Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a possibility of reimagining the Prange Collection, the Archive of the Allied Occupation of Japan, as a vehicle to bridge the periodized historical narratives of print media and reshape literary landscape in response to the series of the events across the transwar decades.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores a possibility of reimagining an archival collection as a vehicle to revise historical narratives across the divide of war and reshape a scope of continuities and changes over the transwar decades. The Gordon W. Prange Collection is identified as the "Archive of the Allied Occupation of Japan" because of its comprehensive print publication holdings issued for the first four years of the Allied Occupation, 1945-1949. However, these materials were not necessarily brand new innovations for the postwar readership. Substantial numbers of the book titles were reprints or revised editions of the publications originated from the first four decades of the 20th century Japan. Numbers of magazines and journals were revival from the wartime suppression with modified or rechristened titles. Publishing companies were also postwar comeback, which emerged and flourished well before the Occupation period.

The Prange Collection, then, could be instrumental in situating the postwar print media retrospectively within the broader literary history, bridging the pre- and post-war literary trends, and revealing the historical continuities and changes from the early to mid-20th century Japan. Andrew Gordon theorizes these decades as the "transwar period," during which modernity emerged and evolved as manifested by the rise of a mass consumer society and the spread of commercialized leisure. If print media plays a key role in shaping and disseminating modern life style and products, analyzing reprinted or revised holdings comparatively with the original versions could be a feasible approach to examining the transwar trends of literary production and consumption and highlighting the process of evolving notions and practices of modernity. Uncovering the continuities and changes in these literary media could make it possible to deconstruct the periodized narratives of 20th literary media history and illuminate transwar landscape of literary phenomena in response to the series of the historical events, such as depression, wartime mobilization, and military occupation. By examining Prange's reprint or revised editions, this paper seeks a possibility of reinterpreting archival materials beyond the specific time and space and constructing transwar literary landscape transcending the periodized historical narratives of Japanese print media.