Date: Thursday 23 October 2025, 16:30 – 18:00
Location: Faculty Room, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent

“War Memorials and Religion in Japan: Separation of Religion and Politics and the Role of the Scholars,” given by Prof. Akira Nishimura (University of Tokyo)

Abstract

While the field of memory studies has not yet been fully institutionalized in Japan, the politics of war memory has attracted sustained public and scholarly attention since the immediate postwar years. Especially since 1995—the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war—research on war memory has expanded significantly across disciplines. In this talk, I will explore the connection between politics and religion, which has played a key role in shaping how war memories are preserved and interpreted in wartime and postwar Japan. By looking at this intersection, I hope to show how religious institutions and practices have interacted with political and personal efforts to manage and represent Japanese war remembrance.

Bio

Akira Nishimura is a professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology at the University of Tokyo. His research explores modern and contemporary Japanese religious history, especially issues related to war memory, the Nagasaki atomic bombing, and the collection and repatriation of human remains. He has served as Editor-in-Chief (2016–2018) and President (2018–2020) of the Japanese Society for Sociology of Warfare. In 2022, he co-edited the five-volume series War and Society, acting as the lead editor for Volume 5, Transforming Memory and Commemoration (In Japanese, Iwanami Shoten Publishing). Other publications related to the lecture are:

• “The Commemoration of the War Dead in Modern Japan” in Numen, 66 (2-3), 2019.4, pp.139-162.
• “Battlefield Pilgrimage and Performative Memory: Contained Souls of Soldiers in Sites, Ashes, and Buddha Statues,” in Memory Connection Journal,1/1, 2011.12, pp. 303-311.