Thursday 16 November – Wednesday 6 July 2011
2006 Daiwa Japan Forum Prize Lecture
Daiwa Foundation Japan House
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
In recent years, controversies over the content of Japanese history textbooks and visits to Yasukuni Shrine by Prime Minister Koizumi and other senior government officials have placed the international spotlight on the ways that Japanese people remember World War II. The lecture, based on Dr Seaton’s 2005 article in Japan Forum, will provide a critique of the reporting of these two issues in the British media. By focusing on ‘newsworthy’ controversies, on the stance of the Japanese government and diplomatic confrontations between Japan and China/South Korea, the British media, it will be argued, may have under-represented the complexity and contested nature of Japanese war memory. The lecture will seek to balance the debate by considering how these same issues are being addressed today from within Japan.
Philip Seaton’s winning article appeared in Vol.17, No.3, 2005.
About the contributors
Dr Philip Seaton
Dr Philip Seaton has taught in the Institute of Language and Culture Studies, Hokkaido University since 2004. He first went to Japan in 1994 on the Japanese Ministry of Education’s JET Programme as a junior high school English teacher. He mixed teaching positions with postgraduate research in the UK before completing his DPhil in 2004. His research is about how World War II is remembered and commemorated within contemporary Japanese society, particularly in the media and popular culture. His first book, Japan’s Contested War Memories, is due to be published by Routledge early in 2007.
William Horsley
William Horsley (chair) is a senior BBC foreign correspondent who has spent over 10 years as a TV and Radio reporter covering Japan, China and other parts of Asia. He took a degree in Japanese Studies at Oxford University in 1971 and was BBC Bureau Chief in Tokyo from 1983 to 1990. He is the co-author with Roger Buckley of Nippon: New Superpower (BBC Books, 1990). He is now a BBC World Affairs Correspondent based in London, and Chairman of the Association of European Journalists in Britain. The Daiwa Japan Forum Prize was inaugurated in 2001 and is awarded for the best article submitted to Japan Forum in the last year by a junior scholar. The official journal of the British Association for Japanese Studies, Japan Forum provides a comprehensive source of analytical articles in the field of Japanese Studies, and makes scholarship on Japan available to an international readership of specialists and non-specialists. It is published by Routledge.