2025 Portz Scholar Award Recipient

Abstract

Public memory often fails to encompass varied perspectives on past events, representing exclusively the collective understanding of one group or nation. Most nations shape historythrough personalized narratives, which remember their own motivations in conflicts, neglect their harms done against others, or memorialize past harms and traumas for reasonssuch as collective identity, nationalism, or guilt. However, while public memory is similarly controlled from nation to nation, various scholarship has illuminated changes withinJapanese World War II education, and many scholars have discussed its potential impact to Japanese World War II public memory. To fully analyze Japanese public memory andthe influence of these changes, this thesis compiled interviews from Japanese college students concerning their public memory of World War II. Through these interviews, this paperexamined current Japanese public memory of World War II and its influencing factors, specifically Japanese education, museums and memorials, and popular culture. This thesisidentifies three distinct historical narratives of justification, victimization, and pacifism throughout present-day Japanese public memory and argues nationalists utilize these historicalnarratives to shape public memory and unify Japanese national identity.

Why this research is important to me:

I have always been fascinated by how public memory of history is shaped through different narratives. Entire generations can remember events differently based on how textbooks, popular media, and museums present them. This fascination, and my background in Asian history and culture, led me to research Japanese public memory of World War II. It is deeply important to understand how the presentation of past events changes public perception of them. Further, this knowledge must be used to incorporate more perspectives of past events into daily life and education in order to build a more educated and understanding future.