전쟁과 역사의 기억 그리고 아태지역의 미래 - 미일과 야스쿠니 문제 -

Abstract

The issues that continue to swirl around Yasukuni Shrine, the military comfort women, the Nanjing Massacre and other controversies rooted in colonialism and the Asia-Pacific War are critical to the future of the Asia Pacific region and the US-Japan relationship. Why, six decades later, at a time when Cold War passions have faded, and when the economies and even cultures of China, Japan and Korea are deeply and positively intertwined, do the issues of war, war memory, and war representation repeatedly threaten to explode into regional and global conflict? Are the memory wars reenacted by historians, social scientists and humanists condemned to reify indefinitely the national and nationalistic premises that underlie these persistent disputes and pave the way to conflict and war? In addressing these issues, I will foreground the “Yasukuni problem,”perhaps the most intractable of these volatile questions because it is so deeply embedded in the complex set of issues surrounding Japanese empire, war, emperor, religion and identity. I hope thereby to clarify issues of comparative nationalisms, to show the ways in which Yasukuni issues are deeply intertwined with the US-Japan relationship, and to point to certain distinctive charac- teristics of Japanese nationalism that have made the problem so intractable. It is important to state clearly at the outset the reason for undertaking this analysis: it is to search for resolution of the problem in ways that will contribute to mutual understanding among the nations and peoples of East Asia and the Asia Pacific, including Japan, China, Korea and the United States. I will emphasize three points about the “Yasukuni Problem”and contemporary nationalisms that seem absent in much of the discussion in Japan, Asia and internationally. The first is the need to transcend an exclusively Japanese perspective by locating the issues within the framework of the Japan-US relationship that has dominated Japanese politics for more than six decades; the second is the importance of locating“ Yasukuni nationalism”within the broader purview of competing nationalisms in the Asia Pacific, including Chinese, Korean and US nationalisms; the third requires that we deconstruct “the Japanese,”to recognize deep fissures among the Japanese people with respect to Yasukuni, nationalism, the emperor in whose name Japan fought, and memories of colonialism and war.