The Ghosts Return: History, Memory and International Tensions Between Japan and Its Neighbours
Tessa Morris-Suzuki - Professor of Japanese History, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, the Australian National University
The Council is pleased to present the 15th Annual John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies.
Recent visits to Yasukuni Shrine by the Japanese prime minister and other politicians, and new proposals to revise the content of Japanese history textbooks, have once again focused attention on conflicts between Japan and its neighbours over problems of historical memory and the commemoration of war. Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, ongoing “history wars” between the countries of Northeast Asia were accompanied by a range of governmental and non-governmental projects that sought to promote reconciliation and shared understandings of the past. What challenges did these projects face, and what impact did they have on public understandings of the past? In an age of renewed regional tensions in Northeast Asia, what lessons can we learn from the regional search for historical reconciliation over the past two decades?
Tessa Morris-Suzuki holds an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on aspects of modern Japanese and East Asian regional history: particularly cross-border movement between Japan and its Asian neighbours; issues of history, memory and reconciliation in Northeast Asia; grassroots social movements in Japan; and the modern history of ethnic minorities and frontier communities in Japan. Her most recent works include Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War (2007); To the Diamond Mountains: A Hundred Year Journey Through China and Korea (2010); Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era (2010) and East Asia Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of War (Routledge, with Morris Low, Leonid Petrov and Timothy Y. Tsu, 2013). In 2013 she was awarded the Fukuoka Prize (academic award) for contributions to the study of East Asian.
Please RSVP to eastasian.studies@yale.edu.
Light reception to follow talk in Luce Common Room