Worlds of Memory in Japan
Wars and disasters shape our world even when they have long passed. As memory they live on in our contemporary societies and impact individual and collective identities as much as they may shape art and politics, and other realms of public life. With Collective Memory and Disaster we address one of Japan’s most recent large-scale disasters, i.e., the earthquake and tsunami in the Tōhoku region, and the meltdown in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor from an interdisciplinary perspective and in international collaboration. In our project on Bearing in Remembrance: Wartime Japan and Germany we ask how the contemporary societies of Japan and Germany, in various institutions such as schools and media reflect on wartime atrocities, and what we can learn from potential commonalities and differences for building a peaceful future.