"I Have No Recollection" — The Institutionalization Mechanism of Political Memory Denial
In Japanese politics, the response 'I have no recollection of that' recurs across parliamentary testimony and records-disclosure proceedings. This is not a matter of individual memory loss; it is a practice of institutionalized ignorance deployed to evade accountability. This essay analyzes the denial of political memory through the framework of agnotology, revealing its mechanisms and functions.
Knowledge is inseparable from power. Saying "I do not know" can itself be a form of power.
What Is Happening
"I have no recollection of that." This phrase recurs in parliamentary testimony and public-records disclosure proceedings in Japan. During the Diet deliberations over the Moritomo Gakuen and Kake Gakuen scandals from 2017 to 2018, government officials produced an unbroken string of responses: "I have no memory of that," "I was not aware of it," "I cannot confirm it."
This is not a question of individual memory capacity. It is a structural problem: in certain official settings, the response "I do not know" is institutionally tolerated, and in fact operates as a rational choice. That is the core issue.
McGoey(external site, opens in a new tab) (2012) framed "strategic ignorance" as a matter of the benefits obtained by claiming not to know something, even when one possesses the relevant knowledge. Japan's political "I have no recollection" is the institutionalized form of that strategic ignorance. The problem lies not in individual choice but in the structure that enables organizations to remain in a state of not-knowing.
Background and Context
The Legal Asymmetry Between "Memory" and "Knowledge"
One reason the response "I have no recollection" functions as it does is a legal asymmetry.
In parliamentary testimony, perjury is at issue when a sworn witness gives false testimony (Article 6 of the Act on Oath and Testimony before the Diet(external site, opens in a new tab)). The response "I have no memory of it" is not a denial of a fact — a statement that "such a thing did not happen" — but rather a declaration of an internal state: "I do not remember it." It is difficult for a third party to objectively disprove an internal state.
This legal character makes "I have no recollection" a low-cost defensive move. The burden of proof shifts to the other side, and the person being questioned can respond in the form "there is nothing to be done if I have no memory of it." This is an epistemically important asymmetry: denying cognition is far harder to refute than denying a fact.
Miranda Fricker(external site, opens in a new tab) (2007) addressed the question of power embedded in "whose testimony is trusted." The denial of political memory is the reverse face of that question — namely, "whose testimony can be denied." The "I have no recollection" of someone in power carries the force to override the "it definitely happened" of someone without power.
Organizational Memory and Individual Memory
Individual memory and organizational memory are distinct things. Even if an individual forgets, an organization should retain records — documents, emails, meeting minutes, exchanges between personnel.
The structure of public records management is what becomes problematic here. The government's Guidelines for the Management of Administrative Documents(external site, opens in a new tab) require ministries to create a document for records of meetings that affect policy formation or the direction of a programme. The same guidelines also explain that a memo written by an official while drafting is generally not an administrative document. How much of a meeting is kept as an organizational record therefore has a wide margin. By not preserving organizational records, the conditions can be created for a later situation in which "there is no record" or "the person in charge does not remember either."
This is not an accidental product. Where a bureaucratic culture has formed around the principle "do not put decisions that might become problems later into writing," the absence of records itself functions as a pre-emptive move to evade accountability. It is not individual memory loss; it is organizational avoidance of record production.
What the Moritomo and Kake Scandals Revealed
The Diet deliberations over the Moritomo Gakuen and Kake Gakuen scandals from 2017 onward are important as a case that made this structure visible.
In the Ministry of Finance (Zaimushō) public-documents falsification scandal, 14 official approval documents were rewritten. According to the ministry's own document, the rewriting took place between late February and April 2017, after the case had been raised in the Diet. That documents already signed off were altered afterwards means the facts themselves were not erased; the path leading to the facts was rewritten.
This is structurally identical to the "non-adoption" pattern discussed in The Inhibitory Effect of Strategic Ignorance in EBPM. Even when evidence exists, an organizational decision is made not to adopt it. Here, the pathway to the evidence itself was altered.
Reading the Structure
Functional Analysis of "Remaining in Not-Knowing"
The response "I do not know" in a political context serves at least three functions.
Dispersal of responsibility: If one did not know, one was not involved in the decision. If one was not involved in the decision, one bears no responsibility for the outcome. This creates the conditions for explanations such as "the person in charge acted unilaterally" or "it was standard ministry practice."
Avoidance of prosecution risk: If one knew and made a decision, the correctness of that decision can be called into question. The position of "I did not know" allows one to frame a bad outcome as "I was deceived."
Termination of debate: The response "I cannot confirm it" or "there is no record" places an upper limit on the pursuit of the facts. By foisting the unreasonable demand "prove that something does not exist" onto the other side, the debate can be brought to an end.
The Structure of Parliamentary Questioning About "Memory"
| Form of question | Form of response | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| "Did you know about X?" | "I have no recollection of that." | Evades accountability by denying cognition, not facts |
| "Does a document exist?" | "We cannot confirm it." / "It was discarded." | Severs pursuit by absence of records |
| "Who was responsible?" | "The organization handled it collectively." | Diffuses the responsible party, protecting individuals |
| "Explain how the decision was reached." | "There are no materials that led to that decision." | Makes reconstruction impossible through absence of evidence |
The left column of this table (the questions) represents demands for "epistemic justice"; the right column (the responses) represents the practice of "epistemic obstruction."
