Emotion, Identity, & National Memory: The Problem with Japan’s Historical Awareness Problem

As conventionally framed, Japan’s World War II historical awareness problem entails excessive victim identity alongside insufficient victimizer identity. Japan readily identifies with its own WWII suffering, but does little to recognize the WWII suffering it inflicted. This thesis sees a problem with the framing of that problem. Casting historical awareness along the dimension of identity—victim identity as opposed to victimizer identity—precludes historical awareness along the dimension of experience—the victimhood Japan experienced together with the victimization Japan perpetrated. The focus on what Japan is precludes a full awareness of what Japan did. More specifically, this thesis takes up a psychological frame, and investigates the role of emotional language in Japanese historical discourse. In particular, Psychology’s Antecedent-Consequence-Behavior Model is applied toward investigating the emotional structures of historical statements at three levels of Japanese society: political elites, civil society, and individuals. That investigation reveals how the language of emotion in Japanese historical discourse diminishes historical awareness along the dimension of experience and brings the dimension of identity to the fore