Dispatches from the present
You could see phantoms in the smoke—Saigō Takamori and Konoe Fumimaro and Tōjō Hideki and LeMay and Kishi and MacArthur and Kim and Dodge and Rhee flickering in the shadows of the discharge from the homemade gun that killed the former prime minister of Japan, Abe Shinzo. In an America only dimly aware of its own history, the meaningfulness of the global past can easily fade out of sight. But events like the shocking assassination of Abe blast it back into focus.
Well, that’s certainly a picturesque enough story, isn’t it? And it’s not entirely wrong. Abe’s killing was overloaded with the baggage of history, and it did instigate a spike in awareness and discussion of Japanese and East Asian history. The most mainstream of mainstream news sources were obligated to temper their paeans to Abe’s furthering of American regional interests with brief contextualizing remarks about “comfort women” and Kishi Nobusuke’s role in Manchukuo, while in the froth kicked up by the churn of the news—articles for serious readers in serious magazines, long explainer threads on Twitter, “content” from the internet’s favorite political commentators—history was front and center.
It is a rare week when Americans in any number learn about the Reverse Course or the complex aftermath of the postcolonial-civil-world war that took place in Korea. But the pattern itself isn’t rare. The shocking, the strange and the spectacular always seem to demand historical context, and our news and entertainment industries can always provide. What can be harder to muster is a recognition of just how constrained this pattern can be.
Where it appears at all in America, attentiveness to history is defined by the kind of recent event relevance seen in the case of Abe’s death. Global history is boxed up into the historicity of the news: books about Stalin sell when Russian invaders cross into Ukraine; the Jane Collective comes to mind when the Supreme Court demolishes a right; we study the Beer Hall Putsch while we follow along with the January 6th hearings. The best and worst of this phenomenon, though easy to pick out, tell us little about it. Of course it is heartening when some headline sounds the bell for serious grappling with the past and how to use it; of course it is aggravating when “historical explainers” mystify and mythologize more than they historicize, or worse, when they just lie.
The middle ground, on the other hand, tells more of the tale: contextualizing remarks that really do contextualize, historical primers that really do teach some history before they are put back on the shelf. These bare archaeologies of recent events can be emotionally and intellectually satisfying, but readers reliant on them as their primary exposure to the past risk compressing history into a mere passive assemblage of background facts. The contemporary dominance of history as explanation conceals history’s status as a contested narrative space, something that is always fought over in the present to determine its impact on the future. Platitudes about knowing the past or repeating it remain just that without a marrow-deep recognition of the need to actively enforce the disjunction—something not necessarily implicit in the way Americans learn history to more sagely shake their heads at the news.
The parochiality and impotence of the historicity of the news are all the more obvious when the stories the news relates expose a sharp alternative: the historiography of the powerful. Half the reason history was in the headlines after Abe’s death was because of his own entirely more tendentious dealings with the past. Any honest summary of his legacy must acknowledge that Abe and his government pursued their vision of a further rearmed, regionally dominant and “beautiful” Japan through educational policies that whitewashed imperial violence and public statements that outright denied it. Abe took hold of Japanese history and exerted himself to wrench it into such a shape that he could claim his colonialist grandfather with pride rather than shame.
This contrasting pattern—the ascendant right engraving its bad history into the edifice of a larger project with the tools of state—is just as characteristic of the day as the historicity of the news. From on high, history spreads out like a continent ripe for conquest: from the Supreme Court’s use of insultingly fallacious historical reasoning in Dobbs v. Jackson to Vladimir Putin’s pseudo-historical justifications for the Russo-Ukraine war. The projects may be reactionary, but the mode is not reactive. Rather than brushing away dust and counting strata to satisfy a confused present, historiographers with power like Abe strip-mine the past for the raw materials of their monstrous futures.
The symmetry between the way history emerges in the news and the way it is used by the political actors behind the news is unmistakable. On one side readers come across history as an enervated explanation for a permanent present; on the other potentates look toward the future as they craft histories with wicked intentionality.
As that contrast comes into focus, it becomes tempting to replace the just-so story with which we began with a just-so prescription: we must not be satisfied to consume history as it comes, or to let it end with explaining the present; we must adopt the historiography of the powerful for ourselves, look out across the fullness of the past with a sense of aristocratic ownership to identify and use—more truthfully and more humanely than men like Abe—the resources with which we will build our future.
As before, there is something to that. But the situation wouldn’t be quite as complex or quite as grim if a seismic shift in the dominant modes of approaching the historical could be effected merely by wishing it so. Constant, reactive context and historical explanation are only needed, after all, when a more bountiful relationship to the past has been withheld.
With any luck, however, events like Abe’s assassination—events that force mighty collisions between the historicity of the news and the historiography of the powerful—will force up a new landscape where that relationship could grow. A single article discussing history or even discussing the discussion of history could never bring about the mass development of a fuller sense for history. Persistently coming face to face with the historiography of men like Abe in the news, on the other hand, might effectively demand it.
Photo credit: Prime Minister’s Office of Japan (CC / BY 4.0)