A major achievement, theoretically and empirically, The Long Defeat exposes startling fractures in Japanese identity that will affect regional and global politics for decades to come. Timely and empathic, this is also a deeply disturbing book.
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University
World War II is no longer a lived experience for the ... Read morevast majority of people. But in East Asia today the politics of war memory are more divisive than ever. Ihe Long Defeat is must reading for anyone seeking to understand why. With a deeply grounded comparative perspective, Akiko Hashimoto offers a searching and compassionate analysis of the way people in Japan have dealt with the traumatic memory of war over the long postwar decades.
Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University
The Long Defeat is a sweeping analysis of Japanese memory from virtually every angle - political, cultural, and personal - across the span of postwar history. There is hardly anything else like it. It is an essential contribution to the scholarly literature as well as an exceptionally compelling read
Jeffrey Olick, Professor of Sociology and History, University of Virginia
In this timely, poignant, and eminently readable volume, Hashimoto ... examines Japan's continuing "history problem": the competing narratives of memory seeking to reconcile the present with a very difficult past ... Essential.
T. S. Munson, CHOICE
The Long Defeat is a highly accessible book on Japan in the period since 1985 that should be of interest to a wide popular audience.
Franziska Seraphim, Monumenta Nipponica
Hashimoto makes a welcome contribution to the methodology of trauma studies. She proposes and tests an interesting "method of shadow comparisons," the method of data elaboration.
Joanna Rak, Qualitative Sociology
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