Postwar Japan: Ghosts of Modernity

Yukiko Koga
Department of Anthropology
Fall 2020
Mondays, 9:25am-11:15am

D R A F T – Subject to Change
This course introduces students to contemporary Japan, examining how its defeat in the Second
World War and loss of empire in 1945 continue to shape Japanese culture and society. Looking
especially at the sphere of cultural production, it focuses on the question of what it means to be
modern as expressed through the tension between resurgent neo-nationalism and the aspiration to
internationalize. The course charts how the legacy of Japan’s imperial failure plays a significant role
in its search for renewal and identity since 1945. How, it asks, does the experience of catastrophic
failure—and failure to account for that failure—play into continued aspirations for modernity today?
How does Japanese society wrestle with modernity’s two faces: its promise for progress, on the one
hand, and its history of catastrophic violence, on the other? The course follows the trajectory of
Japan’s postwar nation-state development after the dissolution of empire: from its resurrection from
the ashes after defeat, to its identity as a US ally and economic superpower during the Cold War, to
decades of recession since the 1990s and the search for new relations with its neighbors and new
reckonings with its own imperial violence against the background of rising neonationalism. It will
draw on popular culture such as films, and fiction to explore how Japan’s failed empire appears and
disappears over the course of the long postwar and how the Japanese society negotiates its layered
pasts in the present.

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Course Requirements:
(1) Readings & Weekly Reflections:
You are required to post a brief reflection (one or two paragraphs) on the assigned texts and films
by 8:00 am on Sunday before the class.

(2) Midterm Essay:

There will be a midterm essay assignment on the theme specified in class.

(3) Collaborative Project – Group Presentation:

You will be assigned to a group to embark on a collaborative project built around primary materials,
which will result in an in-class group presentation.

(4) Final Essay:

There will be a final essay assignment on the theme specified in class.

Grading:
Active participation in class and weekly reflections: 30%
Midterm Essay: 20%
Collaborative Project – Group Presentation: 20%
Final Essay: 30%
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Version: 2020-07-30
 SYLLABUS: Postwar Japan: Ghosts of Modernity 2

Week 1 (08/31): Introduction

Week 2 (09/07): The Japanese Empire and the Asia-Pacific War

Asako Serizawa, Inheritors (New York: Doubleday, 2020).

Week 3 (09/14): Defeat and Newborn Japan

John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1999), Introduction, 19-30, and Part I, “Victor and Vanquished,” 31-84.
Constitution of Japan, Preamble, November 3, 1946.
Film: Utsukushiki nichiyobi (One Wonderful Sunday), directed by Akira Kurosawa (1947 Japan, 109
min.).
MIDTE RM E SSAY TO P IC ANNOU NC E D IN C LASS.

Week 4 (09/21): Dissolution of Empire

Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), Introduction, 1-18, Part 1: “New Map of
Asia,” 19-55.
Matthew R. Augustine, “The Limits of Decolonization: American Occupiers and the ‘Korean
Problem’ in Japan, 1945-1948,” International Journal of Korean History, vol. 22, no. 1 (2017):
43-75.
Film: Gishiki (The Ceremony), directed by Nagisa Ōshima (1971 Japan, 123 min.).

Week 5 (09/28): Inverted Victimhood I: Air Raids and A-Bombs

MIDTE RM E SSAY DU E O N MONDAY , SE P T. 2 8 AT 9 :0 0 AM BE F O RE C LASS.
Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Introduction, 3-18, Chapter 1: “The
Bomb, Hirohito, and History,” 19-46, and Chapter 6: “Re-presenting Trauma in Late-
1960s Japan,” 164-198, and Conclusion, 199-210.
Film: Hotaru no haka (Grave of the Fireflies), directed by Isao Takahata (1988 Japan, 93 min.).

