Writing History in America's Shadow: Japan, the Philippines, and the Question of Pan-Asianism(Kyoto CSEAS Series on Asian Studies)

Both the Japanese and Filipino people experienced a re-writing of their national histories upon being defeated by the United States: the Philippines after 1902 and Japan after 1945. This re-writing was conducted in order to justify and explain US rule and its ideology of modernisation and democracy. These new histories portrayed the immediate past as the dark ages: the Spanish colonial period for the Philippines and Japan's wartime totalitarianism and militarism. What kind of dilemmas and contradictions did Filipino and Japanese historians and intellectuals embrace by accepting the US re-writing of their national histories? Did Japanese Filipino and Japanese historians interact at all, under the US hegemony? The idea of America's Shadow is meant to shed a light on areas of darkness in both Japanese and Philippine historiographies and understanding of their region. Through an examination of the commonalities, differences and interactions of Japanese and Filipino histories, ideas of history, modernisation theory, and area studies, Serizawa makes an important contribution to sorting through the tangled histories of Asia in the complicated matrix of colonial, wartime and Cold War contexts.

About the Author :
Takamichi Serizawa is a research fellow at the Institute for Research in Humanities in Kyoto University.

Review :
“An important read for scholars of Japanese and Southeast Asian Studies... intended to demonstrate that despite Japan’s Pan-Asian discourse, American knowledge and power has defined Japanese and Filipino history writing since the early twentieth century.” “Writing History in America’s Shadow is especially adroit at demonstrating the underlying legacies of Orientalism and imperialism on US area studies, including Japanese studies and Southeast Asian studies. . . . [This book] is an astute meditation on history and politics, modest and at times disjointed in its historical scope but ambitious in its historiographical intervention.” “Employing almost ten years’ worth of archival research and interviews, Serizawa’s book is commendable for its documentation of the individual histories of numerous Japanese scholars and his explanation of the political context behind their intellectual works, which were for either propaganda or academic use. Many of those included in this book are understudied, which gives Serizawa the leverage on the selection of these authors.”