Book review: Bodies of Memory
Nov. 21st, 2011 00:24![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic 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.
Historiographical Engagement: Igarashi's sources are broad, but mostly discursive, and drawn from popular culture, broadly defined--movies, books, philosophy and criticism.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Explicitly forswearing any intent or capability of revealing "any deeper, more essential meaning of the loss" experienced in Japan's postwar, Igarashi argues that "the tension between these desires [to remember the past and to forget the past] has shaped the cultural productions of postwar Japanese society" (12). For Igarashi, all of these things have to be understood in light of the unequal relationship between Japan and the United States, such that "the United States was a defining factor in Japan's self-invention;" and that "the discursively constructed body becomes the central site for the reconfiguration of Japan's national image" (13).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter lays out what Igarashi calls the "foundational narrative" of the postwar Japan-United States relationship, in which a series of great men on both sides of the conflict brought to the war to a merciful end: Truman by authorizing the merciful atomic bombings, Hirohito by magnanimously authorizing his country's surrender. As Igarashi notes, the obvious elisions and falsehoods of the foundational narrative are the point; "the power of the foundational narrative derives from its contradictory claims; hence, it requires constant maintenance" (46). The narrative displaces many more salient factors in favor of a reductive understanding of history that nonetheless, having been produced, remained highly productive until the breakdown of the Cold War global order necessitated rewriting it, in conflict, in the 1990s and after.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapter two examines what Igarashi terms "the age of the body," i.e. the first few years of the Occupation in which the imperial regime of bodily regulation abruptly collapsed and Japanese people were left to discover the liberatory possibilities of their embodiment even as Occupation controls left them struggling to meet the physical needs that embodiment imposes. Particularly, Igarashi examines how "the sanitization of bodies and the universal developmental scheme of science helped to transform Japan's defeat into a necessary condition for an eventual return to the international community" (48) through the work of Tamura Taijirô ("Nikutai no mon"), the writings of Maruyama Masao (about whom Igarashi has a very idiosyncratic interpretation) and the DDT and medical examination programs of SCAP.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter "traces the genealogy of nihonjiron back to 1950s Japan, where the new political reality desperately called for a new discursive formation of the nation" (75), arguing that ideology should be understood not as a form of false consciousness but as a historical reality. In particular, the loss of the nation as an explicit forced Japanese people across the political spectrum, but especially on the right, in the 1950s to talk not about the Japanese nation but about Japanese culture, establishing Japan as always already hybrid, culturally superior and incomprehensible, and above all non-imperial. Igarashi examines what he calls the origins of this discourse in the works of Kojima Nobuo and future Nobel laureate Ôe Kenzaburô.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter discusses the radio melodrama Kimi no na wa, the movie Gojira | Godzilla, and professional wrestling "as sites haunted by memories of the past" (105). Igarashi argues that consumption of these media allowed their audiences to return to and thereby exorcise the monstrous past, "mediated through images of the other as the United States" (105). In Igarashi's view, the central feature of all three of these media is that they revolve around liminality, "either creating liminal spaces or featuring liminal figures" (130)--which liminality was banalized into the essentialist discourse of nihonjinron.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines the Anpo protests and the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as efforts to transform the body and the metropolis (and the body of the metropolis) into sanitized modern living spaces in the face of what Igarashi calls "the tenaciousness of war memories during the early 1960s" (132). Igarashi concludes by discussing the training regimen of the gold-medal winning Japanese women's volleball team under their war survivor and repatriate coach, concluding that "their bodies were icons of the past, yet they transformed memories into necessary conditions for the rational and national project of progress" (163).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples The last chapter examines several short stories (including "Hotaru no haka") by Nosaka Akiyuki and the final quartet of Mishima Yukio as exempla of the difficulty of opposing the contemporary social discourse, "which contained war memories into a set of banal images" (164). Ultimately, the futility of their interventions underscored the fact that Japan had, for the time being, thoroughly entrenched the norm of peaceful prosperity in society, forgetting the past.
