The Ghosts of Derrida haunting Japan: on Tetsuya Takahashi’s Discourse of Derridean hauntology and its grafting of Issues concerning Japan’s wartime, Colonial and Postwar responsibility in East Asia
The Ghosts of Derrida haunting Japan: on Tetsuya Takahashi’s Discourse of Derridean hauntology and its grafting of Issues concerning Japan’s wartime, Colonial and Postwar responsibility in East Asia

Summary/Abstract: Following the end of the U.S.–Soviet Cold War in 1989 and the death of Emperor Shōwa in Japan, a series of controversies unfolded throughout the 1990s and 2000s over Japan’s war, colonial, and postwar responsibility, particularly between “historical revisionists” and their critics. This paper analyzes the discourse of Tetsuya Takahashi, one of the leading figures criticizing historical revisionism, and demonstrates how his appropriation of Derrida’s philosophy paradoxically exposes his own blind spots. Whereas Derrida sought to re-invoke the “specters of Marx” that had been excluded in the post–Cold War context, Takahashi narrates historical consciousness by excluding these very “specters of Marx.” Such a blind spot, however, is not unique to Takahashi; rather, it is shared by many Japanese who deny the persistence of Cold War structures in East Asia after the end of the U.S.–Soviet confrontation. Reflecting on this blind spot, I argue, is intrinsically linked to considering both the actuality of “East Asian despotism” and the potentiality of an “East Asian simultaneous revolution.”

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