Victims and victimizers : representations of war in postwar Japanese popular culture

Abstract

It is frequently asserted in both academic and journalistic descriptions of contemporary Japan that "historical memory" regarding the country's wars of the 1930s and 1940s is either a form of "historical amnesia" or is ruled by "victim's consciousness". These concepts, however, fail to capture the diversity of representations of war that exist in Japanese popular culture. This thesis draws upon a large number of popular sources from a variety of media including film, popular history, fiction, manga, and video games, produced between 1952 and 1995, to establish that many authors and creators have represented the Japanese side as both victims and victimizers in war. These representations are complex and contrast sharply with simplistic perspectives on Japanese "historical memory" prevalent outside of the country and also with the viewpoints commonly put forward by Japanese politicians. Until the 1990s, the stance of Japan's political elite toward wartime aggression and atrocities is best described as a form of "silence". This thesis discusses ways that popular works filled this rhetoric gap, bringing critical images of war crimes and layered discussions of national and personal responsibility to the Japanese public. Particular attention is paid to the origins of this pattern of representation in the 1950s, a period that is often discussed in terms of a dominant "victim's consciousness" in academic writing, but one that saw a number of seminal treatments of the victimizer theme appear. Arguing that academic works have tended to prioritize political discourses over popular ones, this thesis also establishes that in Japanese popular culture, images of victims and victimizers, different from those circulated in the political sphere, are not considered to be dichotomous. They are frequently utilized in a complementary manner to communicate anti-war themes to audiences. This trend has been an important one since the late 1950s, and this thesis outlines the ways that the Security Treaty protests, the Vietnam War, the reincorporation of Okinawa into the Japanese state, the restoration of relations with the People's Republic of China, the 1982 "textbook controversy", and other important external and internal events have shaped the way that the wars of the 1930s and 1940s are represented popularly in Japan. While many areas of historical understanding are contested at present, the views put forward in popular culture have been as diverse as they are effective at bringing negative images of war and militarism and critical depictions of victims and victimizers to Japanese popular audiences.