats itself, so when it is applied to the different fronts of knowledge
production or even politics, there are cascades of ramifications. So, if
there are two fronts, and in each front this dichotomy repeats itself, it
has cascading ramifications.
(1) The Pressure of Naturalism
One of these fronts is related to the pressure of naturalism. The
posthuman turn is being informed by the natural science disciplines.
While most historians focus on the uniqueness of the particularities ineach individual society’s experience of history, it has been pointed outthat the wider perspective of history is being lost. The resulting gap isnow being filled not by historians, but by geologists and evolutionary
biologists, natural scientists such as Jared Diamond, author of many
popular science books like The World until Yesterday, and Yuval NoahHarari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, who wrote
not as a historian but utilizing the recent findings of the evolutionary
biology as a result of the pressure of naturalism.
The pressure of naturalism helps historians to incorporate the wider(non-human) agencies and an emerging trend is the success of
ecological history that is ecological history in a wider sense. I do notmean the ecological history of the earlier period focused on by Marie
MacNee, but rather for example the perspective of maritime history, thehistory from the sea. Actually, Professor Dudden’s earlier presentation
was a kind of practice of ecological history because it incorporated thenon-human agency in multiple layers, the animals and the geologicalsettings and all those different non-human agencies, and came up withthree different types of alternative historical imagination. I think that69

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

this is a positive acceptance of the post-human impact on history, but it
also entails the dissolution of the (human) history into the longer
evolutionary process and erases the human agency. Talking about theapplication of biology to the politics of hope, and historical imagination
as an alternative invites many questions about the Romanticism andconservative humanism and these are all related issues.
If we surrender to the pressure of naturalism and totally erase thehuman agency, relativizing the position of humanity among the othernon-human beings, we will actually devolve history into biology,
bringing us to the point of the dissolution of human history into thelonger evolutionary process, and then we may end up with extremely
dangerous political consequences like the Holocaust.
(2) Writing History from Within
On the second front, the writing of history as an internalmeasurement, current history is basically dissolving the writer andreader of history and also dissolving the distinction between what isright history and what is written in history. In other words, the positionof the writer cannot be found in any place transcendent from the history
as such.
If a historian can write history only from within the history itself,
writing history can be legitimized only as an internal measurement
without any transcendental viewpoint of history. This is not necessarily
a bad thing, but it can imply the possibility of the radical practice oftrans-history, that is that all kinds of agencies are making and writing
history at the same time.
Hypothetically, any kind of beings, not only human beings canparticipate in making and writing history. Of course, this is just a logicalextreme but to judge what we are doing we need some logical extreme
point from which to measure our reality. But at the opposite extreme

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there is a risk of the dissolution of history into an incessant series of
emergence.
Professor Dudden mentioned Eric Norman’s comment about thestatus of Okinawa Ryukyu, and history has many critical moments overwhich the world is completely differently made and remade. If there isno transcendent viewpoint of history and historians can only write
history from within the historical events, the historian is contained at
the moment that he or she is writing the history. From this perspective
we can say that History is re/contained in the present at every moment
because there is no transcendental viewpoint. My argument is that if weare totally surrendered to the posthuman turn the posthuman fact is that
we may end up with the Evaporation of History as we know it.
Of course, as historians we should counter this tendency and I thinkthat through Professor Dudden’s remarks in the first session I have asense of the real dichotomy between the elaboration of history and thepolitics of hope.
Thank you very much for listening.

