Articles

The development of Japan's university sector was a key factor in Japan's modernization process after the Meiji Restoration. The period from the 1870s to 1940s was also a period of Japanese imperialism, and from the 1930s, militarism. As a result, many of Japan's oldest and most prestigious universities, both national/public and private, made important scientific, social, and intellectual contributions to imperialism and militarism. This article examines how three prestigious universities in Kyoto—Kyoto University, Ritsumeikan University, and Doshisha University—have presented their wartime roles in university histories. These universities—a national (formerly imperial) university, a private secular university, and a private religious university, respectively—constitute a useful microcosm of the broader higher education sector in the 1930s. Furthermore, Kyoto's relative lack of wartime destruction during air raids forces the universities to focus on their active roles in the war effort rather than passive victimhood. The article analyzes the universities' histories as presented in university websites, official university histories, on-campus exhibitions, and the research of individual academics and employees. It demonstrates how a university produces multiple versions of its own history, presenting quite different images of its past. Understanding these differences requires identifying the actors within the university who produced the history, for what purpose, and how they disseminate the narrative. Universities must balance the desire to use "history for promotion" while remaining faithful to historical honesty, accuracy, and scholarship regarding an extremely divisive period of national Japanese history. The development of Japan's university sector was a key factor in Japan's modernization process after the Meiji Restoration. The period from the 1870s to 1940s was also a period of Japanese imperialism, and from the 1930s, militarism. As a result, many of Japan's oldest and most prestigious universities, both national/public and private, made important scientific, social, and intellectual contributions to imperialism and militarism. This article examines how three prestigious universities in Kyoto—Kyoto University, Ritsumeikan University, and Doshisha University—have presented their wartime roles in university histories. These universities—a national (formerly imperial) university, a private secular university, and a private religious university, respectively—constitute a useful microcosm of the broader higher education sector in the 1930s. Furthermore, Kyoto's relative lack of wartime destruction during air raids forces the universities to focus on their active roles in the war effort rather than passive victimhood. The article analyzes the universities' histories as presented in university websites, official university histories, on-campus exhibitions, and the research of individual academics and employees. It demonstrates how a university produces multiple versions of its own history, presenting quite different images of its past. Understanding these differences requires identifying the actors within the university who produced the history, for what purpose, and how they disseminate the narrative. Universities must balance the desire to use "history for promotion" while remaining faithful to historical honesty, accuracy, and scholarship regarding an extremely divisive period of national Japanese history.