Japan and the United States became close political allies so quickly
after the end of World War II, that it seemed as though the two
countries had easily forgotten the war they had fought. Here Yoshikuni
Igarashi offers a provocative look at how Japanese postwar society
struggled to understand its war loss and the resulting national trauma,
even as forces within the society sought to suppress these memories.
Igarashi argues that Japan's nationhood survived the war's destruction
in part through a popular culture that expressed memories of loss and
devastation more readily than political discourse ever could. He shows
how the desire to represent the past motivated Japan's cultural
productions in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period.
Japanese war experiences were often described through narrative devices
that downplayed the war's disruptive effects on Japan's history. Rather
than treat these narratives as obstacles to historical inquiry, Igarashi
reads them along with counter-narratives that attempted to register the
original impact of the war. He traces the tensions between remembering
and forgetting by focusing on the body as the central site for Japan's
production of the past. This approach leads to fascinating discussions
of such diverse topics as the use of the atomic bomb, hygiene policies
under the U.S. occupation, the monstrous body of Godzilla, the first
Western professional wrestling matches in Japan, the transformation of
Tokyo and the athletic body for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the writer
Yukio Mishima's dramatic suicide, while providing a fresh critical
perspective on the war legacy of Japan.
