War Memories in Twentieth-Century Japan from a Comparative Perspective

This article opens with a brief examination of a political incident, which received scant media attention just after the Great East 1 a pan Earthquake and the nuclear accident in Fukushima in Spring 2011. In a Resolution that was published at this time to mark the 150th Anniversary of German-japanese relations, the japanese Diet erased certain sentences which evoked the war crimes of World War II and the historical responsibility of both states for them. This incident is a good example of the "German Obsession" that has been noted in japan since the 1980s. On the one hand, the German example has been used as a moral and political yardstick for measuring the backwardness of japanese historical reflection. On the other hand, there has also been a strong tendency among a part of japanese intellectuals to distinguish and mark the uniqueness of Nazi-Germany\u27s crimes. Focusing on the Russo-japanese War of 1904/05 and the memories that it evokes in japanese society, particularly representations of the war in movies, this article reflects on why the popular understanding of Japanese wars of the 20th Century as wars of aggression and invasion is not widely shared. It also makes some suggestions in favor of a comparative analysis of 1 apanese "War Culture"