Abstract
This group of papers emerged from a panel entitled “Japan’s Identity Crisis and Reactionary Nationalism” at the 2016 Association of Asian Studies Conference held in Seattle, Washington, US. With the exception of Akiko Hashimoto, all the contributors were panelists.
The authors explore different dimensions of nationalism in Abe’s Japan illuminating what the ongoing culture wars signify about Japanese democracy, war memory, pacifism, religion, education, and wartime responsibility. There is much common ground among the authors in terms of their analysis of the main factors driving contemporary Japanese nationalism, involving a rightward, neonationalist political shift at the top and the emergence of revisionism from the mid-1990s in response to the government’s more forthright reckoning regarding wartime misdeeds. These essays illuminate how identity politics are intensely contested in Japan’s ongoing culture wars as they are waged in the media, textbooks, museums, shrines, in the streets, and in school ceremonies.
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