Why question the “2nd Sino-Japanese War”?

―The present tense of ‘War memories’ in Japan―

Abstract

　　This study explores one core question: why we must reconsider 2^nd Sino-Japanese war today? Anyone interest in the various literary, philosophical, filmic, and sub-culture texts produced in postwar Japan, is well aware of the giant shadow cast by the experiences and memories of the Second World War. Words and images concerning “the great war” have come to form one of the largest archives in Japanese-language discourse. There is no doubt, however, that this is a biased archive. The paucity in Japanese society of collective memories of war in Asia, and in particular of the eight years of continuous fighting on the Chinese continent, is extremely odd. Today, at a moment in which the international situation in East Asia seems worse than it has been since the 1990s, I believe that it is of the upmost importance that we turn back to the Japanese-language archive of the war memories and re-interrogate it over the question of how those experiences were recounted and represented.