WAR AS A STRUCTURAL ELEMENT OF NATIONAL IDENTITY: PERSPECTIVES FROM UKRAINE AND JAPAN

Abstract

This article examines war as a structural element of national identity through the cases of Ukraine and Japan. It argues that, despite the countries’ contrasting sociocultural and wartime experiences, war consistently emerges as a profound factor in shaping national self-consciousness. Methodologically, the study combines comparativetheoretical analysis with the use of semi-structured expert interviews (October 2023 – February 2024) conducted with representatives of the religious and academic spheres in both countries, which served as a heuristic source for interpretation. The theoretical framework combines Benedict Anderson’s concept of the “imagined community” and Jan Assmann’s notion of cultural memory as a factor in the temporal continuity of national identity with studies of the role of war in nation-building (P. Fennell, D. Black, J. Hutchinson). In the Ukrainian context, war acts as an active and visible constructor of collective experience that shapes national identity. This manifests itself in official and unofficial memorials, everyday acts of commemoration, largescale volunteer initiatives, and so on. Under different historical circumstances, war envelops nations in distinct ways. In particular, the Japanese case illustrates the opposite mechanism–a regime of structural amnesia and selective forgetting following defeat in the Second World War. Occupation policies, the adoption of a pacifist constitution, and the memorialization of the victims of the atomic bombings have produced a victim-narrative and affirmed the value of peace. The erasure of the aggressive dimension of history became a strategy for constructing a new national identity that emphasizes pacifism and victimhood. The results of this study demonstrate that war, as a structural factor of national identity, can operate simultaneously in two modes–active and passive–yet in any case remains present “behind the scenes” of each nation’s unique cultural code. Whether through active heroization of memory or through strategic forgetting, war embeds in the collective consciousness those values, rituals, and notions of belonging to the community without which long-term unity would be impossible. This approach allows us to view war not merely as a historical episode but as a constant, dynamic factor that shapes and transforms national identities.