Japanese Memories of the Asia-Pacific War

by Akiko Takenaka

Akiko Takenaka is Associate Professor of Japanese history at the University of Kentucky. She specializes in the social and cultural history of modern and contemporary Japan with a focus on experiences and memories of the Asia-Pacific War, war responsibility and restitution, and gender and activism. Her book Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending War (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) is the first book length academic work in the English language on the highly controversial military shrine. She has published in journals including Gender and History, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, The Public Historian, and The Pacific Historical Review. She is currently working on a new book project entitled Mothers Against War: Gender, Motherhood, and Grassroots Peace Activism in Postwar Japan.

Incident 3: In April 2014, Peace Osaka, a municipal museum dedicated to the Japanese experience of the Asia-Pacific War, closed its doors in order to overhaul the entire exhibit. The museum had displayed, in addition to local experience of the Allied air raids, aggressive acts committed by the Japanese military in China. The transformation was a result of continuous attacks by the revisionist right, which argued that the museum must present a history that Japanese youths can be proud of. The museum reopened a year later featuring a narrative of the Asia-Pacific War completely devoid of Japan’s aggressions in Asia.³ Several other municipal museums dedicated to local experiences of the war have also removed displays of Japanese atrocities under similar pressure.

Read entire article at The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus