Section 7 | History, Politics and International Relations | Session 6B, Panel
Chair and Discussant: Sheldon Garon (Princeton University)
Bill Mihalopoulos (Zayed University Dubai
In this paper I focus on the film Postwar History as told by a Barmaid directed by Imamura Shôhei. What I find interesting about this film is how Imamura opens a gap between the sanctioned history of post-war Japan – centred on US occupation and subsequent economic recovery – and an alternative history of Japan lived by people on the margins of Japanese society due to the unevenness of post-war development. The brilliance of this film is the way Imamura discloses a gap between the lived experience of the barmaid narrating her story and the official history of the nation. Throughout the film, the events that make up the life of the barmaid are never subsumed into the narrative of the nation-state. Imamura offers the marginalized existence of the barmaid as form of unaffected experience of what it means to be Japanese that has no associations of equivalence with the nation-state or national identity.