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Discussion
Doctor Miwa HIRONO’s Remarks
Moderator: Thank you very much Professor Yamashita for a very
enthusiastic presentation, and for making the connections between thefirst session and the second session. Without further ado I would like toturn to Doctor Miwa Hirono from the College of Global Liberal Arts.
Doctor Hirono: Thank you very much Professor Yamashita for yourinteresting and thought-provoking presentation. The issue you havepresented today is both broad and complex, and in my opinion what you
are describing here is the abuse of history. Your juxtaposing of history
and science was noteworthy, and the diagram that you used illustrated
some similarities between them.
In this age of populism, in trans-science, today’s populist leaders
are trying to create their own science about climate change. Meanwhile,the negative impacts of climate change are appearing, and these impacts
are the result of public decision-makers trying to coopt or utilize science
for their own benefit, which is very similar to what you have beentalking about in trans-history. Therefore, in today’s context of
popularism the diagram you showed and the similarity between the two
is even more salient.
One of the most important points in your presentation is yourconcept of trans-science and trans-history. You are making theargument that trans-history is taking over from history and you’re also
trying to promote the idea of an alternative form of solidarity, so I think
you are right to focus on this concept of “trans”. I would like tocomment on the concept of “trans” which you have taken from transscience and applied to history.

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History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the PosthumanTrans-history as a space for participation, a space fordemocratization in the form of science cafes, history cafes, andconsensus conferences is really interesting, but when you talk about
democracy and participation, the concept itself varies a lot. Einstein
wrote an article in 1969 in the field of development and he categorized
responsive participation as having nine levels, starting frominformation dissemination. At the very top of the ladder there isempowerment, and in between there is the dubious practice of asking aquestion when you already know the answer in order because you aretrying to guide people to a certain answer. So, from the top to the bottomof the spectrum there is a huge array of different ways of participatingin the creation of knowledge.
The first question I have is about this concept of “trans” history.
When you’re advocating this alternative force of solidarity, what kindof participation are you talking about? Certainly, you are not talking
about information dissemination; it’s more a deficit model. So, to what
extent can we talk about empowerment as participation, andparticipation as empowerment, when we talk about trans-history? Inother words, to what extent can this trans-history space be a bottom-up
process in the real sense that it brings power?
Let’s look at the example of civic engagement in social history or
the history of the environment of the people who are participating in thecreation of history. What about something people don’t feel so close to,like the history of Space or the history of the World? To give you an
example, anyone can talk about the history of their grandfather, andparticipate in the creation of knowledge around their grandfather, but
without possessing the historical expertise it’s very difficult tomeaningfully participate in the creation of knowledge about the historyof the World. So, my first question is, “To what extent can this transspace you describe be truly empowering to people, not just somethingthat seems to be democratizing?” That’s the concept side of the question.

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This leads us to a really huge question about the role of theuniversity. The university is filled with experts, so when we talk about
the creation of knowledge, “What is the role of the university?” Andeven before that question, “What is the role of democracy in the creationof knowledge?” In your abstract you mentioned this tension between
expertise and democracy. This is a very interesting and yet
controversial point. Having expertise is great, and each of us in thisroom has expertise of some particular area, but how can it bedemocratic? Are democracy and expertise always opposites? How canthese two co-exist?
My second question is about the method. “How do you actually doit?” The history cafe and the school-kai, this “trans” state that you
mentioned were extremely interesting.
When I received the kind invitation from Prof. Mun to participate
in this discussion, I asked him what I should say today. He said I should
talk about my own view of history. To illustrate this, I would like tointroduce an interesting episode that I recently experienced.
Last November I went to a conference in the Philippines for the firsttime and I wanted to learn about the history of the Japanese occupation,
so I went to Corregidor Island where America and Japan fought. At theend of the war 6,000 Japanese soldiers committed suicide in the Malinta
Tunnel. I participated in a guided tour. We took a ferry to the island androde a bus to the tunnel where the Japanese people committed suicideand died. The guided tour I joined was conducted in English, but there
were many Japanese tourists who were with a Japanese speaking guide.
My guide didn’t realize that I was Japanese, as I was speaking English.
He must have thought that all his customers were not Japanese, so hestarted to tell some jokes about Kamikaze and all those things that inJapanese society seem to be taboo.
Then he said something quite revealing: “Look we have one history,
but two interpretations of history; we are giving you this tour, but those74

