Bodies of Memory (ebook)

Argumento de Bodies of Memory (ebook)

"With this book, Yoshikuni Igarashi contributes significantly to our understanding of the emergence and solidification of memories of the war in post-war Japan. . . . Absorbing and thought-provoking reading."--Beatrice Trefalt, Japanese Studies

"An innovative attempt to trace the "absent presence of war memories" in the cultural discourse of postwar Japan. The author's juxtaposition of examples from different cultural registers is distinctive, persuasive, and provocative, and the book is a pleasure to read."--Carol Gluck, Columbia University

"This is history writing at its best. The author maintains a subtle tension between historic continuities and postwar discontinuity, between interpretation and documentation, between political and cultural analysis, between literary and mass cultural analysis, and between the posited and resurrected body of the Japanese nation. His central concern for remembering postwar forgetting takes us from wartime exclusion of the victims of leprosy and mental illness under the Eugenics Law, to the cleansing of the postwar process of discursive formation of the 1950s and 1960s that brought us such figures as RikidÇzan, the Korean wrestler passing for Japanese. The treatment of the Japanese body and of Japanese bodies is a compelling narrative of the "foundational narrative" of the U.S.- Japan relationship that has informed so much of postwar Japanese cultural and economic recovery and forgetting, a remembering of Japanese suffering made possible by the forgetting of the colonized Asian body. Bodies of Memory thus provides a powerful explanation as to why so many in Japan refuse to accept Japan's modern history in Asia. It belongs alongside the new anthropology of Japan that is uncovering the layers of consciousness of postwar Japan, for Igarashi shows us how trauma may have been forgotten but not abandoned."--Miriam Silverberg, University of California, Los Angeles0Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 3
I. The Bomb, Hirohito, and History: The Foundamental Narrative of Postwar Relations between Japan and United States 19
II. The Age of the Body 47
III. A Nation that Never Is: Cultural Discourse on Japanese Uniqeness 73
IV. Naming the Unnameable 104
V. From the Anti-Security Treaty Movement to the Tokoyo Olympics: Transforming the Body, the Metropolis, and Memory 131
VI. Re-Presenting Trauma in Late-1960s Japan 164
Conclusion 199
Notes 211
Bibliography 253
Index 275