Between Local and National Historiography: The Mongol Invasions of 1274 and 1281 and their Reinterpretations in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Studies of nineteenth-century Japanese nationalism have mainly dwelled on the ideology and aspirations of political leaders and intellectuals. Most studies implicitly or explicitly build upon the concept of the nation as construed, consciously manipulated and imposed upon the population by a small central elite. In contrast to conventional wisdom, this presentation argues that the formation of a Japanese national identity involved geographically varying interpretations of historical events. To substantiate this hypothesis, this presentation focuses on historiographies of the two Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281, which came into being during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/95 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05. The analysis of these historiographies shows that local actors elevated locally rooted commemorative traditions to a national level and thereby played an important role in constructing a Japanese national identity. As a consequence, Japan’s nation-building process at the end of the nineteenth century was not homogenous and centrally directed, but on the contrary arose from the interplay between local and national levels of political actions and mentalities.