Review of “Public History in Japan. Theory and Practice”, edited by Masafumi Yokemoto, Miho Hayashi, Michihiro Okamoto, Andrew Gordon; Springer Singapore, 2025

Review of Public History in Japan. Theory and Practice, edited by Masafumi Yokemoto, Miho Hayashi, Michihiro Okamoto, Andrew Gordon; Springer Singapore, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-95-1316-1

The Japanese Association for Public History was founded in Tokyo in 2019, largely thanks to the work of Michihiro Okamoto, who had coordinated a Public History Study Group at the University of Tokyo. Since then, debate on what public history means in Japan has also developed internationally, in dialogue with the International Federation for Public History. The volume reviewed here forms part of this broader reflection on the field’s development in Japan and beyond. It examines how public history seeks legitimacy in the Japanese context: on what grounds, through which topics, practices, and methods, and against the background of a traditional academic historiography that has long regarded participatory, media-based, and civic approaches to the study of the past with caution.

Andrew Gordon is one of the book’s four editors and the only one who does not contribute a chapter. Since 2020, Gordon, an American Japanologist, Harvard University professor, and former chair of both the Department of History and the Harvard University Asia Center, has directed the Japan Disasters Digital Archive:[1] a catalogue and search engine for archived digital materials related to the 11 March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. In the preface to the book, he notes that the chapters are divided “into sections on theory and practice, but the divide is hardly rigid. Chapters in the “Theory” section address specific examples of public history practice, and chapters in the “Practice” section offer theoretical insights.” The book’s two parts therefore combine a more theoretical approach to the Japanese case with methodological reflection, while the second part turns to concrete examples in which history moves beyond the university and is produced through archives, literature, tourism, memory, museums, and community practices. Both sections contain four chapters. The more theoretical part does not present public history as the mere dissemination of historical content and narratives to wider publics, but as a field marked by interpretive, ethical, and political tensions. The practice-oriented section is more heterogeneous: it is less concerned with systematic reflection on how the field has been interpreted in Japan and focuses instead on specific case studies.

Michihiro Okamoto, emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo, opens the volume with an important essay, Public History from a Japanese Perspective, which provides its theoretical framework. I devote more space to this chapter because of its significance not only for the book but also for a broader comparative understanding of how public history has developed across different continents and national contexts. Okamoto discusses “the basic trends in public history, trends in historical research in Japan since its establishment as a modern nation-state, criticism and countercriticism of public history, and changes in approaches to history that are thought to have influenced public history” (p. 11). He reconstructs the main historical definitions of public history, beginning with North America and emphasizing the centrality of the public. He then turns to Japan, showing that the reception of public history there was both late and cautious. The most important aspect of his argument is the way he situates the emergence of public history within the longer genealogy of Japanese historiography from the Meiji period onward. As in nineteenth-century Europe, history in Japan became an instrument of nation-building: in Okamoto’s words, “history was nothing more than a tool for creating a national consciousness” (p. 6). Okamoto then examines the impact of positivism and Marxism on Japanese historiography. In the postwar period, after the collapse of nationalist, “emperor-centred historiography,” historical research became strongly oriented toward economic and political questions. He also discusses the difficulty, within academic settings, of embracing more open and participatory models of historical practice, less strictly confined within disciplinary boundaries; the limited engagement with sociology, ethnography, and anthropology is particularly evident. At the same time, historians in Japan were more engaged in popular history than in many other countries and understood the role of the people in history from two different perspectives: “the people as the object of enlightenment” and “the people as agents of transformation,” the latter being the position adopted by Marxist historians in the movement known as History for the Nation (p. 7). Ordinary people were thus also viewed as agents of change, and people’s history became an important topic of historical research, while ordinary citizens increasingly sought to write their own histories autonomously. Social history emerged in the 1960s, emphasizing everyday life and “history from below rather than history from above” (p. 7). Yet interest in public history in Japan began to develop only in the 2010s, because “in postwar Japan, academic history, both positivism and Marxism, have exercised a controlling influence” (p. 7). Okamoto also argues that a second reason for the late emergence of public history lies in a well-founded fear: public history can easily be appropriated by nationalist revisionism.

