Thammasat University students interested in Japan, East Asian studies, sociology, history, futurology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 18 December Zoom webinar on Shaping a Future of the Planet and Humanity Together.

The event, on Wednesday, 18 December 2024 at noon Bangkok time, is presented by Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo, Japan.

Its website explains:

Program

Session 1

Opening remarks

OSHIMA Marie (Deputy Director, Tokyo College)

Congratulatory address

GONOKAMI Makoto (President, RIKEN/Former President, The University of Tokyo)

Lecture

EMA Arisa (Associate Professor, Tokyo College)

“How to get along with AI/robots?”

Intermission

Session 2

Congratulatory address

HANEDA Masashi (Former Director, Tokyo College)

Lecture

Andrew GORDON (Ushioda Fellow, Tokyo College/Professor, Harvard University)

“Tokyo College: The Value and Power of a Work in Progress”

Intermission

Session 3

Congratulatory address

FUJII Teruo (President, The University of Tokyo)

Lecture

SHIMAZU Naoko (Professor, Tokyo College)

“What is an Institute for Advanced Study? Global Positioning of Tokyo College”

Closing Remarks

AIHARA Hiroaki (Executive Vice President, The University of Tokyo)

Moderator

Takeo HOSHI (Director, Tokyo College)

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of futurology in Japan.

The TU Library also owns published research by Professor Gordon.

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QeOEgWR-SHCmUoH9D21uKw#/registration

For questions or further information, please write to:

tokyo.college.event@tc.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Here is an excerpt from an article by Professor Gordon, posted on the website of Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus:

A sidebar controversy to the intense debate of 2015 on how Japan’s leaders would mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II sparked my interest in the phenomenon of “dark tourism,” defined in brief as touristic interest in sites associated with death, disaster and atrocity. The practice of dark tourism, with focus mainly on the creation of dark tourist sites and the messages they convey (or fail to convey), is the concern of the three papers to follow.

The main controversy in and around Japan that year was not dark tourism, but rather, the stance the Japanese government — Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, in particular — would take in a public statement expected to be issued on the August 2015 anniversary of Japan’s surrender. Abe’s base in the Diet and beyond, and most notably in the organization known as the Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi), was well-known for denying both the atrocities in Nanjing and the wartime government’s responsibility for recruiting, transporting and confining Korean and other women in the so-called “comfort stations.

In line with this stance, in the run-up to the 70th anniversary, Prime Minister Abe made no secret of his desire to break with the 50th and 60th anniversary statements, notable for relatively forthright apologies for wartime aggression and the colonization of Japan’s neighbors. From late 2014 through the summer of 2015, a fraught context of anticipation and criticism from the South Korean and Chinese governments, as well as from activists and scholars in Asia and the West, put a chill on Japan’s relations with its neighbors.

In the 2015 statement Abe issued on behalf of the government on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender, his pragmatism narrowly outweighed his nationalism. He effectively finessed the apology question. By including the four key words of his predecessors’ statements of 1995 and 2005—“heartfelt apology,” “deep remorse,” “colonial rule” and “aggression”—he limited the ongoing recriminations from abroad. At the same time, his grammar offered a subtle gesture toward his nationalist base.

He affirmed the apology of predecessors without apologizing in his own voice. He stressed Japan’s peaceful global posture since 1945, and sought to exempt his successors from further apology: “We must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize.” He concluded that “even so, we Japanese, across generations, must squarely face the history of the past.”

That same summer, a related controversy surrounded Japan’s petition to UNESCO to recognize a number of shipyards, iron mills, and coal mines as “World Heritage Sites,” notable as the locales for the first non-Western industrial revolution. This suggested Abe’s government was hardly facing history squarely. The South Korean government threatened to veto Japan’s application because it focused only on the Meiji era, with no mention of the brutal treatment of drafted wartime laborers transported against their will from the Asian continent to work in Japan.

Eventually, the two sides agreed that coercion was part of the story. For a time, they argued over the precise wording to describe it. Would it be kyōsei rōdō (“forced labor”) or the slightly softer kyōsei sareta rōdō (“labor that was forced”)? In the end, the Japanese government acknowledged that Chinese and Korean labor “was forced” to work at these sites during the war, and the UNESCO committee voted to designate these facilities as World Heritage Sites.

The framing of this issue in terms of a Japanese-told story of “a good Meiji” versus a Korean or colonized story of a “bad empire” was almost inevitable in the context of the contested politics of history and memory in Japan, as well as around the world, that played out on the main stage in 2015. Even so, it struck me as very odd. Odd, although not surprising, firstly because the Japanese government application to UNESCO made no mention whatsoever of the difficult conditions experienced by the many thousands of Japanese men and women, including prison laborers, who had worked in these same mines and shipyards from the time of their founding. Odd, secondly, because few of those who jumped into the debate did so by questioning the “good Meiji” narrative.

Alternative ways to view the history of Japan’s industrial revolution were, after all, well known, and easily accessible. I had written at length about sites of Japan’s industrial revolution in my doctoral dissertation and first book. I had learned from earlier generations of historians in Japan of the dangerous conditions, frequent accidents, and harsh supervision endured by workers in mines in particular, but also in steel mills and shipyards.

For years, I had been showing students in my courses an excerpt from a program on Meiji-era Japan, itself an hour-long segment in an eight-part documentary produced by Seattle Public Television in 1985, titled The Pacific Century. That several-minute excerpt described the dark side of Japan’s Meiji era modernization. The narrator and the camera zoom in on Hashima (or Gunkanjima: “Battleship Island”), probably the best-known of the locations proposed for World Heritage Status. The narrator calls it “a ghostly relic of the costs of Japan’s modernization.” The eminent economic historian Sumiya Mikio then elaborates:

“It was hell. This kind of mine work was true hell…Many people tried to escape but they couldn’t because it was an island. Records show that when people were caught trying to leave, they met a horrible end. Around 1890, there were newspaper accounts of miners who were murdered by their bosses when they were caught trying to escape from Battleship Island.” […]

Clearly, then, this island offers opportunities to examine histories not only of economic development and technological achievement, but also of labor exploitation and resistance by the miners. I was disappointed (if hardly astonished) that Japan’s application to UNESCO focused exclusively on achievements in technology and management, with nary a whisper about the dark side of these places during the Meiji period itself.

But knowing of the Pacific Century video, I was more disappointed and more surprised that almost none of the media coverage of this 2015 controversy, and so few of the responses of scholars—two notable exceptions being the fine pieces in this journal by Takashi Miyamoto and Hiromi Mizuno in 2017—placed the undeniably atrocious conditions imposed on wartime laborers from Asia (and some Allied POWs) in a longer context of coerced labor (prison labor) or harshly exploited “free” labor in these same locations. This history reached back to the very period the government hoped to celebrate […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)