Book review: Bodies of Memory

Bibliographic Data: Igarashi, Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Main Argument: Igarashi, in trying "to examine how the past is signified and forgotten through the mediation of history" (3), argues that after the war Japan remembered its past through discursively constructed bodily tropes, and furthermore that after the war the bodies of Japanese people became "sites for national rehabilitation, thus overcoming the historical crisis that Japan's defeat created" (5). A complex movement between memory and forgetting eventually weighed down on the side of forgetting, such that twenty-five years after the war, in Igarashi's view, Japanese society had managed to naturalize forgetting the losses of the war, such that the loss itself was lost.

( A book more of forgetting than of laughter )

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples "After struggling with its conflicting desire both to re-member and to forget its loss, postwar Japan managed to restore nationhood through a teleology of progress and the country's newly acquired material wealth. This recuperation of nationhood as an integral part of re-membering the past." (199) The chapter concludes with an examination of the effect of the 1970s oil shocks on Japanese society and its war amnesia before the obligatory mention of Kobayashi Yoshinori's Sensôron manga, which Igarashi considers to be a failed attempt "to hold the crumbling postwar paradigm together by emphasizing the utility of the war's deaths," which "conceals the historical trauma of 1945" (206).

Critical assessment: Bodies of Memory begins, in the Acknowledgments, by stating that "This book is a personal endeavor to make sense of Japan's postwar history" (ix), and in some sense, though Igarashi advances other arguments, the book's great strength and great weakness is that it never rises beyond that fact.

This is a meaty book that, if it never quite coheres, surveys a vast territory that other scholars have since begun to fill in with greater depth and clarity (Godzilla studies, Olympic studies, to name but a few). For my own taste, I have to admit that I found Igarashi's interpretations to be consistently too informed by a kind of subjugated Freudianism (complete with the total disregard for queerness that accompanies much Freudian critique)--at times he clearly seems to be over-reading various historical texts and incidents. Similarly, the central conceit of "bodies" is excessively vague, and under-theorized; Igarashi never says what he means when he uses the term, which of course allows him to have "bodies" just about every which way he wants.

Igarashi doesn't offer very many new interpretations, but he was the first or at least the earliest notable person to lay out the so-called "foundational narrative" of Japan's postwar, which is certainly something. At the same time, his interpretation of Maruyama Masao in particular is highly questionable, particularly in light of the fact that (unlike many other books I thought of while reading this) Andrew Barshay had already published on Maruyama and modernism long before this book was published--an article that, significantly, is not to be found in Igarashi's bibliography.

Still, if later scholarship has substantially revised various aspects of Igarashi's narrative, there is certainly something to be said for getting in first, and Igarashi has done so with an unusually synoptic survey. That he still manages to ignore manga (!) is symptomatic as well as my personal good fortune.

Further reading: Christopher Ross, Mishima's Sword; Sebastian Conrad, The Quest for the Lost Nation; Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Meta notes: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was apparently strongly influenced by Mishima. Spoilers: Mitchell does it better.

Occupy the UC

I've been struggling to write something that expresses my rage, frustration and shame coherently over the last few days, and I don't think I'm going to get there. Instead, by way of a post, have a collection of links and comments.

I previously posted about the absolutely unprovoked violence of the UCPD at UC Berkeley in response to the Occupy Cal movement on November 9. Some video links:

Berkeley students and faculty being bludgeoned by UCPD in riot gear.

Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan is grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground and arrested.

What happened to former Poet Laureate Professor Robert Hass when he went to protest.

Chancellor Ron Birgeneau's response to the fact that UCPD were beating Cal students and faculty?

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents.  This is not non-violent civil disobedience.

…

We call on the protesters to observe campus policy or, if they choose to defy the policy, to engage in truly non-violent civil disobedience and to accept the consequences of their decisions.

Birgeneau ended his missive with a classy appeal to the silent majority "who elected not to participate in yesterday's events" and who therefore, he apparently assumes, are on his side.

Last Monday, Birgeneau frantically backpedaled:

I returned to Berkeley yesterday after a week-long trip to Seoul, Tokyo and Shanghai where we successfully advanced some important new partnerships that will benefit our campus.

