Section 7 | History, Politics and International Relations | Session 8C, Panel
Organiser and Chair: Alexander Bukh (London School of Economics)
David C. Stahl (Binghamton University, New York )
In modern societies, identities and ideologies are constructed and reconstructed out of race, culture and history. How this is done following major armed conflict has especially important ramifications to responsibility, atonement and nationalism. Years after Japan’s defeat, an enduring master narrative of collective victimization centered on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was formed. By means of this construct, the particular identity and victimhood of A-bomb survivors were symbolically appropriated for and attributed to the nation and populace as a whole. In Hiroshima Notes (1965), Ôe questions the evasive conflation of national Self and Hiroshima Other, and advocates a counternarrative involving the deliberate conversion of the compromised former to the authentic ways of life pioneered by the latter. Ôe's reconstitution of collective postwar identity vis-à-vis hibakusha is inseparable from critique of Japanese wartime and postwar politics and ideology. By means of inversion and decentering, he seeks to reconstruct viable Hiroshima and Hiroshima survivor-based alternatives by representing the peripheral city of Hiroshima as the legitimate postwar locus for consideration of matters long neglected by the central government in Tokyo. By basing his reconfigured hierarchy on humanism, ethics and responsibility as opposed to political, military and economic power, he effectively inverts the tennôsei structure so that representative Hiroshima survivors are repositioned to the top, and the emperor is displaced to the bottom.
Yulia Mikhailova (Hiroshima City University)
This paper aims to contribute to the discourse on the role of memory, Japanese attitudes towards the Second World War and the construction of post-war Japanese national identity. It considers the issue rather ignored in Western Japanese studies, namely, the role Japanese POW kept in Soviet labour camps played in the above-mentioned discourse. On presumption that collective memory has more to do with political interests and opportunities than with the persistence of individual trauma or memory, the paper examines how the individual and group traumatic memory of POW was intertwined into the political discourse of the Cold War facilitating the construction of post-war national identity in Japan against the negative image of the Soviet Other. At the hey-day of the Cold War the “dark side” of POW experience based mainly on the sufferings of their bodies and the sense of the unjustness of imprisonment was successfully used for the construction of the collective memory in Japan which helped to relieve the Japanese from the sense of guilt for the war, at least in regards to the Soviet Union. As POW were becoming older, their reminiscences underwent some changes – they tended to recall more nostalgically their Soviet past, to concentrate on the “light side” of their experience, even attributing to it their individual life achievements. However, in contemporary Japan this part of POW memory is not in demand either politically or socially which not only supports the above presumption, but demonstrates the decreased role of post-Soviet Russia as Japan’s counter-Other.
Alexander Bukh (London School of Economics)
Since late 1980s, the issue of national identity has been the focus of numerous theoretical and empirical works in the broad IR. While the ontology and epistemology of the various theoretical approaches differ substantially, there is a tendency to essentialise the contents of national identity and to perceive it as monolithic and rigid. The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study in Japan's national identity construction vis-à-vis two "Others"-post-Soviet Russia and North Korea in the post-Cold War era. The paper will attempt to show that the inquiry into national identity in IR would avoid essentialism and reductionism if it recognizes the fragmented nature of national identity and would explore its various constructions vis-à-vis significant Others.