THE SASAKAWA PEACE FOUNDATION

Japan-China Young Historians Conference/PhaseII

9,600,000yen [Self-operated Project]
The Sasakawa Peace Foundation

Recently, trust between the Japanese people and the Chinese people have been severely undermined due to a repeated conflict between two states regarding the perception of history. This issue affects studies and education of history in the entire East Asian region. Furthermore, it is spilling over to the U.S. and beyond, even to a global scale. The SPF held Japan-China Young Historians Conferences for five years starting from 2001 in an effort to facilitate dialogue between Japanese historians and their Chinese counterpart. The outcome of it bore fruit in a form of a book entitled Toward a History Beyond Boarder, which was simultaneously published in Japanese (by University of Tokyo Press) and in Chinese (by Social Sciences Academic Press), and was highly rated in both countries. It was not without a challenge, however, in the sense that mainland Chinese scholars did not take part in it. Moreover, due to the scarcity of information in western countries with respect to the historical issues of China and Japan and their misunderstanding being far from negligible, introducing and disseminating information vis-?-vis the West in this respect is anticipated. In Phase II, study sessions will be held amongst experts including scholars from the mainland China to cover Sino-Japanese Modern history with outcome to be published as annual reports both in Japanese and Chinese. Additionally, Toward a History Beyond Border shall be translated into English for subsequent publication.
In the first year of program, following activities are planned.

Japan-China Historians Dialogue Conference (Five sessions, Japan)
A series of dialogue will be conducted involving Japanese scholars and Chinese counterparts residing both in mainland and overseas to have various issues of Sino-Japanese modern history clarified.
Publication of Yearly Report
(1) Editors: Liu Jie, Professor of Waseda University; Daqing Yang, Associate Professor of the George Washington University
(2) Content: Post-war Sino-Japan relations; healing of the wounds of war and decolonization; status quo of researches and studies underway in Japan and China
(3) Schedule: Selection of authors to whom requests to be sent out (April 2007), followed by submission of first draft (August 2007) and publication (March 2008).
(4) Expected authors: Five Japanese, mainland Chinese, and Overseas Chinese scholars, respectively. Fifteen authors are expected in total.
Translation of Toward a History Beyond Border into English (to be published in Fiscal Year 2008) (1) Publisher: Harvard-Yenching Institute (2) Translators: Daqing Yang, Joshua A. Fogel, Professor of University of California and other young historians (3) Editorial supervision for English translation: In the interest of readers of English version, additional portion will be incorporated to cover insufficiencies in preceding studies done in English-speaking countries.
Information Gathering for the Project Execution Preliminary meetings with collaborators in Japan, China and the U.S. as well as information gathering relating to Sino-Japan historical issues will be carried out.

(First year of a 3-year project)