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 argues that "Japanese society rendered its traumatic experiences of the war comprehensible through narrative devices that downplayed their disruptive effects on Japan's history" (3). Igarashi, focusing "on how memories of the war were transformed in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period," argues that Japan's "memories were discursively constructed through bodily tropes" because "many Japanese discovered their bodies as the entities that survived destruction and thus embodied historical continuity. Their bodies became sites for national rehabilitation, thus overcoming the historical crisis that Japan's defeat created" (5). Examining the tension between repression and expression, Igarashi uses both to study the impact of the war on postwar Japanese society.

( Bodies of memory (and forgetting) )

Critical assessment: I think this is a good book, but at times, perhaps inevitably, it feels somewhat claustrophobic. I appreciate Igarashi’s insistence on not treating the postwar period as one long, homogeneous period, and his focus on the first twenty-five years after the war provides his study with a valuable finite frame; I very much appreciated his insistence on historicizing the postwar in general. That said, if his final sentence (“Historical studies may not make the pain of others more comprehensible; but they do teach us how to resist certain narrative practices that reduce such pain to easy categorical knowledge” (210)) is meant to refer to this book in particular, I have to question to what extent Igarashi actually achieves his aims. “Suffering Asian bodies” recur in his narrative, but are never fully brought into it; the empire, which doesn’t even merit an index entry, remains in the end the unreachable exterior of his study. I wonder if the Derridan notion of “hauntology,” those specters of the past that are neither extant nor in-extant but that continue to dog the present, might have been more productive than psychoanalysis.

That having been said, within its limits this is an excellent book, much more adept at its reading of popular discourses and unabashed in its critical viewpoint. I think Igarashi here has added a crucial piece to the construction of a full narrative of postwar Japan (and I especially liked his criticisms of Maruyama, I have to admit).

Further reading: Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home; Perilous Memories, ed. Takashi Fujitani et al.

Meta notes: Some historians are very good at the analysis of cultural productions.

Book review: Brokers of Empire

Bibliographic Data: Uchida, Jun. Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.

Main Argument: Uchida argues that the Japanese emigrants to Korea, "in remaking their lives on the peninsula, also helped to make the nation's empire" (3). Although these people were driven first by personal considerations and only secondarily by national interests, "their mundane activities and the state's ambitions were inextricably entwine" (ibid). However, due to the politics of memory and forgetting in Japan's postwar, the story of Japanese settlers in Korea has been expunged from history, creating parallel archives of "official repression" and "nostalgic innocence" which support the incorrect claim among historians that Japanese colonialism in Korea can be equated solely with the rule of the Governor-General. Uchida argues on the contrary that he "was not the only wielder of power in the colony. Numerous civilians helped maintain and expand Japanese hegemony on a daily basis, while pursuing interests and ambitions of their own. … More than eyewitnesses or bystanders of the Governor-General's rule…settlers shaped how the Japanese empire began as much as how it ended, and indeed, how it fared during the 36 years of its existence" (4-5).

Historiographical Engagement: Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire; Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword; other recent books on the Japanese empire

Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Uchida refers to settlers, such as the merchant Kobayashi Genroku of the clothier Chôjiya who is his first example, as "brokers of empire" because settlers such as he "actively mediated the colonial management of KOrea as its grassroots movers and shakers" (5). They were brokers because they were motivated by profit, because they "mediated Japan's rise as a modernizing nation and empire" and because they "operated simultaneously as agents and pawns of colonial power" (6). Many also at times occupied quasi-official positions, because the line between the state and the settlers shifted over time--thus giving the settlers some influence. Finally, the term "brokers" highlights the ways in which "Koreans both constrained and channeled settler agency" (7). Uchida argues that "settlers became the crux of empire as well as the crucible of encounter in spite of themselves," rendering Japanese colonials in Korea "intense yet fragile" (8). Furthermore, "historians have missed the state's struggle to anchor its authority in the multiethnic polity and its continual efforts to rule through local actors, practices, and institutions" (14). Historians have in effect oversold the Governor-General's power, and also given settlers short shrift as independent agents in their own right (to say nothing of earlier historians who simply discounter Japanese settlers outright). Uchida's analysis of the "colonial middle" is also informed by the concept of "colonial modernity," which approaches colonies "as a fluid and contingent space of encounter shaped by a global framework of modernity and not reducible to a simple dialectic of rule and resistance" (15). Uchida also wants to articulate Korea as "Japan's Algeria," not to fit Japan into European models but to complicate the models themselves. Although Japanese and British and French colonists shared similar social concerns and hang-ups, in terms of economic and political power the Japanese settlers were far weaker than their counterparts. Furthermore, they occupied a legal space of liminality that kept them in uncertainty but also generated the roles they played that Uchida explores in this book.

( The colonial middle )

Critical assessment: This is an excellent (and exhaustive) book that meaningfully deepens our understanding of the Japanese empire in Korea: how it worked, how it changed over time, and how it was lived by its informal brokers. I agree with Uchida that his book demonstrates that modernity and the nation were negotiated and constructed in the imperial peripheries as well as in the core, and all in all, this book provides a very useful contribution to the discussion of how Japan's empire developed along with Japan.

Further reading: Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home

Meta notes: Why are all the dates in this book bolded? It's very weird.