😀😀書評：漫長的戰敗

《漫長的戰敗：日本的文化創傷、記憶與身份》（The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan）
作者：橋本明子（Akiko Hashimoto）
牛津：牛津大學出版社，2015年出版，192頁，定價 £74.00（精裝）
ISBN-13：978-0190239169
書評撰寫者：佐藤重樹（Shigeki Sato），法政大學

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《漫長的戰敗》是一部細緻而深思的著作，探討日本如何在戰後的文化記憶中處理戰爭的遺緒。橋本明子透過豐富的實證資料與多元文本——包括報紙讀者投書、社論、學校教科書、歷史漫畫、動畫電影與電視紀錄片——描繪出日本普通人在漫長戰後歲月中，如何理解、記憶並再現戰爭。

一、核心論點：反對「健忘症」論與多重記憶共存

橋本首先提出兩層論點。
第一，她反駁了西方媒體常見的「日本健忘症」 caricature——即日本人集體失憶、逃避戰爭責任的說法。相反地，她指出，日本的戰爭記憶早已深深滲入家庭日常、學校教育與大眾媒介中。
第二，她強調日本並不存在單一的「集體記憶」，而是多重且彼此衝突的記憶場域，不同敘事之間競逐合法性。為了描繪這種複雜結構，橋本借用了德國社會學家伯恩哈德‧吉森（Bernhard Giesen）提出的三元框架——英雄（heroes）、受害者（victims）與加害者（perpetrators）——來分析日本的戰爭敘事。

在日本，

• 英雄敘事（Heroic narratives）強調戰死者的英勇與犧牲精神，例如戰艦「大和」的故事或保守政治人物的悼詞；

• 受害者敘事（Victim narratives）則以無辜的平民與士兵為主，訴說他們在空襲、原爆與無謀軍事行動中白白犧牲的痛苦；

• 加害者敘事（Perpetrator narratives）則正視日本在東亞的侵略、剝削與暴行，如南京大屠殺、「慰安婦」制度與沖繩集體自殺等。

不同社群藉由這三種敘事，呈現各自的政治與道德立場。橋本以此為概念地圖，精確描繪出日本戰後「戰敗文化」（culture of defeat）中多層記憶的動態張力。

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二、受害者敘事的主導地位與「文化創傷」

儘管敘事多元，橋本發現「受害者」框架在家庭記憶、學校教育與媒介再現中始終佔據主導地位。
戰場與後方的「無力受苦」經驗，被一再講述為戰爭的本質，塑造了戰後世代的文化創傷（cultural trauma）。
這種強烈的「被迫犧牲」記憶，使後代產生深刻的反戰情感，體現在「那樣的苦難絕不能重演」、「戰爭就是錯的」等常見語句中。

橋本指出，這種情感記憶支撐了日本戰後的和平主義。
在全國各地的和平博物館教育中，常以暴力死亡與棄民故事激起憐憫、恐懼與悲傷，進而強化「和平的珍貴」。
她認為，和平因此成為「使社會團結成為可能的規範性框架」（p.88）。
儘管1990年代後，加害者敘事在新聞與教科書中有所抬頭，新民族主義則以「英雄重現」為回應，但「和平」依然作為一個共享的文化符號，使互相衝突的記憶能並存並延續過去的文化記憶。

