Book review: Bodies of Memory
Feb. 6th, 2014 18:54![[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 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.
Historiographical Engagement: Igarashi is engaging mostly with the scholarly discourse on (historical) memory and its social construction.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Igarashi describes his project, saying that the "readings of various narrative strategies deployed in Japanese culture to make sense of the war's trauma…do not promise to reveal any deeper, more essential meaning of the loss; rather, they demonstrate how extensively postwar society was related to the sense of loss and how in turn this sense motivated its cultural productions" (12). Ishikawa makes two points: one, that "in the postwar period, the United States was a defining factor in Japan's self-invention" and two, that "the discursively constructed body becomes the central site for the reconfiguration of Japan's national image" (13). Discussing the "suturing" of the discursive body after imperial Japan was dismembered, Igarashi notes that this process "demonstrates that the act of remembering is far from a simple recovery of the past" (14).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at what Igarashi calls the "foundational narrative of postwar relations between Japan and the United States," starting with the Enola Gay controversy in 1995 as gateway example, and how the narrative "informed the ways in which each country defined the other's image in their postwar relations" (21). The U.S./Japan melodrama ended with the atomic bomb, after which masculine America rescued feminine Japan through the "divine decision" of the emperor, whom the U.S. leadership in turn supported. Although both countries remain divided on whether the use of the bomb was justified, they share the similarity of being "great man" narratives. Moreover, this relationship between Japan and the U.S. in the immediate postwar was highly sexualized in a narrative of rescue and conversion. Igarashi argues that "what has been repressed in the United States is not past memories of the conflict between the two countries but the present alliance between the two countries that the narrative and conversion and rescue carefully mask," thus handily erasing Japan's wars in Asia (41). "The power of the foundational narrative derives from its contradictory claims," Igarashi concludes; "hence, it requires constant maintenance" (46).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter 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). After the wartime regulation of the body, and what Igarashi discusses as the collapse of the body and mind into the "nationalist body," ordinary people "celebrated the end of the war as the liberation of their bodies" and the recovery of their bodily senses (52). Not coincidentally, "the postwar culture emerging out of black-market experiences celebrated sexuality as the embodiment of bodily senses," although the bodies that became both celebrated and commodified were female (55). Igarashi discusses the Tamura Taijirô short story "Nikutai no mon" and then Maruyama Masao's irritation at the "body literature" that it engendered; despite his hatred for it (shut up already Maruyama), Igarashi argues that both works shared a similar message: "Japan retained its essential qualities even after defeat" (62). Crucially, Igarashi pins down the heart of Maruyama's postwar appeal: "first, it presented the historical continuity of the nation beyond its devastating defeat," which "diffused a sense of loss in Japan's modern history. … Hence, the deeper his pessimism and critical discourse reached into Japanese society, the less guilt was attached to each individual who participated in the war" (64). Finally, Igarashi discusses the Occupation's literal sanitization in Japan; in its "medical and social discourses, the production of healthy bodies became a prerequisite for the construction of a democratic society" (65). That invasive medical examinations for women, individual DDT spraying, and vaccinations were all attested in "scientific discourse" made these pills easier to swallow, allowing Japanese to sanitize their memories as well as their bodies.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the cultural discourse on Japanese uniqueness in the 1950s: "culture, or tradition, was a convenient medium through which to project continuity with Japan's past in order to mask the historical disjuncture of Japan's movement from a former enemy to ally of the United States" (73), because discussing politics made it impossible to conceal Japan's position as subordinated to the United States. Igarashi briefly discusses nihonjinron and traces its genealogy to these 1950s discussions, which relied on "tropes of in-betweenness and hybridity…to confirm the unique position of Japanese culture and Japan in relation to other nations, with Japan conceptualized as a third term that defied the very premise of the binary opposition" (79). Igarashi discusses Katô Shûichi's thesis of Japanese hybridity as the only place where West and non-West can meet, which Maruyama also disliked because his nihonjinron-esque views were strongly negative. These discourses, which agreed that Japan was a third term, delinked Japan from the East and put it firmly in the middle of the East and West, which was expressed in literature--such as Ôe Kenzaburô and Kojima Nobuo--as the simultaneous revulsion and desire for the other.