Connection to Silence-Structuring
What the analysis of silence-structuring addressed was the mechanism by which, as the cost of dissent rises, "not saying even what one knows" becomes fixed at an organizational scale.
The denial of political memory has a complementary structure. Silence-structuring is the normalization of "not saying"; "I have no recollection" is the institutionalization of "not knowing." If the former closes the exit of information, the latter closes the entrance. Organizationally, the two operate in tandem. In an organization where the silence-structuring principle of "do not bring that kind of talk up to management" is functioning, upper-level officials are structurally guaranteed to remain in a state of not-knowing. "The person in charge who failed to report" takes responsibility while "the manager who did not know" is protected. This is a vertical division of labor in organizational ignorance.
Conditions for Institutionalization
Why does "I have no recollection" recur? Because it "works." That it works means that this response has, in practice, allowed the pursuit of accountability to be evaded.
Three conditions must hold for it to work. First, there must be no means by which an internal state (memory) can be objectively disproven. Second, records must either not exist, or their disclosure can be refused. Third, media and public scrutiny must subside within a certain period.
So long as all three conditions are met, "I have no recollection" remains a rational choice. To counter it, two simultaneous measures are needed: strengthening public records management (guaranteeing that records exist) and making the information-disclosure request system substantively effective (guaranteeing access to records). The problem is not a technical reform but a question of institutional design — one that raises the cost of remaining in a state of not-knowing.
Statistics cited in this article
- 1Ministry of Finance, 'Results of the Investigation into the Approval Documents'（2018） Open source
References
- 1.行政文書の管理に関するガイドライン (Guidelines for the Management of Administrative Documents)(external site, opens in a new tab)
Decided by the Prime Minister of Japan (2017)
Cabinet Office (decided 1 April 2011, partially revised 26 December 2017)
Model document-management rules for each ministry, with commentary. Sets out which meeting records must be written up and which documents fall outside the definition of an administrative document.
- 2.Strategic unknowns: towards a sociology of ignorance(external site, opens in a new tab)
McGoey, L. (2012)
Economy and Society, 41(1), 1-16
Conceptual foundations of strategic ignorance. Analyzes 'the benefits of not knowing' at the organizational and institutional level.
- 3.Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing(external site, opens in a new tab)
Fricker, M. (2007)
Oxford University Press
Theory of epistemic injustice. The concept of testimonial injustice provides a framework for analyzing the denial of political memory.
- 4.Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance(external site, opens in a new tab)
Proctor, R. N. & Schiebinger, L. (2008)
Stanford University Press
Theoretical foundations of agnotology, addressing the production, maintenance, and dissolution of ignorance.
→ Related: What Is Silence-Structuring? | Strategic Ignorance in EBPM | The Monthly Labour Statistics Scandal and State-Level Ignorance
Corrections
— The scholar named in the text and the book listed in the references belonged to two different people. We removed both and replaced them with the government guidelines on public records management.
- Before
- As Taku Sugawara has pointed out, Japanese public administration frequently handles important decisions as informal 'meeting memos' or verbal confirmations / Reference: 矢野和男 (2014), データの見えざる手, Sōshisha
- After
- A citation of what the Guidelines for the Management of Administrative Documents require and explain / the same guidelines replace the book in the references
Why we got it wrong The book listed in the references was written by Kazuo Yano, not by Taku Sugawara, whose name appeared in the text. The book itself reports research on happiness and productivity measured with wearable sensors; it does not discuss the keeping of public records. When writing the essay, we checked neither the author nor the content of the book.
— We replaced the figure 'more than 300 passages' with '14 approval documents', the number stated in the Ministry of Finance document, and removed the sentence about the purpose of the rewriting.
- Before
- More than 300 passages in official approval documents were rewritten (source: Ministry of Finance, 'Report on the Falsification of Approval Documents Related to the Moritomo Gakuen Case', 2018) / the rewriting was carried out to prevent 'suspicion from arising'
- After
- 14 official approval documents were rewritten (source: Ministry of Finance, 'Results of the Investigation into the Approval Documents', 12 March 2018)
Why we got it wrong The report we cited is a scanned file whose text cannot be read by machine, so we could not confirm where the figure 'more than 300' appears in it. A separate document the ministry published on the same case states that 'a total of 14 approval documents were rewritten', and that text is machine-readable. We could not find the statement about the purpose of the rewriting in the cited source either.
— Removed one reference whose existence we could not confirm (Stehr, The Uncertainties of Knowledge). The text of this essay does not cite it.
- Before
- Reference: Stehr, N. (2004). The Uncertainties of Knowledge. Transaction Publishers
- After
- (removed)
Why we got it wrong Neither Crossref nor Open Library lists a book with this title. The author's books from 2003 to 2005 include The Governance of Knowledge, Biotechnology and Society and Knowledge, none of which matches. When writing the essay, we did not confirm that each reference exists.
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