History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the PosthumanJapanese over there are hearing a different version of history. That guy
has to talk about Japanese war heroes”. It was really interesting because
Japanese people probably come to this place trying to study the history,
but in this business model, they want Japanese who participate in thistour to hear good stories about Japan and the sacrifice that Japan had tomake, not necessarily about the sacrifice of the Filipinos.
The reason I’m mentioning this is that if this is public education, if
this is an example of the “trans-state”, what exactly are we talking
about? In this day and age, the business aspect is always there, so people
want to sell the history that people want to hear. I don’t know whostarted this war story business in the Philippines, dividing people into
different types of tour, but when I was looking at your slides andlistening to your presentation I thought, “What really is trans-history?
It’s certainly very different from the point about solidarity, because it’s
dividing people.” Unfortunately, at the end of the day we live in thisworld of business and I think the business aspect is important in thishistory discussion.
I’d like to mention another really interesting point. It’s not reallyrelated to your issue but another shocking thing I saw was lots ofpictures of what happened on Corregidor Island. One of the pictures
was of Japanese soldiers throwing a baby in the air and then killing it
by stabbing it with a bayonet. I was horrified and told a Filipino manthat what I had learned in my history textbooks about this episode wasreally different from actually being there and seeing all those atrocities.
He said, “Oh you’re Japanese aren’t you?" and I said, "Yes", so heexplained: "O well you don’t have to worry about that because the guide
who is doing that is actually Korean". I was shocked and thought.
“What is he assuming?” I was quite alarmed and so I exclaimed, “Whatdo you mean ‘don’t worry’”? The people who are doing that are
Japanese soldiers, so why do you make a distinction?” He couldn't
really conceptualize what I was expressing so he just walked on ahead.

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The point I am illustrating here is that this kind of business-focusedrendition of history is going on and so in that reality, “What can we doto ensure the acceptable dissemination of trans-history?”
The second point is regarding the method. How do we do this? We
can talk about usefulness to humanity and solidarity, but the businessaspect is always there, and many people only listen to what they want
to hear, so in that reality, “What is a good method that you would
advocate?”
My final point is that I work on China, and so when I heard yourphrase “campaign against established knowledge”, which was thestarting point of your discussion, I thought about China. Your diagram
showing history versus hegemony formation in the context ofauthoritarian states like China is very useful, but in that kind of context
it’s difficult for experts to say what they really want to say. Yourdiscussion is based on the assumption that we live in a democraticsociety, but as you rightly said we are seeing the return ofauthoritarianism, we see a lot of authoritarian states who do create
history so, “What does that mean for this diagram?”
Another trend we are seeing is the rise of religious extremism, andduring your discussion on posthuman thought I was thinking that theiridea of human nature is radically different from secular people, somaybe that might be another trend to consider. It’s already becoming acomplicated subject, but to find satisfactory answers we need to go
beyond the typical democratic society and think about different
contexts such as authoritarian states and places where religious
extremism is taking place.
I apologize for my wide-ranging comments but there are many
aspects to this topic. I’m looking forward to your answers to myquestions.

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History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the Posthuman

Professor Hiroyuki TOSA’s Remarks
Moderator: Thank you for your comments and questions. The next
discussant is Professor Hiroyuki Tosa of Kobe University.
Professor Tosa: Thank you for your exciting stimulating discussion.
First of all, I’m curious and interested in the way in which Professor
Yamashita tried to introduce the deficit model into history
communication. First of all, let me comment about his diagram.
Relating to the first speaker, Professor Dudden’s point about thedividing line, maybe the demos is not really homogeneous in thecontext of Japanese. As you know there is some controversy about ourhistorical past, and recently I read a very interesting book titled
Historical Sociologies of the Right-Wing from 1990 to 2000, by Ito
Masaki. Now according to him, there are two kinds among the lay
people, one is the regional civic citizen shimin, and the other is theshomin, which is the right-wing people. Around 1995 the shomin
formed a network with right-wing politicians like Abe and Aso andtheir people, and the shimin were manipulated like pawns bypropaganda. This kind of thinking can lead to sexism, racial
discrimination, and so on.
Actually, there is a huge discrepancy, between the two opposing
wings, and it seems to be closely related to how we appropriate the logicof the cultural references. We should pay attention to the way the lay
people sometimes apply the historical positivist message to counter
civic historical education. Take the example of Yoshida Shoin 3; that’s
one way in which the right-wing sometimes selectively applies thehistorical positivist method arbitrarily. Perhaps we should pay more
Yoshida Shōin (September 20, 1830 - November 21, 1859), was one of Japan's mostdistinguished intellectuals of the Tokugawa shogunate. He influenced the Meiji Restoration.
3

