From Cultures of War to Cultures of Peace: War and Peace Museums in Japan, China, and South Korea

Professor Yoshida examines historical analyses or war and peace museums from the late 19th century to the traces the historical development of a pacifist discourse in postwar Japan that centered on Japan's war crimes and responsibility during the so-called Fifteen Year War (1931-1943). Prior to the defeat, a culture of war gripped the Japanese empire. Every segment of Japanese popular culture during the war bore witness to the flood of patriotism. Textbooks, comic books, board games, children's plays, movies, and war museums all propagated righteous images of Imperial Japan idealizing its rule over colonial territories and romanticizing its war effort. Whereas only a relative handful of leftist Japanese saw Japan as a predatory sure during the war, however, this awareness achieved broad acceptance among Japanese people with its defeat. In this honk Yoshida attempts to demonstrate that the acceptance of Japanese wartime aggression and atrocities as historical facts remains evident to this day in the culture of peace museums in Japan. Those who have little knowledge of contemporary Japan often hastily conclude that the Japanese have been united and monolithic in the way they feel the war should be remembered. This book seeks to challenge that assumption.