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter discusses the phenomenon of "naming the unnamable" in cultural productions, specifically the radio melodrama Kimo no nasa, Godzilla, and professional wrestling, all of which allowed their audiences to "return" to and "exorcise the monstrous past" (105). All three offered ways to encounter the wartime past and images of the United States as enemy, and according to Igarashi, all "revolved around liminality, either creating liminal spaces or featuring liminal figures" (130). But by 1964, however, the Sukiya Bridge of the radio drama was demolished, Godzilla had become a good monster, and the pro wrestler Rikidôzan had died young as a result of violence. Moreover, their liminality "was reduced to a banal sign of Japan's uniqueness in the form of nihonjinron discourse" (ibid).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the four years from the Anpo movement (1960) to the Tokyo Olympics (1964), arguing that "for many, the anti-Security Treaty movement and the Olympics served as opportunities not only to remember their own experiences of the war but also to tame devastating memories before they engulfed postwar economic prosperity" (132). The efforts of Kishi Nobusuke to pass the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty galvanized popular opposition across a broad social spectrum, but although many called Kishi a "yôkai of the Shôwa era," Maruyama and Takeuchi Yoshimi reduced the opposition to Kishi to a binary formulation (democracy or autocracy) that erased the wartime past that had brought democracy to Japan in the first place. Not coincidentally, after Kishi's resignation after his illegal passage of the Treaty, the succeeding prime minister announced his intention to move from politics to economic growth. According to Igarashi, Kishi's resignation and the cancellation of Eisenhower's planned 1960 visit "offered the participants and witnesses of the movement against the Security Treaty an alibi for accepting material prosperity, patterned after the lifestyle of the former enemy" (142). The preparations for the Olympics, however, allowed Japan to mask dealing with the war's destruction, even as they also "finally eradicated the underlying prewar elements in the city" of Tokyo, which the war had not actually managed to do (146). The return of the bullet-train system to Japan from Manchukuo marked the unification of colonial and metropolitan ultra-modern at last, albeit twenty years after the end of the empire. The production of Tokyo as a clean and bright metropolis also involved a literal sanitization of painful memories, just as the victories of the Japan women's volleyball team were carried out through bodies that "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 This chapter looks at the "re-presentation" of trauma in late 1960s Japan, by which time, it becomes clear, even the memory of loss itself had been forgotten. Igarashi looks at the work of writers Nosaka Akiyuki and Mishimia Yukio, both of whom, he argues, "count go the physicality of bodies as their last resort for a reconciliation with the past" (164). Both writers resisted the banalization of wartime losses, but could not put much dent in the larger social discourse of the same. Nosaka wrote the short story "Hotaru no haka," famed the world over as the tear-jerker anti-war Ghibli movie Grave of the Fireflies. Mishima (who had dodged the draft!) of course was the gay (or bisexual? his camping trips with Edward Seidensticker are still a matter of gossip in the field) nationalist writer who committed ritual suicide after a failed coup at the JSDF headquarters in 1970. Of "Grave of the Fireflies," Igarashi notes that "the tragic end of Seita and his sister thus separates them from the selfish behavior of others during the war" and absolves them of war guilt (177). Mishima, by contrast, according to Igarashi, "saw radical possibilities in the repetition of history; he attempted to repeat the past, not as a grace, but as a tragedy through his own death" (181). Igarashi reads Mishima's final tetralogy and Mishima's suicide as an attempt to deny the reality of postwar everyday life [seikatsu] and of the historicity of the twenty-five years after the end of the war, but "his violent death [only] underscored the entrenchment" of the same (198).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Igarashi briefly sketches bodily tropes in discourse after 1970, arguing that "the challenge that Asian people's experiences pose can be met only through rigorous self-reflection on how long Japan managed to repress this challenge and how it sanitized the images of suffering Japanese bodies in popular consciousness" (204). The collapse of the global Cold War regime returned nationalism to the Japanese scene in the 1990s; Igarashi discusses Kobayashi Yoshinori's Sensôron, noting that "although Kobayashi seeks to critique the postwar social paradigm, his narrative ironically demonstrates how deeply it has taken root in popular consciousness" (206) even as "the historically specific condition of the postwar paradigm" foundered on the rocks and shoals of history and economics in the last decade of the 20thC. Igarashi also discusses Katô Norihiro's "twisted' (nejire) thesis in his Haisengo ron, in which he argues that "only through embracing the historical 'twist' at the beginning of postwar history can the Japanese people redefine their nationhood as something more open" (208). Igarashi, however, parts ways with Katô over the latter's non historical conception of the postwar: things did change between 1945 and 1995, which is indeed precisely the point.
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.
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.