Why, then, should public history become important in Japan? Traditional Japanese academic history education, grounded in evidence-based case-study discussion, can certainly be valuable beyond the university, including for students’ professional development, since the research methods used in final theses are applicable in non-academic contexts. Yet Okamoto suggests that public history may become even more significant because of the richness and diversity of the sources it mobilizes. Traditional printed documentary sources were often “left behind by a small ruling elite who monopolised literacy [and] do not reflect the state of society in the past as a whole. […] In contrast, public history uses a wide variety of materials in order to research the past […] and daily life left by ordinary [people]. In other words, in terms of historical sources, it can be said that public history is far superior to academic history” (p. 8). The systematic acquisition of documents through crowdsourcing and digitisation has further strengthened this field. A third reason concerns the making of history “in the public” or “among the public,” especially when the past is communicated through different media. Following Okamoto, the success of historical narratives in the media should encourage academic historians to reconsider how they represent the past in forms capable of engaging broader publics. What Okamoto does not fully address is that academic historians who write for wider publics often become, in practice, professional public historians: they bring to other media not only established narratives, but also the capacity to identify, contextualize, and critically interpret primary sources. In doing so, they must collaborate with other professionals and with ordinary people, developing new ways of practising shared authority. This mechanism of shared authority is precisely what seems underdeveloped in Okamoto’s reconstruction: the capacity of academic historians to remain professionals of the past while also becoming public historians, able to work with amateur historians, communities, and media professionals in interdisciplinary and inter-professional approaches to historical reconstruction.

In the final part of his chapter, Okamoto asks how the idea of public history developed in the late twentieth century, fostered by “the emergence of postmodernism, memory and media studies, and digitisation.” Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) raised the question of whether the past can be faithfully represented through narrative forms such as literature and film. Together with Robert S. Rosenstone, with whom he co-edited the journal Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, White argued that the “practical past” preserved by media and by ordinary people may be more important than the history established by professional historians (p. 10). Okamoto connects this challenge to positivist claims about historical representation with today’s work of Jerome de Groot, a public historian and professor of literature at the University of Manchester, whose innovative book, Consuming History examined the representation of history in literature, popular film, television, drama, and games as forms of public consumption.

A second genealogy of public history lies in the study of social memory. Memories, as intellectual experiences stored in the mind and communicated socially, may become “collective memories”[2] or forms of “cultural” and “communicative” memory transmitted through cultural materials.[3] For Okamoto, collective, social, and cultural memory offer alternative ways of understanding the past, challenging conventional historiography while also enriching public history methods and practices. In the new millennium, the digitisation of documents and the expansion of the internet have enabled people to upload records concerning local communities and families—forms of “crowd history making”—and to circulate them widely. This has empowered ordinary people to contribute to their own histories, even as it has partly displaced the institutions that the first North American public historians of the 1970s considered central to public engagement with the past: museums, historic sites, monuments, and memorials. Since the 1960s, however, history for ordinary people has also been channelled through mass media such as television, and later through the internet and social media, which can entertain large audiences and allow people to make their own histories, sometimes at the expense of historical accuracy.

