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Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970. By YOSHIKUNI IGARASHI. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 296 pp. $49.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Memory, especially in relation to the politics of time and history, has emerged as one of the central-and centrally problematic-frames of experience for the twentieth century. It has become almost a popular wisdom that the politics of memory are particularly fraught in the case of postwar Japan, but until very recently there have been only a very few works that have attempted to consider the postwar practices of memory in Japan seriously. With Bodies of Memory, Yoshikuni Igarashi has made a very significant contribution toward this end, and in fact toward what now appears to be the constitution of something close to an entire field of study focused on these issues.
Igarashi takes up material from widely diverse contexts, including museums, literature, television, film, social criticism, urban form, and sports. Each of these contexts is shown to produce its own strategies of memory and its own relations to Japan's wartime past. The various examples are not connected by any simple linear chronology, but there is a general historical trajectory to the book: it begins with the development of a foundational narrative in the immediate postwar years, moves on through differing attempts to work within and to contest this narrative, and then concludes with a nod toward the dissipation of this narrative in the 1990s.
What brings the different contexts (and relatively independent chapters) together is the idea of the "foundational narrative." Akin...