Interview with George Sansom Professor of History at Columbia University, Dr. Carol Gluck (Part 3)

What are the research themes that you're working on?

In my work on war memory, I set the Japanese experience in a global context: the way the Second World War is remembered in different countries, and why war memory causes conflicts in memory politics both within and between nations. Attention to public, or collective, memory has skyrocketed since I began this work in the 1990s; there is now a large and growing global field called Memory Studies, with a thriving Memory Studies Association and annual conferences held in different cities around the world. 

As I mentioned, I am also researching comparative postwars, what I think of as sekai no naka no sengo, looking at the postwar period in Japan and other countries and at the postwar world order, now ending after eighty years, and asking how it began and developed from 1945 until today, in both international and domestic realms.  

And I have long been interested in the subject of history-writing (rekishigaku) itself: how historians research and narrate the past, and how these approaches changed over time. This work is a kind of meta-history, an effort to think about the nature of history as we understand it. On the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration in 2018, for example, I was again struck by the gap between those who saw the Restoration as a break in time, emphasizing the utter “newness” of Meiji and those who argued that Tokugawa “continuities” explained the shape that Meiji took.  But of course the Restoration of 1868, like the defeat in 1945, neither generated something altogether new that emerged between a night and a morning nor continued earlier ways, unchanged. History does not work that way.  Some things from the Bakumatsu or prewar past continued into the present, although altered by the changed historical context; and some things were indeed new to Meiji or the postwar.  I am interested in tracing the complex ways in which the past becomes the present and the present becomes the future, never in a straight line but also never divorced from their historical context. So those are my main areas of research: modernity, public memory, the war and postwar, and the nature of history-writing. 

Then there is the present. I believe that we are living in a time of major historical transition of the sort that happens rather rarely. It is not simply a matter of change, since history is always changing. It is instead change that is occurring in many different quarters all at the same time, a pile-up of crises that creates the sense of uncertainty so widely felt today.  How to understand the present, which is already in process of laying down threads of what will become the future? Our age has no name of its own: often described as post-modern, post-cold-war, post-colonial, this nameless era (nanashi no jidai) seems to be after everything but before we-know-not-what. This presents a challenge for all of us, and particularly for historians, who usually study something once it is over, once they know how things turned out. An example is the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany in 1989.  Virtually no one saw the event coming; yet, once the Wall fell, it seemed that everyone, historians included, was quick to say that the signs were all there, to the point that the fall of the Wall appeared “inevitable.” But in a time of major historical transition, in a present without a name and a future not clearly imagined, I think we have to assess the mix of past, present, and future while it is happening – as in the time before the Wall fell, so to speak – without knowing how things will turn out. I see this as a task for everyone, but for historians, in particular, the task is to discern past patterns of change, not because history repeats itself. It doesn’t, but because once one has disentangled the threads of past, present, and future in an earlier period, it becomes possible to identify the threads in our own time, and most important, to try to do something to weave those threads in such as way as to create the fabric of a better future. 

Do you have any Messages to students and young scholars in Japanese studies?

Here are three guidelines that I follow myself and also recommend to my students these days:

No. 1 Look elsewhere

Consider Japan in global context: instead of thinking only of Japan, Japan, all the way down, attend to similar phenomena in other times and other places. To understand how postwar Japanese defined democracy, for example, notice how Americans, French, and Germans seem to believe that a change of government, president or chancellor, will fix whatever they think is amiss in their lives. That most Japanese voters don’t view elections in this way becomes clear once one consider the vote for Trump, Macron, or Scholz. Few Japanese think that the LDP or its prime minister will dramatically change their lives, including strong leaders like Nakasone or Abe. Democracy is valued less as a matter of the ballot box than of enhanced access to social goods, a differently shaped society, so to speak. Looking elsewhere, one sees both that Japanese share this view of democracy with a number of other nations and also that their perspective differs from that in the U.S. and France. Looking elsewhere -- considering the global context – is like seeing with a fly’s eye, which combines images from all directions to produce a compound vision of the whole.  

No. 2 Look first for commonalities only then for differences

This guideline is like the first one, only expressed somewhat differently. In looking elsewhere, focus first on commonalities, and only after that on differences. Direct frontal comparison – of Japan and China, or Japan and the U.S. – tends to emphasize difference. But if one compares three or four things, commonalities are likely to be more striking.  A historian who looks first for commonalities and only then for differences is apt to notice the larger historical patterns at work in any give instance. Japan has a robust ballet-box democracy (tōhyōbako no minshushugi) in common with other nations, but it also values highly the social aspects of democracy that accompany its electoral system. And, as I said, this enlarged definition helps the historian better to understand Japan and at the same time the nature of other late modern democracies. 

No. 3 Avoid Japanese exceptionalism

Assume that Japan is a country like other countries, shunning exceptionalist explanations. Not only is Japan stereotyped by outsiders, it generates the Japanese exception itself, offering cultural reasons for its history, whether in the form of Nihonjinron or national history. Cultural explanations, in Japan, the U.S., France or other places, make some sense, but culture is seldom the main or sufficient reason for the way history turns out. 

Scholars of Japan are accustomed to confronting cultural stereotypes about Japan. In my studies of war memory, I collaborated with social scientists who work on collective memory, neuroscientists who study memory in the brain, and directors of historical museums who present the past to the public. Most were European or North American, and they often assumed that memory in Asia works differently than in the West. (“Asians like to apologize” – that sort of thing.) And they often evoked culture as the reason for this difference. But in my work, I found that culture has very little to do with the way war memories are formed or changed. In fact, I found that public memory operates the same way in every place I looked. The content of war memories differs, of course, but one finds what I call the “operations of memory” in every twentieth and twentieth-first mass-and-social mediated society. The insistence on cultural explanations comes from an unfortunate combination of Western ignorance of Asia and self-generated Japanese exceptionalism, resulting in my view in far too shallow a view of the way history actually works. 

These three guidelines obviously go together: looking elsewhere in global context; seeking commonality before difference; and avoiding cultural exceptionalism.  They apply in the currently thriving field of transnational history, but they also help make sense of the modern history of Japan, which like all modern societies exists as a nation in a world of nations, with a history affected by and connected to the histories of others. 

(Interviewer: OHBA Go, Researcher, Center for Innovative Research, National Institutes for the Humanities)