The study focuses on a current dispute about neo-nationalist content in Japanese school books, which is causing political controversy across the borders of the country in all of East Asia and in the academic public debate about problems of coping with the country's colonial past and generally about the social role of history , Memory and history revisionism. The volume embeds these debates, also known as the historians' dispute, in the context of profound structural changes in Japanese post-industrial society since the 1990s, which question traditional identities and at the same time evoke the need for reconstruction.