An Analysis Of Contemporary Japanese War History And National Factors

The Japan’s historical conception of WWII refers to the Japanese official and civilian perspectives of their invasive war during the WWII after the Tokyo Trial, which stretches from the Japanese authorities’legal recognition of the war and postwar liability to Japanese commoners’historical knowledge of the war planning, initiation, and implementation and their ethical cognition of war crimes. Despite the explicit legal verdict of Japanese war crimes and postwar compensation liability decreed by the international court of justice in Tokyo Trial as well as certain records of Japanese anti-humanity and anti-peace crimes in textbooks and documents from the international community, or these victim countries in particular, the Japanese authorities since the 1980s have been trying to deny their liability and whitewash the war. It comes to its full swing when Abe Shinzou rose to power. The Japanese right wing stay in constant clashes with its Asian neighbors over the historical issues of the war, while the Japan’s political trend, influenced by Abe’s mistaken perspectives, takes on a sharp turn to "the right" whose militaristic prototype is worrisome. And the so-called "historical conception of WWII for Japanese commoners" as the historical cognition of the whole nation represents a subjective perspective on the contemporary national memory, narrative, and evaluation of the nation’s merits, demerits and international image. It carries the characteristics of national autobiographies, from which the traces of its inherent national characters are detectable. Therefore, an analysis of contemporary war outlooks, both from a political angle or that of public opinions, should take into consideration Japan’s national characters as a leading factor.Beginning with a literature review, this thesis, from the aspects of Japanese value orientation and behavioral norms, analyses Japanese national characters as negative attribution of the Japan’s historical conception of the WWII, restoring Japanese commoners’civilized vision of the war. Secondly, discussing the nature of the Japanese aggressive war against China and the change of its postwar historical perspectives indicates that the historical weaknesses of the Tokyo Trial left the room for the phenomenon of contemporary Japanese denying historical facts of the war although it made a significant contribution to the development of international law. Both official and public opinions of the war experienced an obvious change. And the fallacious liability cognition by contemporary Japanese inevitably results from the combined influence of government’s misguidance and traditional culture. Thirdly, national characters are embedded with both the passed-down characteristics of the previous generations and the up-to-date features of common social development since the formation of national characters is based on the merge of specific natural environment, historical structure, and social progress. Located in the northeast Asia, Japan presents itself as an island country with its national culture fusing foreign culture with local conventions and has experienced a transition from militaristic dictatorship to Western constitution. The Japan’s national characters of caprice and extremity caused by its natural and social instability leads to a multidimensional perspective of history, including the positive, mistakenly right-winged and sequacious facets. There are connections between the right-winged shift of war perspectives and the national characters. The postwar Japan witnessed a series of constitutional changes and the proliferation of war concepts, especially involving the right-winged outlook, the neo-nationalism sequacious perspective, and the rise of historical revisionism. The logic behind includes the effects of the up-to-date and the physically embedded national characters. Finally, three cases examined makes more persuasive the analysis of Japanese national characters and their fallacious historical points of view.The thesis analyses three kinds of war perspectives, relates contemporary Japanese war perspectives with national characters, and provides a deeper understanding or explanation of the fallacious conception of the WWII. And the analysis of various Japanese concepts of the war and the relations between Japanese national characters and their views of the war by the means of case study adds extra weight to the argumentation and conclusion.Instead of providing the statistics of the cognitive classification of Japan’s war perspectives among different groups, the research under restricted condition generally exams the relations between Japanese national characters and their views of the war, whose conclusion, subject to certain limitations, paves the way for potential field survey of Japanese commoners to obtain specific data in the aspect and the empirical and quantitative analyses in further researches.