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Paper short abstract

This paper reexamines Japanese literary engagements with Vietnam during the 1955–75 war through Kaikō Takeshi (1930–1989) and Hino Keizō (1929–2002). It analyzes their portrayals of war and society, highlighting literature’s critical role within Japan’s long 1960s intellectual climate.

Paper long abstract

This paper reexamines Japanese literary engagements with Vietnam during the country’s 1955–1975 war against the United States, focusing on the works of Kaikō Takeshi (1930–1989) and Hino Keizō (1929–2002). Both writers first engaged with Vietnam through writings based on firsthand wartime coverage and later produced a substantial body of fictional works that transformed these experiences into literary narratives. By examining these texts, this paper investigates how they represented Vietnamese local society and what role literature played in articulating contemporary political and cultural realities.

Postwar Japanese society is often characterized as having strong antiwar sentiments, yet conflicts occurring elsewhere in Asia—such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars—were frequently perceived as remote and largely detached from everyday concerns. Even among Japanese intellectuals of the period, cases such as that of Oda Makoto (1932–2007), who co-founded the Citizens’ League for Peace in Vietnam (Beheiren) and actively participated in the anti–Vietnam War movement, were historically exceptional.

Writers who sustained an interest in the Vietnam War through literary practice, rather than primarily through participation in social movements, were likewise relatively few. Kaikō and Hino, while not intellectuals positioned at the center of social movements, consistently pursued literary practices grounded in wartime observation and, through achievements such as receiving the Akutagawa Prize, occupied secure positions within Japan’s postwar literary establishment. It is in this sense that they merit particular attention.

Through close readings of their texts, this presentation places their literary practices within Japan's “long 1960s” intellectual climate. It explores how these practices were intertwined with images of the United States and perceptions of Asia under Cold War conditions, with Vietnam functioning as a key site for negotiating broader geopolitical and ideological concerns. At the same time, the paper situates these literary texts within the contemporary mass media environment—newspapers and weekly magazines—in which they circulated. By doing so, it reassesses the historical configuration of literary discourse on the Vietnam War in Japan and clarifies how literature functioned across, and in relation to, the boundaries of journalism, political activism, and cultural critique.