Historians and Public Memory in Japan: The &amp;quot;Comfort Women&amp;quot; Controversy: Introduction

Sand, Jordan

doi:10.1353/ham.2005.0005

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Other causes for self-censorship in the context of conflicts as discussed in the literature, albeit to a lesser extent, are the wish to achieve approval and respect from the dominant sector in a society (Dixon, 2010; Maksudyan, 2009), and the wish to prevent possible harm to the country (Akçam, 2010; Bhattacharjee, 2006). In addition, among the causes noted are the wish to prevent damage to intersocietal relations if previous wrongdoings by one society are exposed (Branche & House, 2010), the attempt to avoid paying reparations or giving back territory that was taken unlawfully (Dixon, 2010; Sand, 1999), and the desire to preserve the nation’s unity (Boyd, 2008; Branche & House, 2010).…”

Section: Self-censorship – Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-censorship in conflicts: Israel and the 1948 Palestinian exodus.

Nets‐Zehngut¹,

Pliskin²,

Bar‐Tal³

2015

Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology

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The typical collective memories of societies involved in intractable conflicts play a major role in the eruption and continuation of the conflicts, whereas the positive transformation of these memories to being less self-serving promotes peacemaking. A major factor that inhibits such transformation is self-censorship. Self-censorship, practiced by members of a society's formal institutions, inhibits the dissemination of alternative, more accurate narratives of the conflict that may change dominating biased conflict-supporting memories. Despite the importance of formal self-censorship in maintaining collective memories of conflicts, little empirical and theoretical research has examined this phenomenon. The present study addresses this omission. It examines the self-censorship practiced from 1949 to 2004 in 3 formal Israeli institutions (the National Information Center, the IDF/army, and the Ministry of Education) regarding the main historical event of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus. This is done by analyzing all of these institutions' publications produced throughout the 56-year research period and interviewing their key position holders. The results show that the institution gatekeepers practiced self-censorship for 5 reasons: garnering international support, mobilizing citizens, the impact of Zionist ideology, institutional norms, and fear of sanctions. The empirical findings are used to elicit theoretical insights, such as a definition for formal self-censorship, the difference between self-censorship practiced by gatekeepers (from formal and informal institutions) and that practiced by ordinary individuals, the 5 reasons for such self-censorship RAFI NETS-ZEHNGUT was awarded his PhD at the Political Science Department at Tel Aviv University, and was a predoctoral fellow at Yale and Columbia Universities. Currently he is the Managing Director of the International Summer Program in Conflict Resolution at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His research studies the socio-psychological aspects of conflicts (e.g., via transitional justice and reconciliation), with the main focus being on their collective memory. Regionally, he focuses on the Israeli-Arab/ Palestinian conflict. For more details see http://www .collective-memory.info/. RUTHIE PLISKIN is currently working towards a doctoral degree in Social Psychology at the School of Psychological Sciences at Tel Aviv University and at the Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, under the guidance of Eran Halperin, Daniel Bar-Tal, and Gal Sheppes. Her research focuses on the interrelations of emotional processes and ideology in intergroup conflict, and she is also interested more generally in the mechanisms underlying psychological barriers to intergroup conflict resolution. DANIEL BAR-TAL is Branco Weiss Emeritus Professor of Research in Child Development and Education at the School of Education, Tel Aviv University. His research interest is in political and social psychology studying so-cio...

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Section: Self-censorship – Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-censorship in conflicts: Israel and the 1948 Palestinian exodus.

Nets‐Zehngut¹,

Pliskin²,

Bar‐Tal³

2015

Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology

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“…One finds, for example, similar discussions in historical writing on the character of French colonialism, reflected in the French government's legislation of 2005 requiring that colonial history be taught in a "positive" manner in French schools (Tyre, 2008: 152), which held that "School courses should recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in north Africa" (Henley, 2005); in debates over the lasting effects of Japanese colonialism in areas including China and Korea (Sand, 1999) One might also look at the extensive literature in social science which seeks to use comparative analysis to quantify the differential effects of different forms of colonisation. Feyrer and Sacerdote, for example, use this form of analysis to study the effects of colonialism on a database of islands throughout the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.…”

Section: Historic Injustice: the International Dimensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such, debates, of course, are not exclusive to Britain. One finds, for example, similar discussions in historical writing on the character of French colonialism, reflected in the French government's legislation of 2005 requiring that colonial history be taught in a 'positive' manner in French schools (Tyre, 2008: 152), which held that 'School courses should recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in north Africa' (Henley, 2005); in debates over the lasting effects of Japanese colonialism in areas including China and Korea (Sand, 1999); in the 'history wars' in Australia concerning the effects of British colonialism on Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (Macintrye and Clark, 2004), and so on.…”

