Identity, Culture and Memory in Japanese Foreign Policy

Identity, Culture and Memory in Japanese Foreign Policy
Author: Michal Kolmas
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2021
Genre: Collective memory
ISBN: 9781433172021

The book discusses the changing nature of Japanese foreign policy through the concepts of identity, culture and memory. A set of chapters written by established Japanese and foreign experts show the nuances of Japanese self-images and their role in defining their understanding of the world.

Contested Memories in Chinese and Japanese Foreign Policy

Contested Memories in Chinese and Japanese Foreign Policy
Author: Matteo Dian
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2017-01-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0081020287

Contested Memories in Chinese and Japanese Foreign Policy explores the issue of memory and lack of reconciliation in East Asia. As main East Asian nations have never achieved a common memory of their pasts, in particular, the events of the Second World War and Sino-Japanese War, this book locates the issue of memory within International Relations theory, exploring the theoretical and practical link between the construction of a country's identity and the formation and contestation of its historical memory and foreign policy. - Provides an innovative theoretical framework - Draws connections between the role of memory and foreign policy - Uses the interpretative theory of international relations - Gives comparative perspective using the cases of China and Japan - Presents in-depth analysis of the construction and contestation of national memory in China and Japan

Identity, Culture, and Chinese Foreign Policy

Identity, Culture, and Chinese Foreign Policy
Author: Kangkyu Lee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2020-11-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000261433

This book assesses the role of identity and Chinese face culture in Chinese foreign policy by analyzing China’s political and economic retaliation against South Korea’s deployment of the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system on its soil. By examining the history and military action of China, Japan, and North and South Korea, the book argues that China’s divergent responses were caused by different expectations according to whether states had a perceived identity as a friend or a rival. The author demonstrates that Chinese face culture shapes China’s reaction to others through three dynamics of seeking, saving, and losing face. This book shows how identity and culture have worked in the relationship between China and neighboring countries through three case studies exploring North Korea’s Taepodong-2 missile launch and first nuclear test in 2006, South Korea’s decision to allow the United States to deploy the THAAD around 2016, and Japan’s decision to deploy two U.S. X-band radars in 2005 and 2014. A timely analysis of the importance of identity and culture in international relations, the book will be of interest to scholars of Chinese foreign policy, Sino-South Korean relations, Sino-North Korean relations, Sino-Japanese relations, Korean Politics, Asian Politics, and International Relations.

Historical Memory and Foreign Policy

Historical Memory and Foreign Policy
Author: Lina Klymenko
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2022-10-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3031151941

This book explores the uses of the past in foreign policy-making. It outlines why and how political leaders refer to historical events in contemporary foreign policy discourses; the goals they hope to achieve; and the sometimes unintended foreign policy consequences of their (ab)use of historical memory. Furthermore, it looks at how political leaders shape domestic collective memories in pursuit of their international agendas, and highlight historical events leaders forget, reinterpret or obscure through selective narratives. The chapters explore a variety of theoretical concepts that shed light on how memory and foreign policy are linked in a complex and reciprocal way. The following mechanisms are discussed: the application of historical analogies; the construction of historical narratives; the creation of memory sites; the marginalisation and forgetting of the past; and the securitisation of historical memory. Through the use of a number of methodological approaches (such as discourse analysis, narrative analysis and content analysis of securitising moves) and a broad range of qualitative and quantitative data (newspaper articles, policy documents, commemorative speeches, interviews with policymakers and the observation of memory sites), the contributions highlight the interdependence of the international, national, regional and local dimensions of memory practices and history writing. Although they mostly focus on national case studies of foreign policy-making, they also reveal how representations of historical events evolve through interaction between political actors at the international level of analysis. The collection originated in the section entitled ‘Exploring the Link between Historical Memory and Foreign Policy’ at the annual Pan-European Conference of the European International Studies Association (EISA) 2018 held in Prague, the Czech Republic.

Japan's National Identity and Foreign Policy

Japan's National Identity and Foreign Policy
Author: Alexander Bukh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2010-10-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134058357

In Japan's National Identity and Foreign Policy, Alexander Bukh focuses on the construction of the Japanese self using Russia as the other, examining the history of bilateral relations and comparisons between the Russian and Japanese national character.

