Takamichi Serizawa states in his conclusion to Writing history in America's shadow that his book is 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. The Introduction contains a brief genealogy of Japan's discourse and practice of Pan-Asianism and Pan-Asianists, beginning with the Meiji datsua–koa framework. Datsua, ‘Leave Asia’, refers to the ideology of emulating the West, and Western colonialism, while koa, ‘Stay with Asia’, refers to aligning with other Asian countries to present a unified front against Western colonialism. Serizawa demonstrates that the datsua–koa binary does not strictly exist, with case studies showing how Japanese historians blurred the lines in their writing about and engagement with Japanese as well as Southeast Asian history.
This book traces how American Orientalist perspectives on Philippine and Japanese histories have influenced both countries’ own historians. For the Japanese, this discourse had a trajectory of demonising Japan's past and revelling in the ways in which American influence had made it a better country. This approach included banning the use of the term Daitoa Senso (Greater East Asian War) to describe Japan's actions during the Second World War, and replacing it with the term ‘Pacific War’, to present the idea that the Japanese ‘militarists’ were evil. It was also intended to highlight the idea of the postwar transformation of Japan into a peaceful, democratic state. Such views also influenced Japanese ‘peace nationalism’, which rejected and shamed its militaristic past in favour of a more modern ‘enlightened’ postwar present. Serizawa discusses Reynaldo Ileto's critique of American scholarship of Philippine history which portrayed Philippine historical figures as ‘negative others’, pointing out that Japanese scholars of the Philippines also engaged this method, despite the fact that within their own country Japanese historians, through ‘peace nationalism’, embraced the American-oriented concept of Japanese history.
Chapter 2 discusses the ‘decolonization’ of area studies in moving towards documentary and archival research requiring no fieldwork. The demonisation of the past was made through critiquing patron-client relations, seen as backward and against the modern democratic practices introduced by the Americans. Serizawa presents the consistency of this ideology in US scholarship which compared Japan's post-war successes, due to its acceptance of American tutelage, with the Philippines’ failures due to its elites’ resistance.
Chapter 3 oddly takes on the case study of Yamamoto Tatsuro, a pioneering scholar of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian history. Serizawa highlights the paradox of Tatsuro who, on the one hand wanted to reject American influence by recognising Southeast Asian scholarship — such as that of the Vietnamese historian Le Thanh Khoi, who introduced a counter-narrative to colonial history — but on the other hand criticised the same scholarship as being subjective. Tastsuro wrote that in order to achieve true post-coloniality, Vietnamese historians had to embrace modernity. Tatsuro's vague stance can be traced to the prewar and wartime experiences of Japanese intellectuals and their ‘failed’ narratives of rejecting the modernity which was offered by contemporary Western colonial powers. While this would eventually end with the Japanese adopting the American ideology of development, Tatsuro attempted to address this issue by modifying the trajectory into an ambiguous one.
Three Japanese scholars who studied and made a career in Southeast Asian History as part of the colonial structures of Japan, Murakami Naojiro, Iwao Seiichi and Yanai Kenji are the focus of the fourth chapter. All three had to navigate the space of imperialism within Japan and in the process, their narratives focused on criticism of the sakoku period which prevented Japan from developing. However, Serizawa's focus is more on the idea that since these scholars were writing during the period of Japan's expansion and colonisation, postwar Japanese scholars treated their works as taboo, with the assumption that their scholarship assisted in Japan's wartime colonising project. The book fails to mention that the patterns of sakoku criticism also align with US developmental approaches, which could be another reason why American scholars were interested in their works.
Chapter 5 traces the genealogy of Japanese scholars writing about the Philippines during the Japanese Occupation. Predominantly focusing on the work of Kimura Ki who wished to appropriate the Filipino heroes, Jose Rizal, Emilio Aguinaldo and Andres Bonifacio for Japanese propaganda purposes, Serizawa shows how this was a replication of the United States’ earlier utilisation of Rizal after they took control in order to demonise the Spanish and validate the American presence in the Philippines.
While the previous chapters discuss historiography or even responses to Japanese historiography, chapter 6 seems out of place as it traces the discussions on the propagation of Tagalog as a lingua franca during the Japanese Occupation as a continuation of Philippine Commonwealth policies. The chapter feels out of place as its only connection to the rest of the book is how this was used to de-Westernise or de-Americanise the Philippines during the occupation. Furthermore, while the book's focus is on history writing, the chapter deals with intellectuals arguing about the national language of the Philippines.
The final chapter is an in-depth study of Japanese writers-translators who worked on the Philippines, during the Vietnam War era. While the chapter features four writers and translators, the sections on Tsurumi Yoshiyuki, who translated a series of books by Renato Constantino, and Ooka Shohei, writing and re-writing his Reite senki (A record of the battle of Leyte) dominate, to the extent that the sections on Matsuhashi's translation of Zaide and Iwasaki's work on Agoncillo seem like footnotes. Yet, the fact that Tsurumi's translation was influenced greatly by his participation in the anti-Vietnam War movement, while the later editions of Ooka's Reite senki were based on his extensive reading of Filipino texts, are not consistent with the rest of the chapter.
Overall, despite some flaws, this book is an important read for scholars of Japanese and Southeast Asian studies as it provides a detailed genealogy of aspects of Japanese and Filipino historiography.