Section: The Colonial Dimensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repairing Historical Wrongs and the End of Empire

Butt

2012

Social & Legal Studies

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It is a truism to say that we live in a world that has been deeply shaped by imperialism. The history of humanity is, in many ways, a story of the attempted and achieved subjugation of one people by another, and it is unsurprising that such interaction has had profound effects on the contemporary world, affecting cultural understandings of community identity; the composition of, and boundaries between, modern day states; and the distribution of resources between different communities. This article addresses the claim that some contemporary states may possess obligations to pay reparations as a result of the lasting effects of a particular form of historic imperialism: colonialism (Ferro 1997: 1-23, Larsen, 2000. Claims about the harms and benefits caused by colonialism must make some kind of comparison between the world as it currently is, and a counterfactual state where the injustice which characterised so much of historic interaction between colonisers and the colonised did not occur. Rather than imagining a world a world where there was no such interaction, this article maintains that the appropriate counterfactual is one where relations between different communities were characterized by an absence of domination and exploitation. This means that current day states may possess reparative duties which are much more extensive than is often supposed.Quite what it means for a form of interaction to be "colonial" is disputed. Osterhammel defines colonialism as "a relationship of domination between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority and a minority of foreign invaders" and notes that "the fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonized people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis". (1997: 16-17) Such a general description masks the very wide 2 range of practices which could be described in such terms: Young writes that colonialism "involved an extraordinary range of different forms and practices carried out with respect to radically different cultures, over many centuries", and lists examples including settler colonies such as British North America, Australia and New Zealand, French Algeria, and Portuguese Brazil; administered territories established without significant settlement for the purposes of economic exploitation, such as American Philippines and Puerto Rico, British India, Dutch East Indies, German Togo or Japanese Taiwan; and maritime enclaves, such as American Guantánamo, British Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malta, and Singapore (2001: 17). While there is great variety in terms of the experience of colonized peoples, it is nowadays commonplace to maintain that the domination that they suffered at the hands of the We recognize that colonialism has led to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and that Africans and people of African descent, and people of Asian descent and indigenous peoples were victims of colonialism and continue to be victims of its consequences. We acknowledg...

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“…3 In this context, the radical changes and unprecedented reach of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-state during the Maoist years (1949 -1980) both highlighted and rendered extremely dangerous any expression of local memory visà-vis the ascendant official history of the new nation under Mao. Unger 1993;Sand 1999). Unlike Han Chinese individuals and groups participating in a range of public memorializing activities, 4 Tibetans in China are precariously situated as "minority nationalities" (Ch.…”

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confidence: 99%

“Speaking Bitterness”: Autobiography, History, and Mnemonic Politics on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier

Makley

2005

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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In the Tibetan Buddhist monastery town of Labrang, located in southwest Gansu Province, China, the past is a heavy, and very often hidden, burden for residents and visitors alike (figure 1). This is not readily apparent amidst the bustling ‘nowness’ of commercial activities in this tourist site and model town for the profitable coexistence of Tibetan Buddhist monasticism and Chinese state-sponsored development goals. But as I discovered over the course of my fieldwork there in the mid-1990s, and again in the summer of 2002, for a population living with unsanctioned memories of the traumatic ruptures of the Chinese Communist-led revolution beginning in 1949, the ‘unsaid’ of history spoke loudly in implication—in implied dialogue with multimedia official histories, in the gaps in written and oral chronologies of events, in the revived performance of the lay and monastic ritual calendars, and in the dodges and silences of my Tibetan interlocutors during our many conversations about their pasts: “I don't know anything! I'm too young, you know!” (Tibetan [Tib.] ngas shes ni ma red, nga lo chung gi mo). Ama Drolma, a village matriarch in her late fifties, repeated this adamantly to me after I and my Tibetan woman assistant had asked her for a taped interview about local “history” (Tib. lo rgyus). She would hear none of our explanations about my interest in people's personal histories and insisted that I seek out old men, they would know about “early, early, early times” (Tib. sngan na sngan na sngan na).

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Historians and Public Memory in Japan: The "Comfort Women" Controversy: Introduction

Cited by 6 publications

References 6 publications

Self-censorship in conflicts: Israel and the 1948 Palestinian exodus.

Self-censorship in conflicts: Israel and the 1948 Palestinian exodus.

Repairing Historical Wrongs and the End of Empire

“Speaking Bitterness”: Autobiography, History, and Mnemonic Politics on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier

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