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attention to that kind of thing. In addition, there can be a structuraltransformation of the lay peoples’ historical understanding. Maybesome of you remember the Tamogami controversy 4 around 2007-2008
that pushed the Comintern conspiracy theory5. It was so called faked
history, but some right-wing lay people began to believe in such faked
history. That kind of thing also can be noticed even in the past times.
Another example is climate denial. People tend to deny the facts if itfeels uncomfortable because it doesn’t fit their own belief system. Take
the case for example of the Evangelists, they still deny Darwinism. So,
in this sense maybe we cannot use this scenario of trans-science andtrans-history.
My point is that the real problem is how to persuade the people who
reject the past because of their own beliefs. Democratizing, as you
mentioned might continue to produce some solutions, but sometimes
the democratizing process, on the contrary contributes to negative
outcomes such as the climate denialists and the historical revisionists.
An outcome of the democratic process in the cyberspace is that it cancontribute to that kind of democratizing process.
So how do we overcome these difficulties? That’s a big question.
That’s the first question, and maybe those kinds of things are closely
related to the future, the present and the past. Today the younger
generation has lost their future, and history has become a battlefield forpolitical studies, even for the right-wing. We can notice a similar
situation in Japanese society. Actually, history is the main battlefield.

4 Toshio Tamogami, a member of Nippon Kaigi, argued on October 31, 2008 that “it is a false
accusation to say (Japan) was an aggressor nation” during World War II and that it was rather
drawn into the war.
5
Tamogami argued that Japan was drawn into the Sino-Japanese War by the Chinese
Nationalists who were manipulated by the Soviet-controlled agency known as the Comintern.

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History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the PosthumanSo, to observe the infield we must start with the main field, theShusenjo6 in the physical landscape.
That’s my first comment and the second comment or question is theempiric polemical and complex point about post human. Actually, we
cannot see the divide, and the majority still cling to so-called centrism- maybe 99%, but some, like the increasing number of young climate
activists are trying to push for anti- or post-anthropocentrism. It is still
very difficult to expand anthropocentrism because most of the religions,
including Islam, Christianity, and most of the religious doctrines situate
the human being as the sole master of this universe, so how can we
persuade these people to accept the post-anthropocentric idea orargument? It’s very difficult.
I have another question or comment. Some students of science aretrying to apply or to co-opt environmental history, as global history,
world history, like Jason Moore for example. Maybe it seems to bepossible to expound the non-human in global history but the theoreticalproblem is how to overcome the problem of the dissolution of dualism.
Theoretically, we must dissolve the dualism between nature and culture
but after the dissolution of nature and culture it is quite impossible toapply some social science methodology. For example, some orthodox
Marxist scholars pointed out that weakness, so you are just throwing
the baby out with the bathwater.
There is no analytical clarity. At the individual level it’s possible,
as for example in the case of famous scholars such as Timothy Morton,
one of the object-oriented ontological philosophers, who is interested
in Buddhism. The teaching of Dogen philosophy is located in the
dissolution of purity. Well, a Zen master can learn the dissolution of
purity, but how can the majority of the people accept the argument? Yes,
it is also very difficult. That’s my comment and my question.
6

Shusenjo meaning “main battlefield” is a film by Miki Dezaki on the comfort women issue.