Historiographical Engagement: Igarashi is engaging mostly with the scholarly discourse on (historical) memory and its social construction.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Igarashi describes his project, saying that the "readings of various narrative strategies deployed in Japanese culture to make sense of the war's trauma…do not promise to reveal any deeper, more essential meaning of the loss; rather, they demonstrate how extensively postwar society was related to the sense of loss and how in turn this sense motivated its cultural productions" (12). Ishikawa makes two points: one, that "in the postwar period, the United States was a defining factor in Japan's self-invention" and two, that "the discursively constructed body becomes the central site for the reconfiguration of Japan's national image" (13). Discussing the "suturing" of the discursive body after imperial Japan was dismembered, Igarashi notes that this process "demonstrates that the act of remembering is far from a simple recovery of the past" (14).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at what Igarashi calls the "foundational narrative of postwar relations between Japan and the United States," starting with the Enola Gay controversy in 1995 as gateway example, and how the narrative "informed the ways in which each country defined the other's image in their postwar relations" (21). The U.S./Japan melodrama ended with the atomic bomb, after which masculine America rescued feminine Japan through the "divine decision" of the emperor, whom the U.S. leadership in turn supported. Although both countries remain divided on whether the use of the bomb was justified, they share the similarity of being "great man" narratives. Moreover, this relationship between Japan and the U.S. in the immediate postwar was highly sexualized in a narrative of rescue and conversion. Igarashi argues that "what has been repressed in the United States is not past memories of the conflict between the two countries but the present alliance between the two countries that the narrative and conversion and rescue carefully mask," thus handily erasing Japan's wars in Asia (41). "The power of the foundational narrative derives from its contradictory claims," Igarashi concludes; "hence, it requires constant maintenance" (46).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter 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). After the wartime regulation of the body, and what Igarashi discusses as the collapse of the body and mind into the "nationalist body," ordinary people "celebrated the end of the war as the liberation of their bodies" and the recovery of their bodily senses (52). Not coincidentally, "the postwar culture emerging out of black-market experiences celebrated sexuality as the embodiment of bodily senses," although the bodies that became both celebrated and commodified were female (55). Igarashi discusses the Tamura Taijirô short story "Nikutai no mon" and then Maruyama Masao's irritation at the "body literature" that it engendered; despite his hatred for it (shut up already Maruyama), Igarashi argues that both works shared a similar message: "Japan retained its essential qualities even after defeat" (62). Crucially, Igarashi pins down the heart of Maruyama's postwar appeal: "first, it presented the historical continuity of the nation beyond its devastating defeat," which "diffused a sense of loss in Japan's modern history. … Hence, the deeper his pessimism and critical discourse reached into Japanese society, the less guilt was attached to each individual who participated in the war" (64). Finally, Igarashi discusses the Occupation's literal sanitization in Japan; in its "medical and social discourses, the production of healthy bodies became a prerequisite for the construction of a democratic society" (65). That invasive medical examinations for women, individual DDT spraying, and vaccinations were all attested in "scientific discourse" made these pills easier to swallow, allowing Japanese to sanitize their memories as well as their bodies.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the cultural discourse on Japanese uniqueness in the 1950s: "culture, or tradition, was a convenient medium through which to project continuity with Japan's past in order to mask the historical disjuncture of Japan's movement from a former enemy to ally of the United States" (73), because discussing politics made it impossible to conceal Japan's position as subordinated to the United States. Igarashi briefly discusses nihonjinron and traces its genealogy to these 1950s discussions, which relied on "tropes of in-betweenness and hybridity…to confirm the unique position of Japanese culture and Japan in relation to other nations, with Japan conceptualized as a third term that defied the very premise of the binary opposition" (79). Igarashi discusses Katô Shûichi's thesis of Japanese hybridity as the only place where West and non-West can meet, which Maruyama also disliked because his nihonjinron-esque views were strongly negative. These discourses, which agreed that Japan was a third term, delinked Japan from the East and put it firmly in the middle of the East and West, which was expressed in literature--such as Ôe Kenzaburô and Kojima Nobuo--as the simultaneous revulsion and desire for the other.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter discusses the phenomenon of "naming the unnamable" in cultural productions, specifically the radio melodrama Kimo no nasa, Godzilla, and professional wrestling, all of which allowed their audiences to "return" to and "exorcise the monstrous past" (105). All three offered ways to encounter the wartime past and images of the United States as enemy, and according to Igarashi, all "revolved around liminality, either creating liminal spaces or featuring liminal figures" (130). But by 1964, however, the Sukiya Bridge of the radio drama was demolished, Godzilla had become a good monster, and the pro wrestler Rikidôzan had died young as a result of violence. Moreover, their liminality "was reduced to a banal sign of Japan's uniqueness in the form of nihonjinron discourse" (ibid).