How do societies remember? And what responsibilities do we bear toward pasts we did not experience?
A History Textbook Sparks a Crisis
In the spring of 2001, the historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki stood before a panoramic photographic display at Korea’s Independence Hall, contemplating images of torture, execution, and suffering inflicted on Korean independence activists under Japanese colonial rule. The exhibition was painful to view, but what struck Morris-Suzuki most forcefully was not the content itself. It was the presence of Japanese high school students who had come to confront this history—a history their own school textbooks had largely omitted or minimized.
Morris-Suzuki’s visit occurred during a major diplomatic crisis. The Chinese and Korean governments had lodged formal protests against a Japanese junior high school textbook that, in their view, grossly distorted East Asian history. The textbook in question, produced by the Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho o Tsukuru Kai), offered only brief references to the “comfort women” system of wartime sexual slavery, emphasized myths about heroic early emperors, stressed the “unique glories of Japanese civilization,” and offered generally positive assessments of Japanese colonization in Asia.
This was not a dispute about military alliances or trade policy. It was a conflict over memory—over how the past should be represented, who has the authority to tell historical stories, and what obligations contemporary societies bear toward victims of historical injustice. The textbook controversy illustrates why theoretical frameworks for understanding collective memory are essential. Without them, we risk either naive empiricism (the assumption that we can simply determine “what really happened” and settle all disputes) or cynical relativism (the assumption that all claims about the past are equally valid or invalid).
This reading introduces four theoretical frameworks that will inform our analysis throughout this module: Maurice Halbwachs on the social construction of memory, Pierre Nora on sites of memory and the crisis of historical consciousness, Marianne Hirsch on postmemory and intergenerational transmission, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki on historical implication and the ethics of engagement with the past.
Memory as Social Construction: Maurice Halbwachs
Our starting point is the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), whose foundational studies established memory as a subject for sociological inquiry. Halbwachs’s central insight seems counterintuitive at first: memory, which appears to be the most personal and individual of human faculties, is fundamentally social in nature.
Halbwachs argued that individuals always remember within what he called “social frameworks” (cadres sociaux). We do not simply record experiences and retrieve them later like files from a cabinet. Rather, our memories are continuously shaped, reinforced, and reconstructed through our participation in social groups—families, religious communities, professional associations, and nations. These groups provide the categories, narratives, and reference points that make remembering possible.
Consider how you remember your own childhood. Your memories are not simply recordings of past experiences. They have been shaped by family photographs, stories told at gatherings, comparisons with siblings’ recollections, and cultural frameworks for understanding what childhood means. As Halbwachs put it, “The framework of collective memory confines and binds our most intimate remembrances to each other.” Even our most personal memories bear the imprint of social frameworks.
This insight has profound implications. If memory is socially constructed, then it is also subject to social power. The groups and institutions that shape collective memory are not neutral transmitters of the past; they select, emphasize, and interpret according to their present needs and interests. What societies remember, and how they remember it, reflects ongoing struggles over meaning and identity.
Halbwachs’s framework connects directly to Benedict Anderson’s influential concept of “imagined communities.” Nations, Anderson argued, are communities imagined through shared symbols, rituals, and narratives—including, crucially, shared memories. Collective memory helps create, sustain, and reproduce the imagined communities with which individuals identify. When Japanese nationalists contest the memory of wartime atrocities, or when Korean activists demand official acknowledgment of colonial-era suffering, they are engaged in struggles over the very definition of national identity.
Halbwachs himself died in the Buchenwald concentration camp in March 1945, a victim of the very forces of nationalism and ethnic hatred that his work helps us understand. His tragic fate reminds us that memory studies is not merely an academic exercise—the stakes of collective memory are often matters of life and death.
Sites of Memory: Pierre Nora
Building on Halbwachs, French historian Pierre Nora developed the influential concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) in a monumental multi-volume project on French national memory published between 1984 and 1992. Nora’s argument begins with a provocative claim: we speak so much of memory today precisely because there is so little of it left.
Nora distinguishes between two modes of relating to the past. In pre-modern societies, people lived within what he calls milieux de mémoire—real environments of memory where the past was continuously present through oral tradition, ritual practice, and unbroken chains of transmission. Memory was embedded in everyday life, passed down through generations without conscious effort or institutional mediation.
