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Taking the Fight for Japan's History Online: The Ramseyer Controversy and Social Media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

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As a historian of premodern Japan active on Twitter, I seldom find myself embroiled in controversies in real time. I occasionally get pushback when I discuss the legacy of female emperors or nationalistic myths of ethnic homogeneity, but by and large, there's little trouble. So I hardly expected any powerful backlash in February of 2021 when I retweeted an article in The New Yorker by Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen on a contentious publication regarding comfort women. In the tweet I had simply remarked “This is a fabulous summary of how this event unfolded across media and academic circles, also placing the major issues in historical perspective.” The result, however, was a ferocious Twitter storm from historical denialists that came to absorb my life and the lives of a number of my colleagues for months thereafter.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2021

References

Notes

1 Ramseyer, “Contracting,” 3.

2 For an examination of the intersection of neto uyo, politics, and their relationship to formal and popular media outlets, see Ogasawara, Midori. “The Daily Us (vs. Them) from Online to Offline: Japan's Media Manipulation and Cultural Transcoding of Collective Memories.” Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia 18, no. 2 (December 30, 2019): 49–67. doi:10.17477/JCEA.2019.18.2.049.

3 J. Mark Ramseyer, “A Monitoring Theory of the Underclass: With Examples from Outcastes, Koreans, and Okinawans in Japan,” (January 24, 2019), 2.