| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Yoshiyuki Igarashi. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2000. Pp. x, 284.

This provocative book by Yoshiyuki Igarashi examines how memories of war have been suppressed and expressed, and discusses the tensions between diametrically opposed desires—the desire to remember and to forget—through the mediation of history in postwar Japan in the quarter century since defeat. Drawing heavily on popular culture, including radio and TV dramas, films, and sports, Igarashi demonstrates how seemingly trivial cultural characters and phenomena reinforce and resist what he calls the "foundational narrative" of U.S.-Japanese postwar relations, emphasizing Japan's "overnight" metamorphosis from the enemy to the "intimate" ally of the United States in the Cold War. The narrative attempts to smooth the "interruption" of history and thus underline the historical continuity of both countries. 1

As signified by the title of the book, Igarashi focuses primarily on the period from 1945–1970 in tracing the changing image of Japan's bodies—from nationalist bodies to sanitized and democratized bodies in postwar Japan under U.S. hegemony. Further, he explores both "the discursive and material conditions of postwar Japan for its memory and historical production" (p. 5). The book starts with the role of atomic bombs and Emperor Hirohito to provide a basis for the narrative. Hirohito's so-called "divine" decision and the use of the bomb were equally idealized under the pretext of ending the war. At the same time, as implied by the famous "rendezvous" picture of Emperor Hirohito and General Douglas MacArthur (taken on September 27, 1945), the image of Japan's (dominant) male bodies was transformed to subordinate female bodies (Hirohito) in light of the dominant power of the U.S. (MacArthur) in the postwar world. The new feminized bodies conveniently mask the memories of Japan's past aggressive actions. . . .

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