Abstract
This chapter argues that public history is an effective and crucial tool to reconcile conflicts about history. Public History transmits the results of academic historical research to the general public. Here, three media of public history are surveyed: books, films and TV movies, and museums. In East Asia, there is so far no common history textbook as compared to Europe, but there are exchanges of knowledge and common historical publications between Japan, China and Korea. As for films, there are no equivalents of The French village either in China or in Korea. In their films, Japanese soldiers usually are portrayed as villains. Such antagonistic tendencies are emphasised also through the nationalisms of museums in all three countries. As a solution to the observed problems, the author suggests a common museum for the history of East Asia.
(Translated by Lara Tremblay)
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Notes
- 1.
As of March 2022, the websites of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and of the Manchukuo Museum in Changchun are available in English, the homepage of the Unit 731 Museum in Harbin is available only in Chinese and the site of the September 18 History Museum is not available.
- 2.
For a comparison of museums from East Asia and Europe, see Pingel (2016).
- 3.
I participated in the 2017 Rendez-Vous of the RDV de l’histoire de Blois. For more recent events, see: http://rdv-histoire.com. Accessed: 1 March 2022.
- 4.
Just after my visit in September 2019, I noticed that the statue of a Polish hero had been erected in front of the building (see Museum of the Second World War 2019). This seems to me to be a first step in the Polonization of this internationally conceived museum.
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Kenmochi, H. (2023). The Prospects for Public History in East Asia: History Textbooks, Museums, Cinema and TV. In: Helfer, F., Geiss, P., Müller-Tietz, S., Rohrschneider, M. (eds) Overcoming Conflict. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39237-6_10
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