Modernity, Nora argues, has destroyed these organic environments of memory. Rapid social change, urbanization, and the acceleration of history have severed the living connections that once bound communities to their pasts. In their place, we construct lieux de mémoire—museums, archives, monuments, commemorations, and textbooks. These are deliberate efforts to preserve and transmit memory that would otherwise be lost.
The distinction carries important implications. Sites of memory are not neutral repositories of the past. They are constructed in the present, shaped by contemporary concerns, and subject to ongoing contestation. A war memorial does not simply record historical events; it interprets them, assigns meaning, and makes claims about what should be remembered and how. The Japanese textbook controversy was, in Nora’s terms, a battle over which lieux de mémoire should be authorized and what stories they should tell.
Nora also draws a crucial distinction between memory and history. Memory, in his formulation, is living, evolving, and bound up with present identity. It “remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting.” History, by contrast, is “the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.” History belongs to everyone and no one; memory belongs to living groups who use the past to define themselves in the present.
This distinction helps explain why historical controversies in East Asia generate such intense emotion. When Korean activists demand that Japan “correctly remember” colonial-era atrocities, they are not simply asking for accurate historical scholarship (though they want that too). They are demanding recognition—an acknowledgment that the suffering of their parents and grandparents matters, that it deserves a place in the collective memory of the perpetrator nation. The stakes are not merely epistemic but deeply personal and political.
Postmemory: Marianne Hirsch
How do later generations relate to traumatic events they did not directly experience? This question animates the work of literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, who developed the concept of “postmemory” through her study of second-generation Holocaust survivors.
Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before. It is “post” in the sense that it comes after direct memory, mediated through stories, images, and behaviors that surrounded children as they grew up. Yet it is also deeply connected to memory through powerful affective bonds. The children of survivors may not have witnessed the trauma themselves, but they grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their births, shaped by experiences they could not directly access but that nonetheless structured their lives.
Hirsch’s insight is that postmemory is not simply “memory lite”—a weaker version of the real thing. It has its own distinctive characteristics and dynamics. Postmemorial subjects often feel an overwhelming desire to know what happened, combined with an awareness that they can never fully understand experiences they did not live through. They may feel guilty for having been spared, or obligated to bear witness on behalf of those who suffered. The transmission of trauma across generations creates what Hirsch calls an “affiliative” relationship to the past—a connection that is chosen and cultivated as much as inherited.
While Hirsch developed the concept primarily through Holocaust studies, postmemory has proven remarkably applicable to East Asian contexts. Consider the children and grandchildren of comfort women survivors in Korea, or the descendants of Nanjing Massacre victims in China. These later generations did not experience colonial violence or wartime atrocity directly, but they have inherited its effects—through family silence or testimony, through memorial practices and political activism, through the ongoing diplomatic conflicts that bring the past constantly into the present.
The concept of postmemory also helps us understand why memory contests intensify rather than fade over time. As direct witnesses die, later generations may feel an urgent responsibility to preserve and transmit their stories. The “Wednesday Demonstrations” held in Seoul since 1992—the world’s longest-running protest—now include many participants who were born decades after the war. Their engagement with comfort women’s history exemplifies postmemorial witness: a chosen affiliation with the past that carries its own forms of obligation and agency.
Historical Implication: Tessa Morris-Suzuki
The theoretical frameworks we have examined so far help us understand how memory works. But they leave a crucial question unanswered: what should we do with this knowledge? What responsibilities, if any, do contemporary people bear toward histories of violence and injustice that preceded their births but continue to shape their world? Tessa Morris-Suzuki addresses these ethical questions through her concept of “implication.”
Morris-Suzuki begins by rejecting two unsatisfying positions. The first holds that we bear no responsibility for events that occurred before we were born—that the past is simply past. The second holds that we inherit collective guilt for our ancestors’ actions—that contemporary Japanese, for instance, should feel personal guilt for wartime atrocities. Both positions, Morris-Suzuki argues, are inadequate.