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Professor YAMASHITA’s Response
Moderator: Professor Yamashita, would you like to respond?
Professor Yamashita: Quite frankly it’s beyond my capacity to answer
all your questions in the best way but I’ll try. To answer the firstquestion from Doctor Hirono about participation, I’m referring to thepolitical theory of democracy when I’m talking about trans-science, andparticipation is conceptualized as opposed to parliamentary democracy
and what is important for participatory democracy is deliberation. So
trans-science and trans-history are just labels for the domains, they’re
not the method or practices, just domains. In the field of trans-science,and I believe also in the domain of trans-history, there is participation
which introduces deliberation. This is a guideline for better practice inthe domain of trans-history or trans-science. What is important indeliberation is not just to communicate; the value of deliberation ischanging the preference of each participant. Participants understood theparochial nature of their own fixed preferences and found that they had
been transformed, something was different, a new subject with adifferent set of preferences.
This partly answers the second question about the people who only
listen to what they want to hear and also the business aspect, but wehave to keep market moralism away from the domain of trans-scienceand trans-history to make the deliberation robust, and because in market
moralism the preference of the consumer has to be consistent. Hereagain the main benefit in the domain of trans-science and trans-history
was expected to be deliberation through which each participant could
experience a transformation of his or her own preferences and for thatthe market moralism of neoliberalism has to be kept away from thatdomain. That is how I would briefly answer that question.

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History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the PosthumanRegarding the third question about that diagram and theauthoritarian regime, the argument about trans-science assumes some
sort of liberal democracy so we need some additional twist if we are to
apply this argument to an authoritarian regime and at this moment I
don’t know what to do. However, Professor Tosa pointed out that there
is no essential difference between trans-science and distributive history
but I think the issue is not the distinction between science and history,
because the scientific expert in the field of ecology resembles thehistory model rather than the science model this model rather than thismodel (pointing to diagram shown on page 64), because they are
considered as not useful for capital or for power. So, the substantial
dividing line is not between science and history as such but theirusefulness from the viewpoint of the political power. I think this may
partly answer the philosophy of the third question and Professor Tosa’s
first question, but as to the persistence of anthropocentrism, Professor
Tosa’s second point, I am not sure how a monotheistic civilization
reacts to the posthuman turn, but the posthuman thrust in humanistic
discipline does not only come from the awareness of the ecologicalcrisis but also from the technological advancement.
We are becoming more and more like cyborgs. For example, I can’t
write any article without a keyboard. Of course, I am not a cyborg witha keyboard grafted in, but in my opinion human beings are essentiallycyborgs from the 21st century if you think about the essence of a humanin past time. In that sense some people take anthropocentrism as an
ideology, or some kind of theme but I personally do not think that thepersistence of anthropocentrism is such a solid thing. The more
important point about the second question is the analyticalpowerlessness of epistemological monotheism. I am actuallytranslating Jason Moore’s book at the moment. Monotheism, which
denies the ontological distinction between nature and society, does notdeny the expert modes of knowledge production in each kind of thing.

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It just tells us to follow the network of each being, human or non-humanand to stick to the internal measurement. But the truth of the internalmeasurement can be various. The mainstream Marxists often accused
Jason Moore and other monotheists of political thought by obscuring
the analytical expert, but I’m defending Jason Moore’s point.

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Questions and Comments
Moderator: Now the floor is open. Any other comments from anyone?
Questioner 1: It seems that within the room there’s a bit of tension over
how to relate history to the Anthropocene, because one of the issues
with the Anthropocene is that once we think about the Anthropos, we
can’t depoliticize all the issues and also we tend to forget about theuneven responsibility that people must think about given the unevensense of the agency disparity. Men tend to have more agency than
women in different races so the moment we select men there’s a feature.
On the other hand, when we try to stick to the humanist notion of history,
we end up politicizing because everything is political.
In terms of the deliberation that you mentioned about how to guidethe masses it seems to me that you are hinging on this enlightenment
notion of gradually offering even access. But the moment you said
there’s good direction and bad direction that seems to alreadypresuppose that there’s the right kind of talking about history and thewrong kind. This denies the masses ability to democratically engage
with historical understanding and knowledge because you’re
presupposing good knowledge and bad knowledge. I’m thinking ofHannah Arendt’s article about truth and politics where she says the truth
is anti-political because if there’s only one truth it’s not subject todeliberation. That becomes a matter of a divide between thephilosophers with their solitary thinking and the demos, the masses
which need to be enlightened. So, in short, I’m not really convinced
about your idea of deliberation and what it really means to democratize
history.
Professor Yamashita: Let me explain that when I use the words “good”
and “bad” my hypothesis is about defending the value of humanities as83