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.
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.
Historiographical Engagement: Igarashi's sources are broad, but mostly discursive, and drawn from popular culture, broadly defined--movies, books, philosophy and criticism.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Explicitly forswearing any intent or capability of revealing "any deeper, more essential meaning of the loss" experienced in Japan's postwar, Igarashi argues that "the tension between these desires [to remember the past and to forget the past] has shaped the cultural productions of postwar Japanese society" (12). For Igarashi, all of these things have to be understood in light of the unequal relationship between Japan and the United States, such that "the United States was a defining factor in Japan's self-invention;" and that "the discursively constructed body becomes the central site for the reconfiguration of Japan's national image" (13).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter lays out what Igarashi calls the "foundational narrative" of the postwar Japan-United States relationship, in which a series of great men on both sides of the conflict brought to the war to a merciful end: Truman by authorizing the merciful atomic bombings, Hirohito by magnanimously authorizing his country's surrender. As Igarashi notes, the obvious elisions and falsehoods of the foundational narrative are the point; "the power of the foundational narrative derives from its contradictory claims; hence, it requires constant maintenance" (46). The narrative displaces many more salient factors in favor of a reductive understanding of history that nonetheless, having been produced, remained highly productive until the breakdown of the Cold War global order necessitated rewriting it, in conflict, in the 1990s and after.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapter two examines what Igarashi terms "the age of the body," i.e. the first few years of the Occupation in which the imperial regime of bodily regulation abruptly collapsed and Japanese people were left to discover the liberatory possibilities of their embodiment even as Occupation controls left them struggling to meet the physical needs that embodiment imposes. Particularly, Igarashi examines how "the sanitization of bodies and the universal developmental scheme of science helped to transform Japan's defeat into a necessary condition for an eventual return to the international community" (48) through the work of Tamura Taijirô ("Nikutai no mon"), the writings of Maruyama Masao (about whom Igarashi has a very idiosyncratic interpretation) and the DDT and medical examination programs of SCAP.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter "traces the genealogy of nihonjiron back to 1950s Japan, where the new political reality desperately called for a new discursive formation of the nation" (75), arguing that ideology should be understood not as a form of false consciousness but as a historical reality. In particular, the loss of the nation as an explicit forced Japanese people across the political spectrum, but especially on the right, in the 1950s to talk not about the Japanese nation but about Japanese culture, establishing Japan as always already hybrid, culturally superior and incomprehensible, and above all non-imperial. Igarashi examines what he calls the origins of this discourse in the works of Kojima Nobuo and future Nobel laureate Ôe Kenzaburô.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter discusses the radio melodrama Kimi no na wa, the movie Gojira | Godzilla, and professional wrestling "as sites haunted by memories of the past" (105). Igarashi argues that consumption of these media allowed their audiences to return to and thereby exorcise the monstrous past, "mediated through images of the other as the United States" (105). In Igarashi's view, the central feature of all three of these media is that they revolve around liminality, "either creating liminal spaces or featuring liminal figures" (130)--which liminality was banalized into the essentialist discourse of nihonjinron.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines the Anpo protests and the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as efforts to transform the body and the metropolis (and the body of the metropolis) into sanitized modern living spaces in the face of what Igarashi calls "the tenaciousness of war memories during the early 1960s" (132). Igarashi concludes by discussing the training regimen of the gold-medal winning Japanese women's volleball team under their war survivor and repatriate coach, concluding that "their bodies were icons of the past, yet they transformed memories into necessary conditions for the rational and national project of progress" (163).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples The last chapter examines several short stories (including "Hotaru no haka") by Nosaka Akiyuki and the final quartet of Mishima Yukio as exempla of the difficulty of opposing the contemporary social discourse, "which contained war memories into a set of banal images" (164). Ultimately, the futility of their interventions underscored the fact that Japan had, for the time being, thoroughly entrenched the norm of peaceful prosperity in society, forgetting the past.
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.