Telling the Story of Empire: Repatriates Writing Public History in 1960s Japan

• In Event: Post-war Transitions across New Borders: Economic and Political Activities of Repatriates in Post-War Japan and Germany

Abstract

This paper begins where Nishizaki and Nakayama’s papers end by examining the role of former government officials in telling the story of the empire. In the 1960s, leaders of the repatriate group the All-Japan Alliance of Karafuto (Zenkoku Karafuto Renmei) joined academics and journalists to write a public history of the former colony. With financial support from the Hokkaido Prefectural Government the material that was published is often dismissed as another example of “official history” minimising the role of Japanese as perpetrators and maximising their victimhood. I suggest that dividing the telling of the story of the empire into “official” and “repatriate” history hinders understanding of how such stories came to be told. Early book manuscripts, minutes of the drafting committee, and repatriate newsletters, hint at an interplay between the individual, social and cultural influences on the telling of stories. For example, a journalist recruited by the committee inserted his reservations about colonial government policy into the final publication. Similarly, one of the repatriate leaders found his criticisms in the first draft edited out of later. The wider point to be drawn from these kinds of details is to make us look more closely at our own monolithic narratives about “Japanese victim consciousness”. Repatriates may have resorted to the politics of the victim but leaving our analysis there merely deflects attention away from the complex processes behind how empire came to be remembered in post-war Japan.

Author

• Jonathan Bull, Graduate School of Law, Hokkaido University