Okamoto’s opening chapter functions both as a conceptual map of public history in Japan today and as a wider theoretical reflection on the field. At the same time, the Japanese case remains deeply embedded in a highly structured academic historiographical tradition, reluctant to innovation and wary of revisionism and political misuse. Okamoto identifies the reasons why public history began to develop in Japan in the twenty-first century, while also acknowledging that it remains marginal within Japanese universities, where historical research continues to be shaped by “objectivity, factuality, and positivism,” partly because of political pressures. Conservative attempts to revise the history of Japan’s imperial past—especially by marginalizing difficult subjects such as the Nanjing Massacre and the use of comfort women by Japanese troops—have reinforced the fear that such practices might provide ground for nationalist revisionism. In this context, ordinary people who contribute to making history may be perceived as challenging established scholarly knowledge and “providing a basis for conservative historical revisionism.” Such concerns have weakened the legitimacy of a public history that Okamoto defines as “people’s history”, or as the public’s capacity to make its own history and contribute to historical interpretation, thereby strengthening the idea that academic historians remain reluctant to accept “history made or experienced by ordinary people” (p. 12). Okamoto’s essay is important because it historicizes academic resistance to public history and explains why the field emerged later in Japan than in other national contexts. It also defends the relevance of its methods and practices within the specific trajectory of Japanese historiography. At times, however, the opposition between public history and academic historiography is drawn rather schematically, since the former is itself part of historiography, though it develops distinctive methods and practices while still relying on the expertise of professional historians. Okamoto’s interpretation of the relationship among public history, academic history, and politics in contemporary Japan is highly persuasive within the Japanese context. Yet his broader definition of the field sometimes appears too restrictive, especially when it presents it primarily as history made by the people themselves. This leaves insufficient room for a more nuanced inquiry into how public history can remain rigorous and evidence-based while also organizing shared authority among professional public historians, other social scientists, and the communities with whom they investigate the past. If this somewhat schematic vision is applied to Japan, further questions arise. Has public history gained space in universities through specific courses, programmes, or master’s degrees? Or does the division described by Okamoto—between practitioners working through media and the internet, on the one hand, and academic historians committed to positivist research, on the other—remain largely intact? The answer matters because a serious public history, grounded in evidence while open to collaboration, may offer a way beyond the apparent opposition between postmodern engagement with narrative and the positivist search for historical truth in Japanese universities.

The second chapter, by Tetsuya Motohashi, a scholar of literature at Tokyo University of Economics, “Re-enchantment of Histories and the Historiography of Trust,” engages with the division between public history as history made by ordinary people for broader publics and traditional academic research. For Motohashi, literature offers “an example of the interplay between the particular and the universal, focused on its accountability for and responsibility toward the hidden voices of the public” in its engagement with society. This is one of the volume’s most original contributions and makes an important intervention in the wider field of public history. Motohashi examines the impact of Minoru Hokari’s influential work on Aboriginal Australian oral history and its radical challenge to traditional Japanese positivist historiography. Hokari died of lymphoma in Melbourne in 2004 at the age of thirty-two; his book, Radical Oral History: Historical Practice of the Australian Aboriginal People, published in English shortly after his death, had a significant impact on rethinking “the meaning of “historical practice,” i.e., what it means to do history and who is a historian” (p. 15). Written by a young Japanese scholar living within an Australian Aboriginal community, the Gurindji people, Hokari’s book offers an important methodological reflection for practitioners of public history, not only in Japan, who “want to open the arena of historical investigations to the wider public beyond the narrow academic discipline” and to understand historiographical practices “open to the public, carried out by the public, concerned with the public, and offered for the public” (pp. 15–16). Since 2006, the Australian National University has commemorated him through the Minoru Hokari Scholarship for fieldwork.