Instead, she develops the concept of implication. We are implicated in historical injustice not because we caused it, but because we inherit its structures and often continue to benefit from them. The economic relationships, territorial boundaries, and institutional arrangements that emerged from Japanese imperialism did not disappear with Japan’s defeat in 1945. Contemporary people live within frameworks shaped by colonial and wartime violence, even when they played no part in creating those frameworks.
Morris-Suzuki identifies three forms of implication, each carrying different ethical implications:
Implication through continuing benefit: When contemporary people enjoy advantages that derive from historical injustice—wealth accumulated through colonial exploitation, for instance, or territorial claims established through conquest—they are implicated in that injustice even without any personal wrongdoing.
Implication through ongoing harm: When historical injustices continue to cause suffering in the present—as when survivors of wartime violence live with physical and psychological trauma, or when descendants face discrimination rooted in colonial-era categories—those who could address this harm but do not become implicated through their inaction.
Implication through the perpetuation of injustice: When people actively reproduce or defend historical injustice—by denying that atrocities occurred, by celebrating perpetrators, or by supporting institutions that continue discriminatory practices—they become implicated in the original wrong, not merely in its memory.
Morris-Suzuki pairs this analysis of implication with a concept she calls “historical truthfulness.” Truthfulness is not simply a matter of getting facts right, though accuracy matters. It involves a disposition toward the past characterized by openness, humility, and willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. Truthfulness requires acknowledging what we do not know, attending to silenced voices, and remaining open to evidence that challenges our preferred narratives.
The textbook controversy that opened this reading illustrates what Morris-Suzuki means by the absence of truthfulness. The Society for History Textbook Reform’s project was not simply to revise understanding of the past; it was to obliterate certain memories from public consciousness. Morris-Suzuki likens this to the work of Holocaust revisionists—a “historiography of oblivion” whose purpose is not truth-seeking but the erasure of inconvenient pasts.
Conclusion: Memory, Power, and Responsibility
The four theoretical frameworks examined in this reading offer complementary insights into the workings of collective memory in East Asian societies.
From Halbwachs, we learn that memory is fundamentally social—that what we remember and how we remember it depends on the groups we belong to and the frameworks they provide. This insight alerts us to the power relations embedded in memory: who gets to shape the frameworks within which societies remember?
From Nora, we learn that modern memory operates through constructed sites—museums, textbooks, memorials, and commemorations. These sites are not neutral transmitters of the past but battlegrounds where competing visions of history contend. Understanding this helps us see memory contests like the textbook controversy not as deviations from proper historical practice but as inherent features of modern memory culture.
From Hirsch, we learn that traumatic memory does not simply fade with the passing of direct witnesses. Postmemory transmits the effects of trauma across generations through affective bonds that create new forms of witness and obligation. This explains why memory conflicts in East Asia often intensify rather than resolve over time, as later generations take up the work of remembrance.
From Morris-Suzuki, we learn that memory is an ethical domain. We are implicated in historical injustice not through personal guilt but through the structures we inherit and the choices we make about how to engage with the past. Historical truthfulness demands more than accuracy; it requires openness, humility, and willingness to confront uncomfortable truths.
These frameworks will inform our analysis throughout this module as we examine specific memory contests across East Asia. In the weeks ahead, we will apply them to textbook controversies, memorial sites, survivor testimony, and diplomatic negotiations. The goal is not to resolve these conflicts—they involve genuine disagreements about values and interests that theory alone cannot settle—but to understand them more deeply and to engage with them more thoughtfully.
William Faulkner’s famous observation bears repeating: “The past is not dead; it isn’t even past.” In East Asia, the past lives on in memorial sites and diplomatic protests, in family stories and school curricula, in bodies that bear the marks of historical violence and in minds shaped by narratives of suffering and resistance. Understanding how memory works is the first step toward engaging responsibly with the pasts that continue to shape our present.
Core Readings
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 2005. The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History, chapters 1 and 2. London: Verso.
Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26: 7–24.
Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, introduction. New York: Columbia University Press.
Further Reading
Anderson, Benedict. 2006 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso.
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992 [1925]. On Collective Memory. Translated and edited by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Olick, Jeffrey K., Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds. 2011. The Collective Memory Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seraphim, Franziska. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
Weedon, Chris, and Glenn Jordan. 2012. “Collective Memory: Theory and Politics.” Social Semiotics 22 (2): 143–153.