JPOSS #50: “Legacies of Settler Mortality and Historical Memory in Settlers’ Home Regions”

The fiftieth session of the Japanese Politics Online Seminar Series (JPOSS) took place on May 9, 2024. Yusaku Horiuchi (Dartmouth College) chaired the seminar and moderated the Q&A session.

Harunobu Saijo (Hiroshima University) presented a pre-analysis plan co-authored with Jing Xu (Tsinghua University) in preparation for their survey implementation in the upcoming months. The authors examine the role of collective memory and historical prejudice in shaping outgroup prejudice, with a focus on a possible mitigating mechanism. They theorize that narratives making explicit the duality of ingroup members as both victims and perpetrators can potentially reduce outgroup hostility. In order to test different components of their theory, the authors make use of two separate analyses on newly collected data on emigrants from the Nagano prefecture to Manchukuo in the 1930s and 1940s. First, they exploit the natural variation in death rates of emigrants to examine the effects of collective victimization on attitudes of ingroup members who are exposed to the balanced framing narrative implemented in the prefecture’s educational program today. Second, they design a factorial vignette treatment to isolate the effects of the balanced framing narrative.

Volha Charnysh (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Anil Menon (University of California, Merced) offered insightful comments on the theory, pitfalls of the empirical design, and possible ways to strengthen the analysis. During the Q&A session, participants furthered discussions on ways to improve the paper and its proposed analysis, tips on the survey implementation, and ideas for further consideration.

The organizers would like to thank the presenters, discussants, and participants, as well as the staff at the Harvard Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, who provided administrative support. We look forward to seeing you at the next session of JPOSS:  https://jposs.org/.

Originally published on the Japanese Politics Online Seminar Series blog. Original publication can be found here.