Mark E. Caprio

10.18399/acta.2010.13.1.006

annexation Korea Japan Conservative media

For the past three decades Japan’s conservative contingent has endeavored to rescue Japanese history from those who insist that Japan’s national narrative retain its more shameful elements. Arguments put forth by its supporters have surfaced in numerous monographs, textbooks, and other media outlets. This paper examines a similar effort that exploits the Internet, and specifically You Tube, as a medium of instruction designed to influence Japanese historical memory. It focuses on reinterpretations of Japan’s 1910 annexation of the Korean peninsula, and particularly a diatribe delivered by a businessman, Murata Haruki, in front of a government ministry building. His argument resembles other similar efforts seeking to script a “normal” national narrative that instills national pride, rather than national shame, among the Japanese people. Japan intended to annex, rather than colonize, the Korean peninsula; Japanese considered and treated the Korean people as their equal, rather than as their inferior. Pressure from Japan’s colonial and wartime-era victims has driven conservatives like Murata to explain a history that “normal countries”—victors in the Second World War—simply neglect. The national sentiment that conservatives like Murata seek to instill within their viewers strains inter-relations among Northeast Asian states at a time of increased discussion on building more intimate community relations in the region.