In 2025, as we are marking 80 years since Japan’s defeat in World War Two, not only former soldiers involved in active combat, but also civilians who could remember the air raids or wartime evacuations have become extremely few. As a result, the “era of memory” (Narita Ryūichi, The Postwar History of ‘War Experience’) is nearing its limit. In the face of this reality, in recent years we have seen growing discussions about the meaning and methods of transmitting and retelling wartime experiences in the absence of living witnesses. At the same time, there is increasing scrutiny of the ruptures caused by forgetting—ruptures that have often been overlooked in the very process of calling for remembering these experiences.

The transmission and retelling of war experiences is closely linked to the selection and omission processes that construct collective memory. Across various fields in the humanities, scholars have critically examined the postwar Japanese “founding myth” constructed by so-called “August journalism,” which tends to reproduce narratives of victimhood and sacrifice— albeit without adequately addressing Japan’s responsibility as a perpetrator. In efforts to dismantle such “myths,” attempts to reconstruct what Japan’s defeat meant, and to whom, have achieved notable results within the field of contemporary literary studies.

In the absence of living witnesses, collective memory too might enter a new phase of transformation. Will the “founding myth” that has been the target of deconstructing efforts for so long maybe crumble on its own, if the witnesses that could support it are no longer present? Or perhaps, disconnected from living experience, it will live on as a true and pure “myth”? The 80th year since the end of the war marks a turning point—one at which we must critically reexamine established perspectives and methodologies, with an eye toward the post-“era of memory.”

One effective method of subverting the dynamics of “our” collective memory, which too easily morphs into nationalism, is to focus on the micro-histories of the individual in order to question History itself. Exploring the potential of so-called “ego documents”—diaries, school essays, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, etc— is not only the domain of the academia in a narrow sense. For instance, in its five-year series launched in 2021, The New Documentary: The Pacific War, NHK declared its aim to reexamine “the sweeping currents of history through multifaceted perspectives rooted in individual viewpoints,” drawing on the collection and analysis of “ego documents,” considered “the final piece in historical research” (from the project’s press materials). Similarly, artistic practices, museum exhibitions, and private sector initiatives that focus on personal records and memories have generated innovative results that prompted a rethinking in the academic world, too.

Amid these developments, literary studies, which have been refining methods of analyzing self-narration in literary works, are in a position to take the lead in fields that focus on micro-histories, clarifying the significance of individual narratives that are not easily subsumed to collective narratives (“our” History), by examining literary and broader public discourse related to war.

Today, war remains a critical threat to international cooperation. Yet, despite the ongoing media coverage of the horrors of war stirring anguish and anxiety in people around the world, within the rush of everyday life such events are often consumed as stereotyped symbols. If literature is meant to portray the irreplaceable, individual realities of life, stirring the imagination and empathy of others, then how should literary studies engage with texts about war, and what can they do to connect us to such experiences?

Marking 80 years since the end of the war in Japan, this plenary session aims to explore the possibilities and impossibilities of transmission and retelling wartime experience and memory. By sharing these pressing issues, we hope to lay the groundwork for new inquiries into the relationship between war and literature.

AMJLS organizing committee

YAMAMOTO Akihiro: Representations of War in Contemporary Japanese Film, Anime, and Literature: With a Focus on Takahashi Hiroki’s “Yubi no Hone (Finger Bones)” and Sunakawa Bunji’s “Shōtai (Platoon)”

My objective is to describe the structure of the “contemporary (Japanese) understanding of war,” and this presentation serves as a preliminary attempt towards this goal. The presentation is structured in two parts.

In the first part, I examine recent animated films such as The Wind Rises (dir. Miyazaki Hayao, 2013), The Eternal Zero (dir. Yamazaki Takashi, 2013; based on Hyakuta Naoki’s novel of the same name, 2006), and The Great War of Archimedes (dir. Yamazaki Takashi, 2019; based on the manga of the same name by Mita Norifusa, serialized from 2015 to 2023). While comparing them with past representations of war, the analysis extracts two elements that could be considered characteristics of contemporary war representation: “manipulable ideology” and “technology of empathy.” The two characteristics are then related to other phenomena of the present era, and hypothetically integrated in a theory of contemporary society.

In the second part I will analyze war representations in Takahashi Hiroki’s “Finger Bones”(Shinchō, November 2014 issue) and Sunakawa Bunji’s “Platoon” (Bungakukai, September 2020 issue) and examine the continuities and discontinuities with the discussion in the first part. In addition, the analysis will also examine how the references cited within “Finger Bones” are used in the text.