While away, I remained in intermittent contact with Provost George Breslauer and other members of our leadership team and was kept informed, as much as possible, about the Occupy Cal activities on campus.  However, it was only yesterday that I was able to look at a number of the videos that were made of the protests on November 9.  These videos are very disturbing.

Dear Chancellor Birgeneau: there is YouTube in Asia, and regardless of whether or not you'd seen the videos, the UCPD and other outside police departments beating students and faculty is entirely unacceptable. You have lost my confidence as the leader of this campus, and I am ashamed to be associated with you, even indirectly. You would best serve your office and this school by tendering your immediate resignation.

Last Tuesday, members of the campus community at UC Berkeley mobilized to protest police brutality against Occupy Cal and to continue to protest cuts to higher education in the state of California. I attended the noon rally, as well as the evening general assembly and former Secretary of Labor Professor Robert Reich's speech to Occupy Cal.

Students at UC Davis, which used to be Berkeley's department of agriculture, mobilized in a peaceful protest in support of Occupy Cal on November 18. This too was unacceptable to a UC Chancellor. When students linked arms to protect the tents they had set up, UCPD in riot gear pepper-sprayed students, even pepper-spraying directly in their faces and then down their throats.

Chancellor Katehi's response?

While the university has the responsibility to develop the appropriate environments that ensure the practice of these freedoms, by no means should we allow a repeated violation of these rules as an expression of personal freedom.

Through this letter, I express my sadness for the events of past Friday and my commitment to redouble our efforts to improve our campus and the environment for our students.

Assistant Professor of English Nathan Brown has called for Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi's immediate resignation, and the faculty of English at Davis has supported his demands.

I can only agree that the administration of these campuses is currently the greatest threat to the safety of students and members of the campus community. While declaring that it is "time to recommit to the ideal of peaceful protest," University of California President Mark Yudof (himself firmly in the 1%) hastened to declare that he retains full faith and trust in the UCPD and the Chancellors:

My intention is not to micromanage our campus police forces. The sworn officers who serve on our campuses are professionals dedicated to the protection of the UC community.

Nor do I wish to micromanage the chancellors. They are the leaders of our campuses and they have my full trust and confidence.

If there was ever better proof that Mark Yudof is unworthy of confidence as President of the University of California, I don't know of it. Chancellors Birgeneau and Katehi have demonstrated their manifest unwillingness to ensure the safety of students while they exercise their Constitutional right to freedom of expression and of assembly; Birgeneau and Katehi have betrayed their highest duty, which is to the students their institutions serve, and no one else. It's no wonder that public education in this country is crumbling, when university officials refuse to protect even their own students' physical safety, let alone defend students' right to access those universities. This is not the UC I was proud to join, and this is not the Cal I am proud to be a graduate student at.

I can't say it better than Nick Perrone, a graduate student in the history department at UC Davis:

The second point that I want to make is that the police brutality we have witnessed over the past two weeks at Cal State Long Beach, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis is only a symptom of the privatization of these universities. Chancellors Katehi and Birgeneau want safe and inviting spaces on campus, but not for students, for private companies and corporations. When they suppress dissent on our campuses it is in the interest of privatization and clearly not student safety. We must be careful not to treat the symptom alone, but attack the disease itself, the disease of privatization.

Chancellor Katehi, we will not allow you, President Yudof, the regents or anyone else to strangle the students at this university with debt and mediocrity while you simultaneously direct police to suffocate any remaining dissent. It is clear to us that you are no longer an advocate, you are no longer an ally. We need a chancellor who will stand with students against police violence. Our struggle is not your struggle. We want the rich to pay their fair share. We want to lower tuition, not raise it. We want to end the privatization of our university. And we want to stop the use of police to remove peaceful protesters on college campuses. Chancellor Katehi, you have lost the confidence of the students, the faculty and the workers on this campus and it’s time for you to go.

The Occupy Cal general assembly has been voting consistently in favor of resolutions of solidarity with Occupy Oakland and Occupy Wall Street movements worldwide. These struggles are not the same, but they are related, and they have similar root causes. And on the campuses of the University of California, the first step towards a solution is to have administrators whose loyalties are to the students the University of California was established, here at Berkeley in 1868, to serve.