Ways Of Forgetting, Ways Of Remembering - Plot & Excerpts
They follow upon a previous collection published by The New Press in 1993 under the title Japan in War and Peace. The one exception is the first entry, an excerpt from a long essay titled “E.H. Norman, Japan, and the Uses of History” that I wrote as an introduction to an edited book of Norman’s historical writings on Japan published in 1975. Several considerations prompted including this here. The essay was controversial. It was an early attempt to wrestle in a case-study way with how the questions historians ask usually reflect what E.H. Carr called the “buzzing” of their own times.* Reprinting this thus offers a practical starting point for calling attention to the mottled history of writing about modern Japan in English between 1940 (when Norman published the first great scholarly study of the Meiji era and its legacies) and the late 1960s and early 1970s (when I was a graduate student and entry-level academic). None of the texts have been edited or amended, apart from a few editorial changes and notations, and none of the essay titles have been changed.
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