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Author Koyama, Hitomi, author

Title On the persistence of the Japanese 'history problem' : historicism and the international politics of history / Hitomi Koyama
Published London ; New York : Routledge Taylor and Francis Group [2018]

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Description 1 online resource
Series Interventions
Interventions
Contents On the recursivity of the politics of history -- On the rise and demise of civilizational history in Meiji Japan -- The assertion : Japan as the subject of world history -- On the postwar palimpsest subject of history
Summary "In Japan, people often refer August 15, 1945 as the end of "that war." But the duration of "that war" remains vague. At times, it refers to the fifteen years of war in the Asia-Pacific. At others, it refers to an imagination of the century long struggle between the East and the West that characterized much of the 19th century. This latter dramatization in particular reinforces longstanding Eurocentric and Orientalist discourses about historical development that presume the non-West lacks historical agency. Nearly 75 years since the nominal end of the war, Japan's "history problem" - a term invoking the nation's inability to come to terms with its imperial past - persists throughout Asia today. Going beyond well-worn clichés about the state's use and abuse of discourses of historical modernity, Koyama shows how the inability to confront the debris of empire is tethered to the deferral of agency to a hegemonic order centered on the United States. The present is thus a moment one stitched between the disavowal of responsibility on the one hand, and the necessity of becoming a proper subject of history on the other. Behind this seeming impasse lay questions about how to imagine the state as the subject of history in a postcolonial moment - after grand narratives, after patriotism, and after triumphalism"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on print version record
Subject Historicism.
Collective memory -- Japan
historicism (theory)
HISTORY / Asia / Japan.
Philosophy
Historiography
Historicism
Collective memory
International relations
Politics and government
Education
SUBJECT Japan -- History -- Philosophy
Japan -- Historiography
Subject Asia
Japan
Genre/Form Electronic books
History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2020691775
ISBN 9781315109060
1315109069
9781351611923
1351611925
9781351611930
1351611933
9781351611916
1351611917