Bodies of Memory Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970

"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 Memorythus 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 AngelesIgarashi, Yoshikuni is the author of 'Bodies of Memory Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970', published 2000 under ISBN 9780691049120 and ISBN 0691049122.