ABSTRACT
This chapter places contemporary conundrum of how to address Japan’s history problem in larger historical context. Under U.S. Occupation, Japan as a subject of history becomes symbolically effaced with patriotic passages from history textbooks inked out. The state of history in postwar period takes a palimpsest form. I then show how such an ambiguous state of history continues to bind the efforts to address Japan’s victims in Asia by examining Norihiro Kato’s thesis in After Defeat and how it resulted in impasse.