Week 6 (10/05): Inverted Victimhood II: Post-imperial Gaze

C O LLABO RATIVE P ROJE CT ANNOU NC E D IN C LASS.
Barak Kushner, Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). Introduction, 1-27.
Chungmoo Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea,”
Positions 1, no. 1 (1993): 77-102.
 SYLLABUS: Postwar Japan: Ghosts of Modernity 3

Leo Ching, “‘Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!’: Postcoloniality, Identity, and the Traces of
Colonialism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (2000): 763-88.

Week 7 (10/12): (For)given Time: Economic Development and the Cold War
C O LLABO RATIVE P ROJE CT IN-C LASS G ROU P P RE SE NTATION
Primary documents as a starting point of analysis:
(a) The Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, June 22, 1965
(English/Korean/Japanese).
(b) The Joint Communiqué of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People’s
Republic of China, September 29, 1972 (English/Chinese/Japanese).
Suggested reading:
Joon-Hoon Lee, “Normalization of Relations with Japan: Toward A New Partnership,” in The
Park Chung Hee Era, edited by Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2011), 430-456.

Week 8 (10/19): Economy, History, Memory

Theodor W. Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” in Bitburg in Moral
and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1986), 114-129.
Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel, translated by Alfred Birnbaum (New York:
Vintage, 2002). Originally published in Japanese in 1982 under the title Hitsuji o meguru
bōken.
Film: Wasurerareta kōgun (Forgotten Soldier), directed by Nagisa Ōshima (1963 Japan, 25 min.).

Week 9 (10/26): Politics of Memory

Arif Dirlik, “‘Past Experience, If Not Forgotten, Is a Guide to the Future’; or, What Is In a
Text? The Politics of History in Chinese-Japanese Relations” in boundary 2, vol. 18, no. 3,
Japan in the World (Autumn, 1991): 29-58.
Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Introduction, 1-22.
Rana Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History and Memory in the
Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987-1997,” The China Quarterly, no. 161 (2000): 279-
93.

Week 10 (11/02): 1989: Unleashing the Post-imperial

Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor (New York: Pantheon, 1991), Prologue, 5-29.
Carol Gluck, “The ‘End’ of the Postwar: Japan at the End of the Millennium,” Public Culture 10,
1 (1997): 1-23.
 SYLLABUS: Postwar Japan: Ghosts of Modernity 4

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Unquiet Graves: Katō Norihiro and the Politics of Mourning,” Japanese
Studies 18, no. 1 (1998): 21-30.
Film: Mononoke-hime (Princess Mononoke), directed by Hayao Miyazaki (1997 Japan, 133 min.).

Week 11 (11/09): New Forms of Reckoning: “Reappearance” of Victims and the Apology
Politics
Film: 50 Years of Silence, directed by Ned Lander, Carol Ruff, and James Bradley (1994 Australia,
57 min.).
Carol Gluck, “Operations of Memory: ‘Comfort Women’ and the World” in Ruptured Histories:
War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia, edited by Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 47-77.
Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes
(Durham: Duke University Press 2016), Preface, vii-xi, and Introduction, 1-39.

Week 12 (11/16): Recessionary Japan

F INAL E SSAY TO P IC ANNOU NC E D IN C LAS S.
Harry Harootunian and Tomiko Yoda, “Introduction,” in Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural
Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, edited by Tomiko Yoda and Harry
Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 1-15.
Anne Allison, Precarious Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), Chapter 1: “Pain of Life,”
1-20, and, Chapter 2: “From Lifelong to Liquid Japan,” 21-42.

Week 13 (11/30): Anxious Nation and Specters of Modernity’s Double

Leo T. S. Ching, Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2019), “Introduction: Anti-Japanism (and Pro-Japanism) in East Asia,”
1-18.
Film: Kaze tachinu (The Wind Rises), directed by Hayao Miyazaki (2013 Japan, 126 min.).
David Palmer, “Gunkanjima/Battleship Island, Nagasaki: World Heritage Historical Site or
Urban Ruins Tourist Attraction?” Japan Focus: Asia Pacific Journal, vol. 16, no. 4, 2017.

FINAL E SS AY DUE ON FRID AY, DE CE MBE R 7 AT 9: 00AM.