The essay’s central issue is the contrast between “factual truth” and “truthfulness”: a relational form of historical veracity grounded in trust, responsibility, and forms of knowledge that cannot be reduced to conventional documentary proof. Motohashi insists that history is not only a matter of “narrating the past,” but also of “doing history” with human and non-human subjects, within cosmologies different from those of Western modernity. The language of “re-enchantment” is therefore crucial. It does not imply a rejection of critique, but rather a deconstruction of the idea that only positivist method authorises access to the past. Motohashi’s chapter is ambitious because it directly questions the positivist approach that has long dominated historical research in Japan, a dominance analysed in depth in Okamoto’s introductory chapter. His position might appear to risk opening the door to denialism and revisionism, but he avoids this by arguing that the issue is not to abolish truth, but to broaden regimes of historicity and relationships to the past, especially when engaging with wider publics. In this sense, Hokari’s radical oral history does not reject positivist history altogether. Rather, it foregrounds the reciprocal relationship—what public historians would call shared authority—between the maker of narratives, Aboriginal interlocutors, and the historian as listener, while remaining embedded in a methodological practice responsive to the scientific needs of historical and anthropological research. What emerges from this interaction is not a simple opposition between truth and falsehood, but a distinction between ethical and unethical ways of recounting the past. As Motohashi writes, the difference between “the history recounted by ‘dreaming,’ as practiced by Aboriginal people, and the history recounted by European colonizers […] lies not in whether it is ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but in whether it is ethical or immoral” (p. 21). This chapter shows how the fieldwork of a young Japanese interdisciplinary researcher, who died prematurely, can offer a major contribution to global public history practices and methods. By emphasizing trustworthiness and sincerity, Hokari’s historical and anthropological research with the Gurindji Aboriginal community abandons the claim to a narrative authority grounded in colonial and academic power structures. Motohashi’s analysis reveals a distinction highly relevant for public historians worldwide: the difference between historiography as narration about the past and fieldwork as a way of “doing history,” capable of grasping the embodied, spatial, and affective memories of communities. Hokari’s book, the result of sustained research with an Aboriginal community, introduces a profound critique of academic hierarchies of historical knowledge. Influenced by Morris Berman and Max Weber’s idea of the “re-enchantment of the world,” it invites historians to consider histories narrated not only by human beings, but also by animals, stones, sand, trees, rivers, and wind (p. 17). In this broader conception, Hokari deconstructs the positivist framework that dominates Japanese academic historiography and gives methodological value to the Aboriginal practice of “dreaming.” This perspective is especially important for public historians working with subaltern communities whose cultures are not primarily based on written documents, but on complex relationships among people, places, objects, and non-human presences. For such communities, historical truth may emerge through memory, territory, and practice rather than through archival documentation.

Akira Ide’s chapter, “Public History and Dark Tourism: Passing Down Memories of the Great East Japan Earthquake,” examines the earthquake and environmental catastrophe of 11 March 2011, described earlier as “one of the most significant natural disasters in Japanese history, with the number of people killed or missing (including those who died from related causes) reaching over 22,000 by February 2023” (p. 28). Ide focuses on the Great East Japan Earthquake not only through the memory of the natural disaster, centred on the tsunami, but above all through the nuclear accident and its political implications. The interpretive key is the concept of dark tourism, understood as a form of travel connected to the memory of human tragedies, including wars and disasters. In this context, the promotion of dark tourism becomes a means of transmitting the public memory of Fukushima, particularly in its nuclear dimension. Ide distinguishes between official narratives oriented toward reconstruction and “hope tourism” and narratives that foreground darker aspects: discrimination, reputational damage, divisions within communities, and disparities in compensation. In Fukushima Prefecture, alongside public museums such as the Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum and TEPCO’s Decommissioning Archive Center, a growing number of private museums have been established by ordinary people who do not want “history to be made up by the authorities” (p. 28). This is precisely where public history can play an important role: by addressing people’s histories and silenced dimensions of the past in spaces where official rhetoric remains selective or silent. The chapter’s most interesting argument is that dark tourism should not be reduced to morbid curiosity but understood as a critical practice capable of revealing the contradictions of modernity, the politics of reconstruction, and the unresolved consequences of environmental catastrophe. Although the essay could have examined more fully the commercial and spectacular risks of dark tourism, it clearly shows that the public memory of disaster cannot be limited to the narrative of recovery. It must also include social wounds, injustices, and unresolved conflicts—areas in which public historians can work closely with local communities and their memories. The chapter therefore demonstrates that public memory is always selective and that official institutions often privilege reassuring narratives of resilience. By connecting public history with the politics of memory, Ide shows that narrating Fukushima through a dark tourism perspective means deciding what is made visible and what remains in the shadows, thereby affirming public history’s civic and democratic role in illuminating silenced dimensions of the past.