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of Historya whole. When I use the word “bad” I’m implying that in this direction
we are destroying the humanities and we are denying or totally erasingaway the humanities if we follow that logic to the extreme. And when
I use the word “good” it implies the opposite, so it’s just a shorthandfor my dissertation on the dichotomy on each side of the argument.
Basically, I’m pointing out the quite heavy and powerful trends ofthe elaboration of history but I am not saying that it leads history to beambivalent. Against that trend of the erasing of history, we need to finda way to retain the place of humanity. That’s the message behind mypresentation and an explanation of my usage of “good” and “bad”
directions.
Professor Dudden: Thank you for your presentation. I completely
agree. We all have a lot of work to do if we don’t want to romanticize
or shall I say beautify history, and also recognize that history does havea value. And maybe it doesn’t. Even if you evaporate something there’s
always something that matters in the evaporated crystal, isn’t there?
(This is why Fukushima’s water should not be evaporated.) But I likevery much Doctor Hirono and Professor Tosa’s comments too,
especially when Doctor Hirono talked about the trans-space as a placeof empowerment, and Tosa-sensei introduced the film Shusenjo, Miki
Dezaki’s masterpiece. He’s not quite the demos that we’re talking about,because he used knowledge but it wasn’t an accredited knowledge,
which is why to make the film Shusenjo he was able to get those very
extreme views on film as a form of communication and achieved what
he achieved.
I wish we could all make film because it’s a very successful
medium for conveying debate, for conveying ideas and maybe theworld is shifted. For many people their phone is how much their goingto read, which brings me to the problem of the social value of theuniversity professor and the place of the university. Those of you who

84History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the Posthumanare students are accruing value in society by the more degrees that you
are obtaining right?
However, there is the open wild free space of the unregulated
internet which has its own. I think Tessa Morris-Suzuki already in 2004
called it the “gladiatorial space”, because you could say anything andkill anybody and it didn’t really matter; but still to this day if you wantyour voice to be heard about the topic of history you have to be auniversity accredited historian valued by an already valued print media.
You know what we are talking about here. To get a really big point
about history across from the Asahi Shimbun or the New York Times
you have to be a university professor of history, or you have to havepublished a really successful history book.
So, if we’re trying to encourage a broader space, where do we target
it? How do we make the history cafe not something that’s just a lot of
fun in Sendai? And I’m not putting it down because I think it’s a great
idea, but it reminds me of the cartoon Peanuts. Lucy the black-haired
girl was playing the psychiatrist, and she set up her psychiatrist standand charged a few cents and that was hilarious. But how do we have thehistory cafe? Or the psychiatrist’s cafe? But at the same time, it has thesame weight as the Asahi Shimbun historian who’s accredited by
Ritsumeikan?
Professor Yamashita: Well my presentation today is grossly
schematized and there’s a long gradation of public engagement inmaking a live history. Even in this diagram I do not erase the domainof history proper. It’s the darker blue oval, and actually the way to transhistory is becoming heavier and heavier, and at this moment, in thecurrent circumstances it seems that trans-history is overwhelming
history proper, but I’m not saying the history proper disappears. There’s
a trend to deliberation which implies the disappearance of that dark oval
(Diagram on page 64) of the history domain but I am not saying that the85

