研究テーマ
現在日本の政治に置ける歴史・記憶・ナラティブ
History, Memory, and Narrative in Contemporary Japanese Politics
代表者
レーニー デイビッド教授
(1)研究目的
This project is designed to contribute to our knowledge of how history and memory become codified in politics through its structuring as narrative. Building from the principal investigator’s recent book (Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline, Cornell University Press, 2018), and his many recent papers on the subject it traces several other dimensions of historical representation in contemporary Japanese politics to offer clues about how narrative structures shape the ways in which political history is understood and analyzed.
(2)研究の意義
Much of the research on history and memory in Japan focuses narrowly on the Pacific War and its implications for Japanese politics and foreign policy today. While these issues have been important, they obscure the more complex ways in which national foundation in the Meiji Restoration, the country’s postwar growth, and its relations to other countries have been narrated as part of a story that gives contemporary politics its meaning. This project, like the initial book, will make important contributions to scholarship on historical representation, emotion and politics, and the tensions of “constructivism” in contemporary political science. Starting this year, the project will, with the support of a Kakenhi grant, examine comparatively the production of narratives about COVID policy in East Asia.
(3)運営方法
The project will seek to draw on the expertise of members in considering the cultural politics of memory and history, focusing in particular on the competition between great powers and “middle powers” in East Asia (respectively, China and the US, Japan and South Korea) in terms of their handling of the COVID pandemic.
(4)期待される成果
The goal of this project is both to extend discussions within GSAPS and across Waseda’s campus discussions of the relationships between history and politics in ways that allow us to get beyond simplistic divisions between “revisionists” and “mainstreamists.” Instead, we will consider how these history and memory projects get shaped by traditional narrative structures that simultaneously embed the history while also pointing at an ending, a climax, to which a national community is expected to aspire.
The key publication/distribution goals for the project this coming year will be refereed articles dealing primarily with COVID policy and grand strategy in East Asia, and in particular their narrative formulations