Overview
- Explains the latest status of the internationalization of public history in the context of Japan
- Clarifies the relationship between Japanese popular culture and history
- Provides an overview of the politics and museums and archives surrounding the “difficult past” in Japan
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About this book
This book explores how public history, a field developing globally, is gaining attention in Japan and being incorporated into existing Japanese academic studies and practices. Public history in Japan is conducted through an interdisciplinary approach, involving not only history but also folklore, sociology, cultural studies, and tourism studies.
Introducing the perspective of public history means more than just applying an imported discipline to Japan; it involves a broad reconsideration of existing scholarly research and practices. Part I of the book provides an overview of the current state of academia in Japan as described above. Part II presents several case studies of public history practices, digital public history, and museums and archives dealing with difficult aspects of the past such as minority issues and environmental pollution in postwar Japan.
This book not only illustrates the current state of public history in Japan but also offers a glimpse into the internationalization of today's public history, fostering active exchanges among researchers and practitioners worldwide.
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Theory
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Front Matter
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Practice
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Front Matter
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Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. He has written numerous books on Japanese history, including A Modern History of Japan (Nihon no 200 nen). He is completing a book on the curation of industrial heritage in 20th and 21st century Japan.
Michihiro Okamoto, Emeritus Professor at Toyo University. He organized the Japanese Association of Public History and became its president in 2024-2025. His main works in Japanese are Past and Histories (2018) and In between Micro History and Big History (2022). He co-edited Western Historiography in Asia: Circulation, Critique and Comparison, De Gruyter (2022)
Tetsuya (Ted) Motohashi is Professor of Cultural Studies at Tokyo University of Economics. He received his D.Phil. in Literature from York University. He is the Japan Section’s president of the International Association of Theatre Critics. His publications include books on theatre, cultural studies, and Japanese translations of Bhabha, Spivak, Butler, and Chomsky.
Akira Ide is a professor at Institute of Liberal Arts and Science, Kanazawa University. He received Ph.D. in Informatics from Kyoto University. His main research theme is dark tourism. He has led the Japanese academic scene of dark tourism and investigates the sites of dark tourism all over the world.
Emi Tozawa is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. Her research interests include the global consumption of Japanese history through historical fiction, particularly since the 1960s, and sensory connections with the past through walking tours and museums. She has published journal articles in both English and Japanese for International Public History and Shisō.
Makoto Goto, Associate Professor at the National Museum of Japanese History (Rekihaku), applies information science to analyze, preserve, and share historical materials. He develops digital methods for encoding and analyzing premodern Japanese texts. As PI of Establishing the Digital History, he leads an open-access platform to engage various stakeholders.
Noriko Ijichi, Professor of Sociology at the Graduate School of Literature and Human Sciences, Osaka Metropolitan University. Vice Director of the Osaka Korea Town Museum. She conducts research on mobility and transformations in the everyday life, with a focus on the Korean region.
Miho Hayashi is Associate Professor at the Center for Fundamental Education, Okayama University of Science. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from Nara Women's University. She is also an archivist certified by the National Archives of Japan. Her majors are modern Japanese history and environmental education.
Masafumi Yokemoto is Professor of Environmental Policy at the Graduate School of Business, Osaka Metropolitan University. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Hitotsubashi University. His research interests include damage compensation in environmental problems and regeneration of pollution-devastated areas.
Yumi Kamuro is an assistant professor at Kumamoto University Archives. Her research focuses on community-based archiving and photographic ethnography, especially on photographers who documented Minamata disease and the preservation of their negative film archives.
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Public History in Japan
Book Subtitle: Theory and Practice
Editors: Masafumi Yokemoto, Miho Hayashi, Michihiro Okamoto, Andrew Gordon
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-95-1316-1
Publisher: Springer Singapore
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-95-1315-4Published: 18 November 2025
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-95-1318-5Due: 02 December 2026
eBook ISBN: 978-981-95-1316-1Published: 17 November 2025
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 114
Number of Illustrations: 13 b/w illustrations
Topics: Historiography and Method, History of Japan, Memory Studies, Cultural Studies, Popular Culture