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三、對日本和平主義的批判

橋本對日本式和平主義提出批判性檢視：

1. 「無力受害」的主導敘事，掩蓋了多數日本人曾支持戰爭的加害責任。

2. 這種敘事常導致民族中心式的盲點，忽略了其他亞洲人民——特別是韓國人、中國人與沖繩人的痛苦。

3. 因此，戰後的「情感化和平」往往僅停留在浪漫的「拒絕戰爭」態度，而非理性地理解歷史因果與結構。

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四、「影子比較法」與跨國對照

橋本在書中運用了她稱為「影子比較法」（method of shadow comparison）的跨國視角。
她比較了德國、越南與猶太人等不同社會的記憶文化：

• 德國自1970年代起，以加害者敘事為主，形成了「懺悔文化」（culture of contrition），與日本的「和平文化」形成對照；

• 美國越戰後與猶太人經歷大屠殺後，也出現了以「家庭內的無力感」為中心的記憶形式。

不過，她認為日本的和平主義獨具特色：
它源於戰敗帶來的羞辱與屈辱，並以「無力受害」的文化創傷為核心進行自我重建。

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五、未竟之問：日本如何走出「戰敗文化」？

在結尾章，橋本探討日本如何走出戰敗陰影，成為「正常國家」。
她主張，日本應以**「和解取向」**（reconciliationist approach）贏得鄰國的信任與尊重，但也指出，「德國式懺悔」不應被視為普世標準。
在猶太—基督教世界以外，「懺悔—告白—寬恕」的模式未必具有社會共鳴；
強行推行「全球記憶規範」反而可能引發「文明等級」感與道德反彈。

此外，「受害者」與「加害者」的界線並不明確，記憶的全球化過程反而可能陷入新的困境。
橋本在書末寫道：「新的國際秩序要求我們以想像力與創新妥協，打破歷史怨懟的僵局」（p.141）。
然而，她坦言這一目標仍難以具體實現。

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六、書評總結

儘管對多數日本讀者而言，「受害者敘事」與「和平情感」似乎早已不言自明，但橋本的著作首次以堅實的實證研究與高度的理論整合力，全面呈現日本戰後記憶的社會學結構。
這本書不僅對日本讀者與歷史社會學者有啟發，也適合非日本專業人士與大學生、研究生閱讀，作為理解戰後日本文化與記憶政治的入門與反思之作。

The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan, by Akiko Hashimoto. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 192, £74.00 (hardback ISBN-13: 978-0190239169)

The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Mem-ory, and Identity in Japan is a thoughtful and nuanced study of Japan's cultural memory of war. Referring to a variety of popular narrative sources, including letters to newspaper editors, newspaper editorials, school textbooks, history manga collec-tions, animated films, TV documentaries, and so forth, Akiko Hashimoto develops a compassionate and empirically grounded exploration of the war memories of ordi-nary people over the long postwar period.

In her book, Hashimoto offers a twofold argument. First, unlike the caricatured image of "amnesia" often depicted by the Western media, Japan's war memories are deeply encoded in the everyday culture of families, school curriculums, and popular media. Furthermore, Hashimoto reveals that there is no single collective memory in Japan; rather, multiple and conflicting war memories, with different narratives, coexist and compete for legitimacy. In order to illuminate this complex field of narratives of Japan's war memories, Hashimoto very effectively employs the triad of heroes, per-petrators, and victims, archetypes originally used by German sociologist Bernhard Gie-sen in his study of German postwar memo-ries. In Japan, the hero narratives include valorous stories of fallen soldiers that depict them as heroes sacrificing their lives for their country. Victim narratives feature "innocent" and "powerless" civilians and soldiers, who lost their lives "in vain" in air

raids, atomic bombs, and reckless military operations. Perpetrator narratives, in con-trast, emphasize Japan's active roles in invasion, exploitation, and violence in East Asia. While the heroes typically play a cen-tral role in the narratives associated with the battleship Yamato as well as in the speeches of "reactionary" politicians, "vic-tims" dominate the narratives in stories directly or indirectly told by parents and grandparents in their homes. Perpetrator narratives emerge in some academic publi-cations and journalism that discusses such topics as the Nanking massacres, Korean "Comfort Women", and the Okinawa mass suicides. Various individuals and social groups convey these three types of narra-tives, with a view to presenting their differ-ent interests. Using this triadic schema as a conceptual map, Hashimoto beautifully delineates the constellation and dynamism of the narrative field of war memories that constitutes Japan's postwar "culture of defeat".

