Although human rights are often expressed as universal tenets, the concept was conceived in a particular socio-political and historical context. Conceptualisations and practice of human rights vary across societies, and face numerous challenges. After providing an historical account of the conceptualisation of human rights in Japanese society,…

This paper will examine how Japanese education policy was articulated discursively from 1996 to 2010 in the semi-annual speeches of prime ministers to the Diet. It will identify three distinct discourses within these policy statements: a progressive discourse emphasizing the rights of individuals; a neo-liberal discourse of social independence and…

This study proposes a theoretical framework to understand how nations deal with collective memories of perpetration of severe human rights violations, which do not ft comfortably in any national master narrative but have become increasingly difficult to ignore. Building on studies of collective memory, the framework explicates how initial…