Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates how Japanese women in peripheries, as the subject of narrating, (re)claim their forgotten memories in the national memory discourse through postwar fictions, using the concept of “abject” body and Cixous’ “écriture feminine” that explains those women’s storytelling.

Paper long abstract:

Memories of WWII have been ever controversial in Japan, just like many other countries, being associated with the national and other collective identities within the nation. It is also important to note that the war is constantly memorialized and (re)shaped significantly through popular media—a crucial apparatus for constructing a shared past.

Many studies have criticized Japanese war-themed fictions for their gendered narratives—women manifested as victims or nurturing mothers and men as heroic soldiers—to satisfy the national masculine desire. However, these studies tend to look at representations of men and women in a dichotomous framework and fail to notice the significance of war narratives and experiences of different groups of women. This may overlook the power relation between the center and the peripheral of the country. Some fictions have revealed discrepancies in female war experiences within Japan; ones in the mainland are sacralized, and others in peripheries are not. Meanwhile, the mechanism and effect(s) of female narratives in different socio-political positions have yet to be studied sufficiently.

This paper attempts to demonstrate how storytelling of women in peripheries, as the subject of narrating through their “abject” bodies, would serve as a strategy to (re)claim their forgotten memories in the national memory discourse through postwar popular fictions. It examines the mechanism of female narratives and the role of the narrators in popular dramas about the Soviet Union’s military action on Sakhalin near the end of WWII: Karafuto 1945 Summer Hyosetsu no Mon (1974) and Fire of the Mist (2008). Using Kristeva’s “abject” (1982) and the notion of “écriture feminine” (Cixous 1975), the paper discusses the way that (women’s) bodies are manifested as a medium of communication to construct a shared memory of the war among women, destabilizing the dominant national war narrative based on masculine desire.

Paper short abstract:

This article seeks to explore the representation of Japanese historical memory as well as the social roles imposed on women between 1930-1945 through the analysis of Urano Suzu, the main character from Kōno Fumiyo’s manga Kono sekai no katasumi ni (‘In this corner of the world’).

Paper long abstract:

This article uses Kōno Fumiyo’s manga Kono sekai no katasumi ni (‘In this corner of the world’) as an example of how historical narratives can be constructed and massively shared as a pop culture product. Kōno’s work is understood as a pseudo-manifesto, a political declaration that Hiroshima’s citizens and history are much more complex than the mere victims of the nuclear bombing. The chosen manga not only represents this political mindset but also provides many examples of how women’s roles can be constructed and naturalized. The discussion will be centered on the manga’s main character, Urano Suzu. Her conception of the romantic love as well as what she thinks about her social and marital roles will be explored.

The theoretical and methodological frames draw from Eco’s and Barthe’s semiotic theories as well as the guidelines put forth by feminist historians like Hélène Bowen Raddeker and Joan Scott. Thus, the article is structured in two main blocs. First, it seeks to explore what mythologies –as understood in Barthes, 1957– can be found in Suzu’s character. Our preliminary findings suggest that although she has assumed as her own the need to serve and please her family and country, she does not quite fit into the so-called exemplar wife mold. Throughout the story she constantly clashes with other womanhood conceptions as well as with people with very different social backgrounds that force her to question herself as well as to discover and acknowledge her own identity. The latter part of the article reflects upon the political disruption generated by the manga’s plot and protagonist, as they significantly depart from what the mainstream empiricist historians would recognize as the ‘one-true story of the Japanese empire’. The analysis reveals a parallelism between the manga’s narrative and the political utility that feminist historians advocate for in their postmodern and postcolonial investigations. Finally, this paper constitutes a contribution to the study of media accounts of the past and how these representations introduce shifts in historical memory.