Bodies of Memory

by Yoshikuni Igarashi

Japan and the United States became close political allies so quickly after the end of World War II, that it seemed as though the two countries had easily forgotten the war they had fought. Here Yoshikuni Igarashi offers a provocative look at how Japanese postwar society struggled to understand its war loss and the resulting national trauma, even as forces within the society sought to suppress these memories. Igarashi argues that Japan's nationhood survived the war's destruction in part through a popular culture that expressed memories of loss and devastation more readily than political discourse ever could. He shows how the desire to represent the past motivated Japan's cultural productions in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period.


Japanese war experiences were often described through narrative devices that downplayed the war's disruptive effects on Japan's history. Rather than treat these narratives as obstacles to historical inquiry, Igarashi reads them along with counter-narratives that attempted to register the original impact of the war. He traces the tensions between remembering and forgetting by focusing on the body as the central site for Japan's production of the past. This approach leads to fascinating discussions of such diverse topics as the use of the atomic bomb, hygiene policies under the U.S. occupation, the monstrous body of Godzilla, the first Western professional wrestling matches in Japan, the transformation of Tokyo and the athletic body for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the writer Yukio Mishima's dramatic suicide, while providing a fresh critical perspective on the war legacy of Japan.

Genres: Japan, History, Japanese History, Nonfiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published July 10, 2000

Reviews

[Edward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chapter 1 was especially good

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading bodies as texts was big for a moment, and then the moment passed, leaving work like this to seem a bit reactionary rather than revolutionary. Still, the analysis is inventive, if not definitive (see Elyssa Faison's epilogue to "Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan" for another interpretation of the 1964 women's Olympic volleyball team), and deserves to be discussed. Igarashi also recently wrote an interesting piece on how the United Red Army viewed their bodies and their guns.

[Jessie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Igarashi explores the intersection of politics, history, and memory. He elaborates at length on the complicity of “foundational narrative” in US-Japan relations, but without really telling us who is the manufacturer of this narrative. I suppose both Japan and the US, but John Dower’s analysis to me offers a more complicated picture of this process. I also found that some of Igarashi's points were not well supported by documents—this tendency to assume/theorize without much evidence is of course nothing new in studies on memory.

[Benemint · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I was moved by Igarashi's passion while reading it, but also became a little tired of his argument of bodies. An unusually thoughtful piece, though.

[Jonathan]

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