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Bullying and History Don't Mix

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Alexis Dudden
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As someone who cares deeply about many Japanese people and learns from them, I am most concerned by Japanese voters' decision to return Prime Minister Abe Shinzo to office because of his lengthy record of denigrating the histories of those who suffered under Japan's attempts to conquer and control much of Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. Abe has an equally vibrant record of denigrating those who give voice to these histories today. In response to the prime minister's first few weeks in office, Australia's former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans pointedly noted that it was “the responsibility of statesmen, if they are to deserve the name… to take the politically uncomfortable high ground and then bring their publics along.” With Abe we have it the other way around; he drags Japan down.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 54 , December 2012 , e136
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2012

Footnotes

Between 2012 and 2014 we posted a number of articles on contemporary affairs without giving them volume and issue numbers or dates. Often the date can be determined from internal evidence in the article, but sometimes not. We have decided retrospectively to list all of them as Volume 10, Issue 54 with a date of 2012 with the understanding that all were published between 2012 and 2014.' As footnote

References

[1] A 2011 popular opinion poll conducted by Seoul's Asan Institute for Policy Studies discovered that Koreans overwhelmingly regard the island clash with Japan as the “biggest obstacle to the development of Korean-Japanese relations” averaging just above 60% across the spectrum in both the age and ideological leaning categories, with the textbooks coming in second at roughly 30% and the comfort women just under 10%.“ The Asan Institute for Policy Studies Annual Opinion Survey, 2011.