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

dark oval disappears. If there’s no expertise, there is no meaning to
exchanging views about history. I emphasize the value of deliberation
through which each participant has to change. That means the different
participants have to have the different strengths and the academic
historical expertise is one of the strengths which can be appreciated,
and which can be utilized to enhance the transforming power ofdeliberation. So when I’m saying that trans-history is already history
and that there is a trend of the evolution history, I am not saying that
history is disappearing, and I’m not saying that the historic thesis isbecoming useless - actually it’s useful but it has to find the place to beappreciated as useful, that’s what I am saying.
Questioner 2: Thank you very much. I am not a student of this area, so
I have too much to digest from your delicious meals. I always describe
a researcher as a cook who makes ingredients to cook or produce somekind of meal. I feel from Professor Yamashita’s presentation a sensationthat we need to consider our responsibility for history in general. I
found this diagram very interesting, not because it connects science
with history, but rather because it doesn’t. It’s just putting them incontrast. Now, I want to go back one step before this to history andscience in the first place. History could be called a truth, while if welook to science or if we look to what was considered to be science onehundred years ago, there are too many things that were considered to betruth and they have been proven to be wrong. However, for history wehave the ultimate truth always, because it’s history, so nothing can bechanged.
Then, we have a very difficult problem to deal with. We are dealing
with too many layers like the people who are telling the history and thepeople who are receiving the history. My question here concerns thepeople who are telling the history, because most of the time history has
been written by people from the perspective of the strong people, not86

History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the Posthumanthe people who were conquered by them, at least in the past. Now
through technology and social media anyone can contribute to writing
history. In the past, history was more or less the history of the victors.
How can we deal with this issue? My second question is how to deal
with the facts of history today in examples such as Professor Tosa
already mentioned where history has been misused or abused by radical
religious groups? Most of the radical religious groups support what they
are doing by their interpretation of history. How do we deal with thisissue?
Professor Yamashita: Actually, overcoming the history written by thepowerful and victorious has been the long and persistent concern ofmodern history as a scientific discipline. They have been trying toovercome the triumphalism, to overcome this weak interpretation ofhistory.
One corner in which history legitimized itself as a scientificdiscipline is what the Kantian philosophers call ideographic
epistemology as opposed to nomothetic epistemology which is the
epistemology in which the mission of science is confined to thegoverning law, and idiographic epistemology legitimizes the scientificactivity in locating the uniqueness of each event. In the latter 19th
century, history defined itself to be an idiographic scientific discipline
and they tried to figure out a systematized method to identify and locate
the uniqueness of the fact. That gave historic activity an affinity withthe particularistic approach to the history, and that partly ended up with
the naturalist thrust against history, and I’m not directly answering yourquestion but to better conduct history in the domain of trans-history, I
think we need to open up the historical discipline from the containmentof idiographic epistemology and to incorporate the wider perspectivefrom the nomothetic approaches to history, with which to counter the
posthuman turn on humanistic disciplines.

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Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