Cultures of Commemoration

Cultures of Commemoration
Author: Keith L. Camacho
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2011-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824860314

In 1941 the Japanese military attacked the US naval base Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of O‘ahu. Although much has been debated about this event and the wider American and Japanese involvement in the war, few scholars have explored the Pacific War’s impact on Pacific Islanders. Cultures of Commemoration fills this crucial gap in the historiography by advancing scholarly understanding of Pacific Islander relations with and knowledge of American and Japanese colonialisms in the twentieth century. Drawing from an extensive archival base of government, military, and popular records, Chamorro scholar Keith L Camacho traces the formation of divergent colonial and indigenous histories in the Mariana Islands, an archipelago located in the western Pacific and home to the Chamorro people. He shows that US colonial governance of Guam, the southernmost island, and that of Japan in the Northern Mariana Islands created competing colonial histories that would later inform how Americans, Chamorros, and Japanese experienced and remembered the war and its aftermath. Central to this discussion is the American and Japanese administrative development of "loyalty" and "liberation" as concepts of social control, collective identity, and national belonging. Just how various Chamorros from Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands negotiated their multiple identities and subjectivities is explored with respect to the processes of history and memory-making among this "Americanized" and "Japanized" Pacific Islander population. In addition, Camacho emphasizes the rise of war commemorations as sites for the study of American national historic landmarks, Chamorro Liberation Day festivities, and Japanese bone-collecting missions and peace pilgrimages. Ultimately, Cultures of Commemoration demonstrates that the past is made meaningful and at times violent by competing cultures of American, Chamorro, and Japanese commemorative practices.

Yasukuni Shrine

Yasukuni Shrine
Author: Akiko Takenaka
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2015-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824856937

This is the first extensive English-language study of Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial. It explores the controversial shrine’s role in waging war, promoting peace, honoring the dead, and, in particular, building Japan’s modern national identity. It traces Yasukuni’s history from its conceptualization in the final years of the Tokugawa period and Japan’s wars of imperialism to the present. Author Akiko Takenaka departs from existing scholarship on Yasukuni by considering various themes important to the study of war and its legacies through a chronological and thematic survey of the shrine, emphasizing the spatial practices that took place both at the shrine and at regional sites associated with it over the last 150 years. Rather than treat Yasukuni as a single, unchanging ideological entity, she takes into account the social and political milieu, maps out gradual transformations in both its events and rituals, and explicates the ideas that the shrine symbolizes. Takenaka illuminates the ways the shrine’s spaces were used during wartime, most notably in her reconstructions, based on primary sources, of visits by war-bereaved military families to the shrine during the Asia-Pacific War. She also traces important episodes in Yasukuni’s postwar history, including the filing of lawsuits against the shrine and recent attempts to reinvent it for the twenty-first century. Through a careful analysis of the shrine’s history over one and a half centuries, her work views the making and unmaking of a modern militaristic Japan through the lens of Yasukuni Shrine. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar is a skilled and innovative examination of modern and contemporary Japan’s engagement with the critical issues of war, empire, and memory. It will be of particular interest to readers of Japanese history and culture as well as those who follow current affairs and foreign relations in East Asia. Its discussion of spatial practices in the life of monuments and the political use of images, media, and museum exhibits will find a welcome audience among those engaged in memory, visual culture, and media studies.

The Long Defeat

The Long Defeat
Author: Akiko Hashimoto
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190239158

In The Long Defeat, Akiko Hashimoto explores the stakes of war memory in Japan after its catastrophic defeat in World War II, showing how and why defeat has become an indelible part of national collective life, especially in recent decades. Divisive war memories lie at the root of the contentious politics surrounding Japan's pacifist constitution and remilitarization, and fuel the escalating frictions in East Asia known collectively as Japan's "history problem." Drawing on ethnography, interviews, and a wealth of popular memory data, this book identifies three preoccupations - national belonging, healing, and justice - in Japan's discourses of defeat. Hashimoto uncovers the key war memory narratives that are shaping Japan's choices - nationalism, pacifism, or reconciliation - for addressing the rising international tensions and finally overcoming its dark history.

Handbook on the Politics of Memory

Handbook on the Politics of Memory
Author: Maria Mälksoo
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2023-01-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1800372531

Providing a novel multi-disciplinary theorization of memory politics, this insightful Handbook brings varied literatures into a focused dialogue on the ways in which the past is remembered and how these influence transnational, interstate, and global politics in the present.