Public history can be practised not only in traditional sites of memory, but also through literary texts that shape historical imagination. Emi Tozawa’s chapter, “Visiting and Watching Silence: Popular Uses of Historical Fiction About the Christian Persecution in Seventeenth-Century Japan,” offers a sophisticated example of research on the mediation of public history through literature. Tozawa examines the afterlives of Endō Shūsaku’s novel Silence (1966), “one of the most prominent and influential popular cultural texts that have shaped the narrative of Christian persecution in seventeenth-century Japan” (p. 37). Sotome, in the district of Nagasaki, the home of hidden Christians and the setting of Endō’s novel, becomes a central site for understanding the relationship between Japan, Christianity, the Christian West, and Jesuit missions. Tozawa analyses the public remediations and receptions of the novel through museum displays, landscapes, cultural tourism, and film, including Martin Scorsese’s 2016 adaptation.[4] One key example is the Endō Shūsaku Literary Museum, opened in Sotome in 2000 and dedicated to the life and work of the novelist.[5] The museum displays Endō’s books, manuscripts, letters, photographs, and personal possessions, including his writing desk, Bible, rosary, and a statue of Mary inherited from his mother. Yet the museum does more than exhibit the life and work of a twentieth-century Catholic writer: it organizes a way of experiencing the history of Christian persecution by giving space to pain, apostasy, and human fragility—elements often marginalized by heroic or heritage-based narratives. Tozawa shows that public participation is essential to this process. By examining the museum’s visitor books and user reviews of Scorsese’s film, she demonstrates how different iterations of Silence have acquired cultural, religious, and political meanings beyond historical facts, including personal identity affirmation and reflection on colonialism. The chapter persuasively suggests that fiction can be a powerful vehicle for public historical consciousness. Silence simplifies, interprets, and updates the past in line with contemporary sensibilities, without opposing fiction and history. In doing so, it broadens the concept of public history to include cultural reception, showing that novels, literary museums, and narrativised landscapes can produce public history as much as archives or memorials.

The first four chapters discussed above establish the book’s theoretical and methodological axis, while the four contributions in the second part, devoted to practice, further develop the relationship between digital public history, media, archives, memorial practices, and civic participation. They move from the definitional level to the applied dimension of “doing history,” testing these practices in concrete contexts. Makoto Goto examines how artificial intelligence is changing digital public history by prompting a reconsideration of historical description and expertise, especially in relation to digitised archives. The advent of generative AI and large-scale language models is treated through Japan as a case study, while also opening a broader discussion on how AI is reshaping digital public history. Noriko Ijichi’s chapter on Osaka-based Koreans engages with the local history of the Osaka region and with the specific characteristics of a community with a distinct local identity. Rather than treating this community as representative of all Zainichi Koreans in Japan, Ijichi examines how the territorial history and heritage of a circumscribed group can be defined. Miho Hayashi and Masafumi Yokemoto analyse public history practice in relation to environmental pollution (kōgai) and consider how this historical issue can be addressed through public history methods. Finally, Yumi Kamuro examines the archiving of materials related to Minamata disease, a severe case of environmental pollution first identified in 1956. The official archive is held at Kumamoto University, and Kamuro shows how it has been expanded “from the perspective of humanity,” that is, through ethical practices and collaboration with affected communities and patients’ voices. The resulting “ethical archive” is not based only on the official history of the disease, but also on documents and memories contributed by members of the public and different professionals. The addition of approximately 100,000 new items related to the incident challenges an authority traditionally monopolized by academic historians and demonstrates how “doing history” can emerge from collaboration between academic professionals—in medicine, chemistry, law, and sociology—and a diversity of other actors, including patients’ families, support groups, factory workers, and the media (pp. 102–103).

Taken together, these four essays present public history as a civic practice grounded in fieldwork, collaboration, and the recovery of silenced experiences. They further clarify one of the volume’s central arguments: public history, understood as a public service for the knowledge of the past, must engage with marginalized memories and local communities, not simply as objects of study but as active participants in historical interpretation.

