Tatsuya Hanabuchi

I. Introduction The question of whether history can serve as a guide to the future has long occupied an uneasy and contested position within the discipline of historiography, reflecting a deeper tension between the interpretive and analytical ambitions of historical inquiry. On the one hand, history has traditionally been understood as a narrative enterprise, concerned with reconstructing past events, situating them within their specific contexts, and interpreting their meanings through careful attention to contingency, agency, and cultural particularity. On the other hand, there has persisted a recurrent impulse to treat the past as a repository of patterns, from which one might extract generalizable insights capable of informing present judgment and future expectation. This duality has produced a methodological divide, wherein historians often resist predictive claims as reductive or deterministic, while policymakers and strategists continue to seek guidance from historical precedent...