ABSTRACT
According to John L. Gaddis’s opinion in his article “The Long Peace,” previous scholarship on international relations is characterized by paying much attention to the causes of past wars, while the question of why the third world war has not yet occurred has generally been ignored.
A similar tendency is also observed regarding studies of historical disputes. Much has been written on the clash of historical understanding between Japan and China as well as between Japan and Korea, and the causes for these disagreements have been examined thoroughly. Conversely, the question of why the clash of historical understanding has not occurred between Japan and the United States, despite their divergent understanding of the past, has not yet been thoughtfully studied. What did happen seems to attract more attention than what did not.
Nonetheless, as Gaddis’s article has demonstrated, people draw insight by focusing on what did not happen. This may also apply to studies of historical disputes. Stated plainly, against the background of Japan’s fierce conflicts with Korea and China, regarding interpreting East Asia’s history, the question of why disagreements of this kind never occurred between Japan and the United States is highly stimulating.
This chapter does not address the aforementioned problem, per se. Instead, it aims to identify the discrepancies between Japan and the United States in understanding history. It focuses on Barack Obama’s visit to Hiroshima on May 27, 2016, and illuminates the contradictory views toward the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the Japanese and American sides, respectively. This chapter examines academic discourse and public opinion in the United States and Japan on why the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan and whether the use of nuclear weapons in these circumstances was inevitable.
As a response to Obama’s visit in Hiroshima, Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo visited the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in December 2016, which made 2016 the year of reconciliation over historical issues between Japan and the United States. As is well known, French-German reconciliation after World War II is universally considered to be exemplary for similar issues worldwide. By successfully restoring and maintaining positive diplomatic relations despite clashing interpretations of historical issues, U.S.-Japanese reconciliation provides us with an alternative to the French-German case. In this sense, the U.S.-Japanese relations could serve as a unique paragon for similar conflicts.
