History Politics in East Asia

This project examines how history is instrumentalized in public political discourse in contemporary East Asia. It focuses on different aspects of how Japan’s imperialist past is dealt with in Japan, China, and South Korea. Sub-projects analyze the targets, methods, and strategies of different actors in the dispute over the interpretation of key themes such as the Nanjing Massacre and the apology issue. In this context, Japanese perceptions of Asia in general and of China and Korea in particular are included in the analysis. One case study focuses on the Japanese magazine Sapio as a key mainstream medium of historical revisionism in Japan. More broadly, the project ‘History Politics in East Asia’ aims at producing a number of case studies of the political use of history in East Asia and also analyzing the chances, risks, and mechanisms of history politics, remembering, and forgetting from a theoretical point of view.