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Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the circulation and translation of Fujiwara Tei’s The Shooting Stars are Alive (Nagareru hoshi wa ikite iru, 1949) in order to illuminate the gendered process whereby Japan was reconstituted from “multiethnic empire” to “peaceful nation-state.”

Paper long abstract:

Although the Japanese empire theoretically disappeared off the map in 1945 following Japan’s defeat by the Allied Powers, the competing narratives of place and belonging that had been engendered by Japanese imperialism were not so easily erased; instead, they would continue to configure and dis-figure physical, human, and cultural geographies across the transpacific region. This paper looks at repatriate memoirs, interviews, and fiction published in Japan from the 1940s through the 1960s in order to illuminate the gendered process whereby Japan was reconstituted from “multiethnic empire” to “peaceful nation-state.” It focuses in particular on Fujiwara Tei’s repatriation narrative The Shooting Stars are Alive (Nagareru hoshi wa ikite iru, 1949). The wife of a Japanese meteorologist who had been stationed in Manchuria in 1943, Fujiwara fled to Korea after the Soviets entered the war and was eventually repatriated to Japan from there. The novelized version of her experiences was an immediate commercial success when it was published in Japan in 1949 – and became a bestseller in another country as well: South Korea. In tracing out how Fujiwara’s book has circulated in postwar East Asia and how various voices of empire were amplified – or silenced – through the book’s translation, this paper will reveal how the mutually constituted politics of decolonization (in Korea) and postwar reconstruction (in Japan) were not an aberration from the discourse on Japanese national victimhood but the very consequence of it.