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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses Japanese literature after 2000 through the lens of contemporary history, literary history and memory studies. The focus will be on how memory of WWII has been politicized by writers born in the 1930s, with two anthologies by poet Wakamatsu Jōtarō (1935-2021) highlighted.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to discuss Japanese literature after 2000 through the combined lens of contemporary history, literary history and memory studies. The focus will be on how individual and collective memory of the Second World War has been reevaluated and politicized by an older generation of authors born in the 1930s, who personally experienced the war and whose late work can and should be read alongside gravitational shifts in the country’s pacifist self-perception throughout the 2010s and early 2020s. The two last anthologies written by the late regional poet Wakamatsu Jōtarō 若松丈太郎 (1935-2021) will be highlighted in this regard: While Wakamatsu became well-known for his “prophetic” writings premonitory of the 3/11 catastrophe as well as the poetic topos of the “nuclear”, his mode of engagement with the principles of democratic accountability went further into the essence of post-war and pacifist sensibilities of his country. Besides memories of the war itself, the American occupation of Japan, the role of the emperor and the now seemingly historic post-war political, cultural and intellectual modes of thought are evaluated in Wakamatsu’s last poems – texts that can be read both as a warning to a generation continuously more forgetful of its past and, in this line of thought, as a counter-argument against a new Japanese “narration of nation” (Bhabha 1990) that has been labeled or at least discussed as a right-wing shift in support of remilitarization.

Alongside Wakamatsu, well-known authors like Ōe Kenzaburō (1935-2023) and Oda Makoto (1932-2007) were in their late years forerunners not only in the literary debate in support of pacifism in Japan after 2000, but as the last remaining representative figures of a literary generation and literary system after 1945 strongly influenced by World War, national defeat and a critical reassessment of nationalism. Other figures of the same generation born in the 1930s, with their literary memories, complement a framing of these oftentimes overlooked late work contributions as a relevant aspect of Japanese literature – in its recent generational shifts and in its relevance to a national and global memory culture of the 20th century.