Since World War 2, East Asia has experienced dramatic and complex political and economic transformations. Problems associated with emotions, memories, and narratives of the past – particularly those relating to the War and to Japanese colonisation of other countries in the region – are underlying factors that shape the ups and downs of political and economic friction between East Asian countries.

The ongoing territorial disputes between China and Japan or South Korea and Japan, for instance, are fundamentally rooted in different perceptions of East Asia’s past. The intensifying “trade war” between South Korea and Japan is another conflict for which a solution through rational dialogue is made much more difficult by the two countries’ different views of history. How these history problems can be adequately resolved will remain a crucial question for the future of the East Asian region. In this seminar, Professor Asano will discuss a viewpoint of reconciliation of current issues from a historical perspective. He will cover the historical background to the artificial construction of nation states in East Asia, and the process of democratisation from the late 1980s onward; these two subjects support a unique structure of memories, values and emotions in East Asia in which the domestic politics of young nations formerly occupied as colonies interacts both with that of Japan and with the democratic values of international society. He will discuss whether this unique structure is limited to cases of Japanese colonisation in East Asia, where nation states have been artificially created based on history education, quickly emulating the model of ‘civilised’ and developed ‘Western’ nations.

About the contributors

Professor Toyomi Asano of Waseda University specialises in the history of Japanese empire and the Cold War in East Asia. He is particularly interested in the historical transformation of the East Asian region through World War II, and the US intervention into this region in the context of the Cold War. He is currently researching contemporary issues influenced by the relationships between memory, emotion, and so-called universal values, focusing upon different narratives and the political development of the “nation state” from a historical perspective, including the experience of occupation, treaty agreements, claims issues between Japan and ex-colonial states, the demolition of empire, and legal reconfiguration across “nations.” He has published several books and numerous articles on the history of the Japanese empire and colonial rule in the 20th century, being awarded the Ohira Memorial Prize and Yoshida Shigeru Prize in 2009. He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 2009, and has spent substantial periods researching overseas, including at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University (1994-1995), Georgetown University (2006-2007), and the Wilson Center (2015).

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