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Lisa Yoneyama in Toronto; Readings on the ‘Comfort Women’ System
Yesterday I had a chance to meet briefly in Toronto with Lisa Yoneyama, who is one of the most prevalent scholars working today on issues of transnational war memory politics and World War II in Asia....
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Angela Merkel and Japan’s Wartime Past
The German Chancellor was in Tokyo for a couple of eventful days. Although Merkel sees Abe Shinzo regularly, she noted before leaving that she has not been to Japan, the country that she tactfully...
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Old Chapters, New Chapters: The Memory Wars in East Asia
From the very beginning of the so-called ‘post war,’ the territorial and temporal parameters of the memory wars between China and Japan were never drawn particularly cleanly. The war ended formally in...
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Keeping Tabs on Revisionist Groups Active on the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue
Gaining even a cursory familiarity with the statements and logic of some right-wing revisionists groups in Japan is a salutary experience. While most Japanese people (judging from polling data) find...
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Comment on the Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan
Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo Bureau Chief for The Times (London), kindly alerted me to an open letter recently published by a large number of academics nicely timed to follow on the heels of the various...
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Last Call for Abe Shinzo Congressional Speech Op-eds
The Stimson Center’s Yuki Tatsumi threw down the gauntlet in The Diplomat on May 7 in a piece pointedly entitled ‘Stop Obsessing over Abe’s Congressional Speech.’ The conclusion read as follows:...
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On History and the “Comfort Women” Debate
As illuminated by recent anniversaries and commemorations, history is both a malleable plaything and an obsessive object of dispute for states in Northeast Asia. In Tokyo, Abe Shinzo and his Liberal...
View ArticleDocuments on Crown Prince Hirohito’s visit to the United Kingdom in 1921
Historian Herbert Bix describes Hirohito’s long voyage to the United Kingdom in 1921 as a number of things: it was a test of the court and the conservatives in Tokyo (some factions did not want him to...
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Women and the Workplace in Japan, Abe and the Emperor, Japan and Brexit
I feel this story describes more my mother’s generation than my own — then again Japan never fails to shock on the gender front. Guess my own marriage is hardly typical, what with my Japanese husband...
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Reading the Absences in Ramseyer’s “Comfort Women” Provocation
A new publication on Japan’s wartime system of military prostitution (‘Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,’ International Review of Law and Economics [December 2020]) has generated a whirlwind of...
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