In conclusion, the book describes a “Japanised” public history, shaped by distinctive sensibilities and concrete case studies. It does not simply import the Anglo-American model discussed by Okamoto in the introductory chapter but asks why the adoption of public history practices in Japan has been delayed by specific forms of resistance within history departments and among academic historians. This contextualisation is one of the volume’s major strengths. The relationship between public history and the danger of revisionism, especially in relation to political uses of the history of the Japanese empire, is taken seriously across the volume because it directly affects the practice and diffusion of public history in the country. The book warns that, in the Japanese context, public history can also be manipulated, nationalised, and trivialised. In its strongest chapters—especially those on Fukushima and on Silence—the volume rejects a reassuring view of memory and instead foregrounds the tensions of public participation. Public history is not simply a celebration of historical facts or historical truth, but a field of tensions that seeks to address what Michel-Rolph Trouillot described as the silenced dimensions of history. The book also offers global readers non-canonical forms of public history practice, emphasizing historical novels, literary museums, dark tourism, and radical oral history as legitimate ways of expanding what can count as public history. Especially in the chapter on Hokari and truth, the volume suggests that public history does not merely serve to “communicate history better,” but can transform the very way we think about historical knowledge. Its value is therefore epistemological as well as pedagogical, enriching public history as a global field through specific national characteristics and practices.

One limitation of the volume is the marked heterogeneity of its chapters. The contrast between the first, more theoretical section and the case studies presented in the second produces an uneven conceptual balance: the book is rich, but not always fully cohesive. Some essays, especially those devoted to epistemological questions in the Japanese case, are dense and theoretically sophisticated, whereas others are more descriptive. Certain chapters are strongly rooted in local contexts and experiences, while others engage more directly with transnational theories and less extensively with Japanese materials. This may be a limitation for Japanese readers less for an international public because it shows how firmly the volume participates in a broader discussion on the methodologies and practices of public history.

The book demonstrates that, as in other countries, the field encounters scepticism, and sometimes hostility, within universities and among traditional academic historians reluctant to allow ordinary people and communities to participate in the interpretation of their own pasts. The conclusion should therefore make clearer how central trustworthiness, collaboration with non-professional actors, and dialogue with other social scientists and professionals are to the epistemology of public history. In fact, the reader is left wanting a more explicit discussion of where and how shared authority operates across the case studies and reflections offered in the book: all the essays engage with it in practice, but even in the discussion of radical oral history the term itself is never fully addressed or placed in dialogue with international studies of this fundamental concept in public history. That said, it should be strongly underlined that Public History in Japan is an important volume because it shows that, in the Japanese context, public history is not merely a new subfield of historical studies. It is also a challenge to the academic monopoly over historical narration, a testing ground for public memory, and a field of confrontation with revisionism, trauma, heritage, and cultural media.

Not all chapters are equally strong, but the best ones—especially those devoted to the theory of public history in Japan, Minoru Hokari, Fukushima, the afterlives of Silence, and Minamata disease—make the stakes very clear: who has the right to narrate the past, through which media, with what responsibilities, and for which publics. The originality of the volume lies in showing that public history in Japan emerges not as a simple practice of dissemination, but as a complex negotiation among academic authority, wounded memories, political revisionism, cultural media, and different degrees of public participation. For this reason, the book is valuable not only for scholars of Japan, but also for anyone interested in public history as a global discipline and in the place of history in contemporary public life.

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[1] The Japan Disaster Digital Archive, https://jdarchive.org/en

[2] Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Paris, Félix Alcan, 1925.

[3] Jan and Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Munchen, C.H. Beck, 1999.

[4] Martin Scorsese, Silence (2016), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence_(2016_film)

[5] Endo Shusaku Literary Museum, https://www.discover-nagasaki.com/en/sightseeing/453

Serge Noiret

I am a public historian, "History Information Specialist" at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. I obtained my Ph.D. in… Read more

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