Whose History Prevails?
When states weaponize cultural policy to erase atrocities, the world must respond with truth and remembrance.
Cultural policy is never neutral. It is a battleground where power, identity and memory collide to determine whose history is memorized and whose is erased. Governments and institutions use cultural policy, whether explicitly or implicitly, to construct a single narrative, which tends to marginalize diverse voices.
This has been most evident in Japan’s post-war historical revisionism, which systematically covered up its wartime atrocities in China and Asia. As Ingyu Oh and Douglas argued, Japan’s cultural policy used education, legal frameworks, and nationalist rhetoric as weapons to construct a sanitized historical identity. Japan’s reimagining of wartime history, particularly its aggression against China and Asia. It shows how cultural policies and ideological narratives can silence marginalized histories while allowing a single, sanitized version of events to resurface.
At the core of Japanese revisionism is a deliberate reorganization of its imperialist past. The Nanjing Massacre (1937–1938), in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians were massacred by the Japanese army, was rewritten as a “controversial event” in state-sanctioned textbooks. Similarly, the systematic enslavement of more than 200,000 “comfort women”, mainly Chinese and Koreans, has been dismissed by right-wing politicians and academics as a “fabrication”, despite irrefutable evidence in military archives and survivor testimonies. They reflect a broader cultural policy framework designed to legitimize Japan’s wartime actions as defensive rather than aggressive. By positioning Japan as the “liberator” of Asia, this discourse erased the violence suffered by colonized peoples and replaced it with a myth of Asian solidarity. This narrative was institutionalized through educational reforms, museum curation and media campaigns that glorified pre-war nationalism.
Cultural Policy is a Dual-Edged Sword. Japan’s revisionism operates through both explicit and implicit cultural policies. Explicit policies include legislative efforts to amend Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan, which renounces war, to allow for remilitarization under the cover of “global peacekeeping”. At the same time, implicit policies are embodied in textbook revisions that downplay wartime violence and state-sponsored initiatives to promote nationalist historiography. Domestically, they promote collective forgetfulness and absolve post-war generations of historical guilt. Internationally, they project Japan as a victim of Western hegemony rather than a perpetrator of colonial violence. Monocultural Memory has global ripple effects. By erasing its wartime atrocities, it undermines regional trust and exacerbates territorial disputes with China and South Korea. Denying the existence of the Nanjing Massacre and Comfort Women has perpetuated historical grievances, impeded settlement, and fueled cycles of nationalism. Globally, it sets a dangerous precedent for how states can manipulate cultural policy to avoid accountability. The case of Japan also highlights the fragility of transnational memory. The case of Japan also highlights the fragility of transnational memory. While the Western countries often prioritize holocaust remembrance, Asian wartime suffering continues to be marginalized in global discourse.
Get Lei Yan’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Historical consciousness needs to move towards pluralism, and opposition to revisionism requires the elimination of monocultural narratives imposed by cultural policies. Grassroots movements such as the Comfort Women Memorial in South Korea and international academic cooperation continue to challenge the deliberate forgetting of historical trauma at the national level by consistently amplifying the voices of survivors. However, if lasting social change is to be achieved, cultural policies need to be fundamentally reconfigured to place transparency, inclusiveness and restorative justice at their core. History is not just about facts, but about imagining the unknown. Recovering memory is about holding on to these stories, whether of the streets of Nanjing, the comfort stations or the occupied villages, not as relics of the past, but as urgent lessons for the broken present.
Reference
Oh, I., & Ishizawa-Grbic, D. (n.d.). FORGIVING THE CULPRITS: JAPANESE HISTORICAL REVISIONISM IN A POST-COLD WAR CONTEXT. The International Journal of Peace Studies. https://www3.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol5_2/oh_grbi.htm
Nakano, K. (2014, September 24). The Ghost of Historical Revisionism in Contemporary Japan. Eastasiaforum. https://eastasiaforum.org/2014/09/24/the-ghost-of-historical-revisionism-in-contemporary-japan/
Wang, S. (2023, September 3). Japanese Scholars: Historical Revisionism Is Rampant in Japanese Society, but There Are Still People Who Pursue the True History despite the Scolding. China Daily. https://eastasiaforum.org/2014/09/24/the-ghost-of-historical-revisionism-in-contemporary-japan/
Zhao, M. (2015, March 2). Japanese WWII Historical Revisionism Damages Country’s Future. Global Times. https://eastasiaforum.org/2014/09/24/the-ghost-of-historical-revisionism-in-contemporary-japan/
