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The thirteenth session of the 2025-2026 Enemy Encounters in East Asia webinar series of the Research Training Group "Ambivalent Enmity: Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East” at Heidelberg University and the Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies, Germany.
“Ghosts in the Neighborhood: Why Japan is Haunted by Its Past and Germany Is Not”
Walter Hatch
(Professor Emeritus, Colby College)
In this session, Walter Hatch (Professor Emeritus, Colby College) will share his thoughts on the reconciliation of Japan and Germany with their neighbors in the aftermath of the Second World War:
Germany has managed to achieve reconciliation with European neighbors it brutalized in the past, while Japan remains mired in tense relations with neighbors it once invaded or colonized in Northeast Asia. Why? I study paired cases: relations between Germany and France, along with those between Japan and South Korea (Cold War allies now enjoying similarly high levels of economic development); and relations between Germany and Poland, along with those between Japan and China (Cold War rivals with different levels of development). Based on the case study results, I reject the conventional wisdom, which suggests that Germany apologized sufficiently while Japan has not. Instead, I argue that Germany showed a credible commitment to cooperate with its neighbors by nesting itself in regional institutions of economic and security collaboration. Japan has demonstrated no such commitment – in part due to the constraints of its bilateral alliance with the United States.
BACKGROUND
For more information about the Research Training Group "Ambivalent Enmity: Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East”, please go to our website https://www.ambivalentenmity.uni-heidelberg.de/en.
The RTG also produces the podcast series Enemy Encounters which features interviews and in-depth discussions conducted by members of the RTG with scholars, researchers and journalists about various cases of ambivalent enmity in Eurasia as a whole. It can be accessed here and here.
This project has received funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).