Second, notwithstanding the variety of war memories in Japan, Hashimoto illumi-nates the lasting dominance of victim narra-tives in everyday lives, not just in the biographical storytelling of family anec-dotes but also in the representations in school curriculums and the popular media. The repeated narratives of powerless suf-fering on battlegrounds and the home front as representing the essence of war experi-ences evokes deep feelings of cultural trauma in the postwar generations. More-over, Hashimoto points out, the stories of powerlessness of the "forced sacrifice" made by parents and grandparents forge a strong anti-war sentiment, which is typically represented in such common phrases as "that suffering should never be repeated" and "war is just bad". The memory of this negative sentiment associated with war is also a powerful motivator of Japan's post-war pacifism. In the sessions on peace edu-cation that take place in peace museums around the country, as described in the Chapter 4 of the book, the stories of violent deaths and abandonment are commonly used to induce negative emotions of pity, horror, and fear and to reiterate the pre-ciousness of peace. Hashimoto argues that peace is thus a "normative frame that ren-ders social solidarity possible" in postwar Japan (p. 88). To be sure, perpetrator nar-ratives gained prominence in journalism and school curriculums in the 1990s and 2000s, and the neo-nationalist discourse, that sought to bring the tales of war heroes back into the limelight, emerged as a back-lash to the rise of perpetrator narratives. However, peace, as a major cultural code, still works as a common platform for incon-gruent narratives to coexist and keep the cultural memory of the past alive.

In this book, Hashimoto also makes a criti-cal assessment of Japan's pacifism. First of all, the dominant narratives of the "power-lessness" of our parents and grandparents obscure "perpetrators' responsibility". The latter has now been empirically established as a fact, showing beyond doubt that most wartime Japanese supported the war. Sec-ondly, these narratives tune into the ethno-centric blindness to the sufferings of others in Asia, especially Koreans, Chinese, and Oki-nawans. This makes it evident that the emo-tional understanding of peace tends to encourage romantic "just-say-no-to-war" atti-tudes rather than a logical reasoning of the complex causal chains of historical events.

One of the great strengths of this book is a comparative perspective, which the author calls "a method of shadow compari-son". Throughout the book, Hashimoto refers to several works on memory culture and cultural trauma in other societies. For example, drawing on literature exploring

the German situation, Hashimoto remarks that since the 1970s, the public dominance of perpetrator narratives since the 1970s has forged a "culture of contrition" in post-war Germany, which is in sharp contrast to Japan's "culture of peace". Examining the cases of post-Vietnam Americans and post-Holocaust Jews, Hashimoto also notes that prioritizing the feelings of powerlessness "close at home" is not unusual after the predicament of defeat or mass destruction. However, her study suggests that Japan's pacifism, which has been shaped by persis-tent attempts to overcome the humiliation and disgrace of the defeat and is informed by the bitter cultural trauma of powerless victimhood, is quite unique.

In the final chapter, Hashimoto discusses the possibilities for Japan to move beyond the culture of defeat and establish itself as a normal country. While, she stresses, the importance of a "reconciliationist" approach for Japan to obtain the trust and respect of former victims and adversaries and to form better relations with regional neighbors, Hashimoto does not naively believe that the German model of repenting for the past (i.e., the Holocaust, in their case) can be a universal standard or global norm for recon-ciliation. It is not certain if the practice of addressing past wrongs through repentance, confession, and forgiveness have profound public resonance outside the Judeo-Christian world. Presupposing a hierarchy of civiliza-tion, having a "global norm" could even evoke resentment against the implication that not conforming to the norm is backward and morally inferior. Moreover, whereas the demarcation between victims and perpetra-tors or innocence and guilt is far from clear-cut, and open to dispute, the process of globalizing memory norms and a creating common understanding demands greater clarification of these terms. This dilemma drives normalizing Japan into an impasse. In the last page of the book the author declares: "the new international world order demands imaginative concessions and innovative compromise to break the logjams of histori-cal grievances" (p.141). However, this is a difficult task, and how it can be accomplished remains unanswered in this book.

Undeniably, the importance of victim narratives and the emotional resilience of pacifism may be rather self-evident for most Japanese readers. Yet Japan's post-war memory of culture has not hitherto been discussed in such an empirically robust and analytically sophisticated way. This book will prove useful for Japanese readers and experts on Japanese history and society to reflect on the history prob-lem (rekini ninsiki mondai) from a socio-logical perspective. Since the book is quite short and clearly written, it is recom-mended for non-Japanese and non-expert readers (including college and graduate students) interested in postwar Japan.

Shigeki Sato Hosei University