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the four years from the Anpo movement (1960) to the Tokyo Olympics (1964), arguing that "for many, the anti-Security Treaty movement and the Olympics served as opportunities not only to remember their own experiences of the war but also to tame devastating memories before they engulfed postwar economic prosperity" (132). The efforts of Kishi Nobusuke to pass the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty galvanized popular opposition across a broad social spectrum, but although many called Kishi a "yôkai of the Shôwa era," Maruyama and Takeuchi Yoshimi reduced the opposition to Kishi to a binary formulation (democracy or autocracy) that erased the wartime past that had brought democracy to Japan in the first place. Not coincidentally, after Kishi's resignation after his illegal passage of the Treaty, the succeeding prime minister announced his intention to move from politics to economic growth. According to Igarashi, Kishi's resignation and the cancellation of Eisenhower's planned 1960 visit "offered the participants and witnesses of the movement against the Security Treaty an alibi for accepting material prosperity, patterned after the lifestyle of the former enemy" (142). The preparations for the Olympics, however, allowed Japan to mask dealing with the war's destruction, even as they also "finally eradicated the underlying prewar elements in the city" of Tokyo, which the war had not actually managed to do (146). The return of the bullet-train system to Japan from Manchukuo marked the unification of colonial and metropolitan ultra-modern at last, albeit twenty years after the end of the empire. The production of Tokyo as a clean and bright metropolis also involved a literal sanitization of painful memories, just as the victories of the Japan women's volleyball team were carried out through bodies that "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 This chapter looks at the "re-presentation" of trauma in late 1960s Japan, by which time, it becomes clear, even the memory of loss itself had been forgotten. Igarashi looks at the work of writers Nosaka Akiyuki and Mishimia Yukio, both of whom, he argues, "count go the physicality of bodies as their last resort for a reconciliation with the past" (164). Both writers resisted the banalization of wartime losses, but could not put much dent in the larger social discourse of the same. Nosaka wrote the short story "Hotaru no haka," famed the world over as the tear-jerker anti-war Ghibli movie Grave of the Fireflies. Mishima (who had dodged the draft!) of course was the gay (or bisexual? his camping trips with Edward Seidensticker are still a matter of gossip in the field) nationalist writer who committed ritual suicide after a failed coup at the JSDF headquarters in 1970. Of "Grave of the Fireflies," Igarashi notes that "the tragic end of Seita and his sister thus separates them from the selfish behavior of others during the war" and absolves them of war guilt (177). Mishima, by contrast, according to Igarashi, "saw radical possibilities in the repetition of history; he attempted to repeat the past, not as a grace, but as a tragedy through his own death" (181). Igarashi reads Mishima's final tetralogy and Mishima's suicide as an attempt to deny the reality of postwar everyday life [seikatsu] and of the historicity of the twenty-five years after the end of the war, but "his violent death [only] underscored the entrenchment" of the same (198).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Igarashi briefly sketches bodily tropes in discourse after 1970, arguing that "the challenge that Asian people's experiences pose can be met only through rigorous self-reflection on how long Japan managed to repress this challenge and how it sanitized the images of suffering Japanese bodies in popular consciousness" (204). The collapse of the global Cold War regime returned nationalism to the Japanese scene in the 1990s; Igarashi discusses Kobayashi Yoshinori's Sensôron, noting that "although Kobayashi seeks to critique the postwar social paradigm, his narrative ironically demonstrates how deeply it has taken root in popular consciousness" (206) even as "the historically specific condition of the postwar paradigm" foundered on the rocks and shoals of history and economics in the last decade of the 20thC. Igarashi also discusses Katô Norihiro's "twisted' (nejire) thesis in his Haisengo ron, in which he argues that "only through embracing the historical 'twist' at the beginning of postwar history can the Japanese people redefine their nationhood as something more open" (208). Igarashi, however, parts ways with Katô over the latter's non historical conception of the postwar: things did change between 1945 and 1995, which is indeed precisely the point.
A simple ethical call is insufficient to change the historical conditions that produced a chasm in Japan. The chasm that Katô perceives in postwar society is not an empty space waiting to be filled with ethical commitment; it is already filled with layers of discursive practices that have transformed the meaning of defeat. Without critical reflections on the process through which the image of tram has been transformed, the ethical subject that Katô demands would immediately be disoriented in Japan's discursive space. … It is impossible to reach the original trauma by short-circuiting postwar history: one can merely hope to capture its resonance with postwar discourses. (209-10)
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.