So, my answer is twofold. One is making the modern disciplineof history a process of overcoming history written by the powerful, butthen we will end up confining history to idiographic epistemology, andthat makes history relatively vulnerable to the posthuman thrust so inthat sense we need to open up the epistemology for historicalreconsideration. That’s my tentative answer.
Professor Kosugi: Well, I’d like to ask a question to both keynote
speakers. Regarding the doctrine of enlightenment and the subject ofhistory as commodity, skepticism about the endeavors of historians
goes with any kind of interpretation which pleases the people. That’s
the basic trend of nationalism, remaking history as national. On theother hand the global history discourses as I understand from today’s
speeches have a dehumanizing element, making it global, making ademarcation between the human and nonhuman worlds, and when the
global history discourses started I had a hope that it would deconstructworld history which I felt was basically made by the triumphant powers.
Some of this was achieved but the mainstream is not in that direction.
So now we are caught between the evaporation of history, between the
globalizing dehumanizing tendency, and the renationalizing tendency.
Apparently, discourses of history within national boundaries have ausefulness or value as a commodity.
Now when Professor Dudden showed her slide showing the map of
the shape of our country, it was the first time I had seen it and I foundit quite shocking. That kind of idea about talking about the shape of thecountry’s history ignores what happened on the other side of the border.
In this place where we are engaged in Asia-Japan Research, we often
think of Asian history as a kind of common history which Asian
countries can share. I am sure that they are not in complete agreement
but there are things which we can share and by having a common
perspective of history as a group of nations we may reconstruct the88History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the Posthumanhegemonic world history so that we believe it serves more globally.
However, between the split in these two different tendencies, morenationalizing again, or dehumanizing globalizing, can we have such avision, as a hope for our research endeavors?
Professor Dudden: I really like how Professor Kosugi has said that theshape of Japan ignores the other side of the border. I think when we
look at a number of trends; you could mention the local level, like
Okinawa, to look at the local view in the Imperial outpost, rather justthe metropolis and the colony. For example, to do the history of India
from a port city back to the British Empire, rather than what the British
Empire brought to the port city. I do think there are a number ofencouraging trends in this regard. Professor Yamashita mentioned thevalue of history in the nineteenth century in creating the concept of thenation-state and we have spent the last hundred years trying to tear that
down. We’re trying to revalue history in order to denationalize thenation-state to make it more encompassing.
Here I think of the question: Why do so many voices that have beenerased want to be included in national history? I encounter this when I
speak with former sex slaves, former victims; these are people who do
not want to be left out of Japanese history. So, the map that Watanabe
Miwa and the people’s museum created of all of the comfort stations is
an effort to be part of Japan’s history, and it’s that the more complex itgets the more tension there is. As an American I will later send an emailof a new initiative by a lawyer named Brian Stevenson, who has a new
project on lynching. A new museum opened last year, and he has afeature film right now in the US called “Just Mercy”, and this is aneffort to give names to those bodies that were lynched and say this isAmerican history. He’s not trying to say that this is African American
history, but that this is American history and I think it’s making the faceof the nation much more problematic. Again, as historians, we’re doing89

Asia and Japan: Perspectives of History

what we can, because you’re absolutely right to say that the forces ofdarkness are really powerful.
Professor Tosa ended with the comment “We want to have hope”.
But how do we have hope? It is very difficult right now. We know what
we’re up against and my president decided just yesterday that mycountry doesn’t even need a justice department. He’s just announced
that he is a dictator and it’s okay!
Am I powerless against this? No! My weapon is pretty weak rightnow, but I will try. I know that I sound silly, and rather like a politician,but we have to be as active as we can within the limits of what we cando. We have pretty good constitutions so we’ve got to fight for thoseand I think that’s where there’s a lot of work for all of us to do, That’s
all I have to say except that I think bringing the other side of the border
into the national history is precisely what my responsibility is.
Professor Yamashita: Well against Professor Tosa I argued theskepticism about the persistence of anthropocentrism but on the other
hand I’m suspecting that we still think about solidarity based on spatial
imagination. There’s also the concept of networks and long-distancenationalism, although they are novel concepts, but we are still quite
bound by the spatial foundation when we are thinking about solidarity.
Professor Kosugi’s picture is divided between the global history and thenational/renationalized history, but perhaps we should find a third way
because this dichotomy is deeply embedded in the spatial imaginationof solidarity. So, in that sense, I really appreciate Professor Dudden’spresentation today because her version of a maritime perspective may
have potential for reforming our land-based spatial imagination when
we are thinking about solidarity. There is a different logic, a different
dynamism about forming and reforming solidarity in the ocean, so inthat sense Professor Kosugi’s final question, coming full circle to thefirst presentation is a good point to wrap up this discussion.

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History Communication in the Age of the Post-truth and the PosthumanModerator: Thank you very much. You have certainly wrapped up
with a good point and I think this is the end of the second session.

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ONLINE ISBN 978-4-9911356-0-6
PRINT ISBN 978-4-9911356-1-3
Asia-Japan Research Institute, Ritsumeikan University