Making History Matter: Kuroita Katsumi and the Construction of Imperial Japan.

AuthorKadia, Miriam Kingsberg
PositionBook review

Making History Matter: Kuroita Katsumi and the Construction of Imperial Japan. By LISA YOSHIKAWA. Harvard East Asian Monographs, vol. 402. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. Pp. xii + 367. $49.95

Lisa Yoshikawa's important book analyzes the development of the Japanese historical profession in the first half of the twentieth century. As she argues, scholars of this era secured public support for their individual careers, the university system, and the discipline of history by finding and reconciling "objective" evidence of the past with the expansionist aspirations of their increasingly powerful authoritarian state. By the 1930s, this task led them to champion Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific. However, as a result of the nation's defeat in 1945, imperialism, fascism, and militarism were discredited. A minority of historians were scapegoated for the larger complicity of the profession, purged, and officially "forgotten" by their students and colleagues. Meanwhile, a new origin story was created for the historical discipline in Japan. Some scholars represented its genesis as an entirely postwar phenomenon. Others overlooked the ideological implications of prewar scholarship, claiming that their teachers had done nothing more than collect documents. From her position outside Japanese academia, Yoshikawa dismantles these shockingly durable myths by exposing the founding contributions of wartime scholars who "made history matter"--that is, who turned the practice of history-writing into a justification of the ambitions of the state they served.

Yoshikawa narrates the development of historiography in Japan as a generational tale beginning with the first cohort of scholars following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Although the use of history to justify political authority was common in pre-modern Japan, sustained exposure to Euro-American norms and the initiation of a new nation-building agenda in the late nineteenth century gave the narration of the past new purpose as a nationalist enterprise. Japanese scholars studied modern Western historiography abroad and in Japan's new universities, particularly Tokyo Imperial University (Todai), the nation's first and most prestigious institution of higher learning. Among their teachers was Ludwig von Riess (1861-1928), a German scholar and former student of Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). Ranke, often credited with transforming the pursuit of history into a...

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