Sophia Magazine vol.5 / SUMMER 2017

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2015 marked a major milestone for Japan, as the 70th an-niversary of the end of World War II. As a historian, Professor Sven Saaler of Sophia University specializes in Japanese mod-ern history with a focus on the perspectives of the Japanese. Regarding historical revisionism, he says, “Recent trends to revise the interpretation of modern history, that is toward a more “positive” view of Japan’s role in WWII, come mostly from non-historians, while in academia, scholars grounded in historical facts have not exhibited such tendencies.”Saaler was born, raised, and educated in Germany, but be-came interested in East Asian, in particular Japanese, modern history, in search of different and unusual topics after study-ing mostly European modern history at college. He became interested in Japan’s development after WWII that paralleled Germany’s in many ways. In late 1945, both countries were what would be referred to today as “rogue states.” Since then, both countries have worked hard to become trusted members of international society. As Saaler recalls, “Because of that similarity, I thought at first I could easily relate to Japan.” However, a part of his research has evolved to focus more on how Japanese history is remembered than with Japanese history itself. Saaler is concerned that the new approach in Japan of revising by beautifying the narrative of the history of the war may continue to pose problems in relations be-tween Japan and other countries. He remembers that when he came to Tokyo in 1999, he found several worrisome aspects of the Japanese historical revisionism movement that aimed to change how history was taught at school. Some scholars outside the field of history claimed that education about the war was detrimental to the healthy development of students’ identities. He recalls that “In Germany, students receive an education that is highly critical of the war, and they address Germany’s wartime past not only in history classes, but in eth-ics classes, as well.”Saaler recollects, “In the 1980s and 1990s in Germany, there was lively discourse on how to overcome the historical implications of the war. That could also be called revision of history, but there would never be any debate on the basic facts of the war.”The geopolitical situations of Japan and Germany are quite different, he points out. Germany has always been under more pressure geopolitically to deal with historical issues after the war. “As for Japan, it was quite unnecessary for a long time to deal with these issues because Japan was allied with the United States. The U.S. didn’t really question historical schol-arship in Japan that much, but did push Japan to think more deeply about the past in the 1990s and 2000s. Japan had no diplomatic relations with Korea until 1965 and no relations with China until 1972. As a result, Japan has only relatively recently had to reconcile the historical implications of the war with its closest neighbors.” While Saaler contrasts Ger-many’s postwar approach to history with that of Japan’s, he also finds parallels. “With Ger-many, the pressure for histori-cal reconciliation was originally limited to Western Europe, but it also had to deal with issues such as compensation in proac-tive ways. However, Germany was also very late in apologizing to Eastern European countries Publications on Japanese per-spectives on the war and Ja-pan’s relations with Asia written and edited by Professor Saaler.Similarities and Differences between Japan and Germany after WWII13Research