Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.9, 2015

An Analysis of Issues concerning Japanese Historical Understanding during Postwar Seven Decades

(Abstract)

Han Dongyu

For postwar seven decades, the chaos of a series of “change and non-change” has happened to Japanese historical understanding. Facing the defeat in war, Japan once showed a collective “turnaround” of repentance, and also ideological “self-reflection” in academia, but failed to complete the political “transformation” of value in the end. The consciousness of superiority since the “Modern Meiji Times” and the dream of restoration of a “normal state” have decided its distorted view about war and its wrong historical understanding. Consequently, on the critical moment when Japan, the defeated country which had carried out aggression for years, was in the strongest need of development of a correct historical view, Japan as a state rejected this possibility instead. Japan provoked Sino-Japanese conflicts, using and forcing the United States into loosing the constraints upon Japan by the pretext of the so-called “China threat,” and attempting to get rid of the thought and actions of postwar international order. That has not only repeatedly toppled down the standards by which the “left” and “right” wings in the international community observe Japan, but put the Asia-Pacific area into a very dangerous position once again.