The Politics of War Memory in Japan ― Progressive Civil Society Groups and Contestation of Memory of the Asia-pacific War

This book examines the involvement of five civil society actors in the struggle over remembering and addressing the wartime past in Japan today. War memory is still a hugely controversial subject in Japan and the existence of progressive war memory activists is an important sign that the apologia by conservative politicians and grass-root rhetoric cannot be treated as representative of the opinion of the majority of Japanese public opinion. This book strives to partly remedy the disparity between studies devoted to the official level of addressing the ‘history issue’ and the grass-root historical revisionist movement on the one side, and progressive activism on the other. Furthermore, it contributes to scholarly debates on the state of civil society in Japan, challenging the characterisation of Japanese civil society as a depoliticised space by demonstrating a more contentious side of civil society activism. As such it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese civil society, Japanese politics and Japanese history.

Kamila Szczepanska is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Institute of East Asian Politics at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.