Jennifer Dixon’s Dark Pasts examines the politics of memory in two countries that have long drawn negative attention for their persistent official denial or relativization of mass atrocities: Turkey and Japan. For studies of official acknowledgement, repentance, and memorialization as tools of justice and reconciliation within and between nations, these two countries often represent the example for what not to do. The history of discrimination and violence against minorities in the late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey, as well as Japan’s history of past wrongs in East Asia during the first half of the twentieth century, present a dispiriting number of cases to study. Dixon selects two emblematic cases: the Armenian Genocide (1915–1917) and the Massacre of Nanjing (1937–1938).
Dixon’s meticulous archival work confirms earlier scholarship in a broad sense: Policymakers in Turkey have either denied that Armenians suffered systematic mass murder or portrayed the deaths as the unintentional byproduct of wartime emergency. Meanwhile, their counterparts in Japan have usually acknowledged that the Nanjing Massacre was wrong, but they failed to develop an unambiguous, consistent policy of apology. Moving beyond this generic finding, however, Dark Pasts presents enormous detail on the twists and turns of memory politics in both countries. Deconstructing simplistic binaries of denial and acknowledgment is the theoretical and empirical ambition, and the great accomplishment, of this work. In what follows, I offer an overview of the book’s contributions to historiography, nationalism studies, and studies of memory politics.
Dark Pasts contains a progression of official responses to mass atrocity. At one end of the spectrum, states deny and silence past wrongs. Moving from there, they may also relativize or mythologize, acknowledge, express regret, admit responsibility, apologize, offer compensation, and commemorate—in this progression. States move in and out of these official positions. For example, officials in Turkey began to acknowledge the mass deaths of Armenians after 2001, while Japan incorporated a degree of acknowledgment to its repertoire of official responses in 1971. However, it would be a mistake to assume that minimal acknowledgment of what happened would necessarily lead to the acknowledgment of responsibility. Turkey has not assumed responsibility for the mass killing of Armenians, and the question of reparations for the descendants of victims is beyond the pale in both countries. To add to that, states do not only move further up the progression: the Japanese political elite’s tendency to relativize the Nanjing Massacre, which was the dominant strategy into the 1970s, disappeared for much of the 1980s and 1990s, but made a powerful comeback in 1998–1999. The case studies of the official politics of memory are summarized with neat figures that describe the historical progression in Turkey (4) and Japan (103).
The extent of empirical detail is one of the distinguishing features of Dark Pasts. Historical evidence in the book includes speeches and official statements by politicians, diplomatic documents, textbook material, documentation by state agencies, newspaper articles, and expressions of non-governmental organizations’ views. In the Turkish case, history textbooks from 1951 to 2007 were analyzed. In addition, Dixon conducted interviews with elites from both countries. Thus, the book captures every little detail in both states’ official narratives, indicative of continuity and change. The descriptive strategy in the book should serve as a template for works on memory politics because it identifies change as a secular trend in the official narrative as the combination of responses by multiple state agencies, rather than a stand-alone statement by one politician or policy by one state institution.
The constellation of international and domestic factors explains whether, when, and how official narratives change. International factors influence the likelihood of change by altering state actors’ material, normative, and electoral calculus. Without international pressure from victim states, third-party states, or nonstate actors, political leaders hardly ever feel obligated to revise the narrative. In the end, however, the content of change is still largely determined by the complex memory politics in which political parties, bureaucrats, social movement activists, and concerned citizens contest the national past. Even though the book’s subject matter prioritizes responses by state institutions, the book offers rich descriptions of civil society groups and opposition political parties participating in these contestations.
One direction for future research is explaining why the causes that are identified in this book come into existence in the first place. I would like to highlight two such causal explanations here. First, in contrasting the responses to atrocities, Dixon argues that countering claims of wrongdoing has been more central to the identity and legitimacy of the Turkish state than the Japanese one. The evidence in the book corroborates that argument, but it does not fully explain why that is the case. Does the nature of the atrocities shape their centrality for identity or legitimacy? Or could one argue that identity and legitimacy are endogenous to how a state handles discussions of past atrocities? In other words, could the Turkish state have avoided placing the genocide question at the center of debates on memory and identity by adopting a different narrative?
Second, the role of the domestic public in pushing the state to revise the official narrative (or not) deserves further scrutiny. Why have domestic activists urged the acknowledgment of atrocities in Japan, something largely absent in Turkey, exceptions notwithstanding? Multiple explanations are offered, albeit implicitly, in the book: (1) perhaps the same identity and legitimacy concerns that shape politicians’ views are on ordinary citizens’ minds too; (2) official censorship in Turkey has made genocide recognition a taboo subject; and (3) Turkish history textbooks have been effective at socializing citizens into denying the Armenian genocide. Obviously, (1) treats domestic activism as a causal explanation for the official narrative, whereas (2) and (3) take the official narrative as the main causal factor shaping citizens’ opinions and actions. Adjudicating these contentions on why nonstate domestic actors sometimes become elements of continuity, rather than change, would have implications beyond the two cases discussed in this book.
In conclusion, Dark Pasts will be a reference for studies of memory politics in all parts of the world with troubled pasts. The book’s excellence in collecting and analyzing archival and interview data should guide historically informed social science scholarship. The theoretical framework and the findings give scholars of history, memory, human rights, nationalism, and international relations much to think about and debate.