The aim of my discussion is to identify representations of war across contemporary anime, film, and literature, and to develop a semantic analysis of those representations.

It should be noted that most of the works discussed here were produced after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. In my presentation I will also consider to what extent — if at all — the disaster itself, as well as the discourse on social inequality, which has been a persistent issue in Japanese society even prior to the disaster, have influenced contemporary representations of war.

GOMIBUCHI Noritsugu: Distance and Sensitivity: For a Theory of War Fiction in the Post–Cold War Era

In the second half of this panel’s general abstract three questions are raised: (1) How have the news and media conveyed ongoing wars and acts of violence in recent years? (2) What has Japanese literature said about these themes, and how? (3) How have literary scholars received and interpreted these discursive practices? This presentation seeks to respond to the weighty issues raised above by examining war novels and related discourse from the post–Cold War period, particularly from the 2000s.

Many have pointed out that postwar Japan’s “pacifism” is inextricably tied to the historical conditions of the United States’ Asia strategy during the Cold War. Since the 1990s, the Japanese government has steadily continued to dismantle the postwar restrictions on military affairs and warfare. How have such structural shifts influenced the way “war and peace” are narrated in Japanese literature? One particularly striking aspect in this context is the emergence—especially after the September 11, 2001 attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan—of multiple works that problematize the connection between characters’ everyday lives and war or the battlefield.

The lineage of such works can be traced back to Okuizumi Hikaru’s A Banal Phenomenon (1994), followed by Levy Hideo’s Broken into Thousands of Pieces (2005), Misaki Aki’s War in the Town Next Door (2005), and Okada Toshiki’s Five Days in March (novel version, 2007). While not a novel, Kobayashi Erika’s 2002 performance Let’s Meet on the Day of the Air Raid can be said to engage with similar concerns.

Scholarly discourse has often questioned “how war has been narrated.” On the other hand, we must recognize that, among the various forms of military violence exercised in the world today, when, whose, and what kind of violence is labeled as “war” is determined by the politics of discourse and media representation.

With this in mind, this presentation will explore the possibility of critically reinterpreting representations of war in the post–Cold War era by focusing on the ways in which the relationship between war and everyday life has been narrated.

SONG Hyewon: Colonial Time and Memory: “War” in the Writings of Kim Sokpom, Kim Taeseng, and Zainichi Korean Women

In this presentation I will reexamine the image of  the “Korean victim” as shaped by the Japanese war discourse, and discuss the fragmented narratives of “war” that have existed in postwar Japan and the ambiguous temporal frameworks they reveal. The texts analyzed include literary works by Kim Sokpom and Kim Taeseng, as well as testimonies and writings by Zainichi Korean women.

In Japan, wartime memory is strongly associated with fighting, starvation on the battlefield, and the massive loss of human life resulting from air raids and atomic bombings. Discussions of Korean experiences typically center on events from the Asia-Pacific War period, such as the mobilization of forced laborers and “comfort women,” conscription into the military or exposure to the atomic bomb. However, for Koreans, the experience of war extends beyond direct violence during these years. Korean deaths are deeply tied to long-term forms of “structural violence” rooted in colonial rule, including poverty, lack of education, displacement, discrimination, and illness. Moreover, for Koreans, Japan’s “end of the war” is merely the beginning of a new kind of war.

Kim Sokpom and Kim Taeseng, both born in 1925, are rare cases who personally endured  the military conscription imposed on Koreans between 1944 and 1945. Nonetheless,, in their literary works, Japan’s defeat or Korea’s “August 15 Liberation” (as Kim Sokpom terms it) does not occupy a central place. Instead, Kim Taeseng meticulously documents the absurd deaths of nameless individuals, while Kim Sokpom continues to write even today about the Jeju April 3rd Uprising of 1948. Similarly, in the testimonies and writings of Zainichi Korean women, memories of the Asia-Pacific War are often intermingled with recollections of the April 3rd Uprising and the Korean War. For them, to remember the “war” is to recall an ongoing chain of violence and suffering.

In the mid-1980s, Kim Taeseng posed the following question to Japanese readers: Could it be that you have not truly mourned your own “grandparents, parents and siblings” who died in the war? That you have not fully developed a sense of yourselves as victims? In this presentation, I also intend to examine the meaning of these words, which I believe offer important insights for rethinking Japan’s war memory.

Discussant: OKA Mari