Abstract
This chapter demonstrates how war films centered on shōjo in postwar Japan have contributed to the articulation of collective war memory, the hyper-feminizing process in which complexities of war experiences are blacked out, while prompting national amnesia about Japan’s aggression. It investigates two (anti) war films produced in 1966 and 1985 respectively, both of which starred Sayuri Yoshinaga, the epitome of purity and chastity. Focusing on the character of A-bomb maiden, the chapter reveals that the concept of affect is the key to understand the way in which feminized war narrative has led to hyper-gendered collective memory in postwar Japan.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. “Collective Feelings or, the Impressions Left by Others.” Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 2 (2004a): 25–42.
———. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York and London: Routledge, 2004b.
Ai to shi no kiroku [A Record of Love and Death]. Dir. Kureyoshi Kurahara. Nikkatsu, 1966. Film.
Balázs, Béla. “Visible Man.” In Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film, translated by R. Livingstone and edited by E. Carter, 9–16. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010 [1924].
Barnard, Christopher. Language, Ideology and Japanese History Textbooks. London: Taylor & Francis, 2003.
Burch, Noël. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Crawford, Keith, and Stuart J. Foster. War, Nation, Memory: International Perspectives on World War II in School History Textbooks. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2007.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
Elshtain, Jean. Women and War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Enloe, Cynthia. The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Gabbard, Krin, and William Luhr. “Introduction.” In Screening Genders, edited by K. Gabbard and W. Luhr, 1–8. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
Gates, Philippa. “Fighting the Good Fight: The Real and Moral in Contemporary Hollywood Combat Film.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22 (2005): 297–310.
Hasegawa, Kazumi. “Falling in Love with History: Japanese Girls’ Otome Sexuality and Queering Historical Imagination.” In Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, edited by M.W. Kapell and A.B. Elliott, 135–149. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Higson, Andrew. “Place, Space, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the ‘Kitchen Sink’ Film.” In Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, edited by A. Higson, 133–156. London: Cassell, 1996.
Ichiki, Masashi. “Embracing the Victimhood: A History of A-bomb Manga in Japan.” IJAPS 7, no. 3 (2011): 35–52.
Ishikawa, Takumi. “‘Yumechiyo nikki’ ni okeru genbaku, hakketsubyō, Yoshinaga Sayuri” [Atomic Bombs, Leukemia, Sayuri Yoshinaga in the Diary of Yumechiyo]. Genbaku bungaku kenkyū 7 (2008): 9–40.
Jeffords, Susan, and Dennis K. Davis. “Women, Gender, and the War.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6, no. 1 (1989): 83–91.
Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Kanō, Mikiyo. “Shiro no gundan ‘kokubō fujinkai’: Onnatachi no kusanone fashizumu” [White Corps, ‘Female National Defense Group’: Women’s Glass-Roots Fascism]. In Onnatachi no sensō sekinin [Women’s War Responsibility], edited by Y. Okano, K. Hasegawa, S. Watanabe, and Y. Kitada, 3–17. Tokyo: Tokyodō Shuppan, 2004.
Kawamura, Kunimitsu. Otome no yukue: Kindai josei imēji no tanjō [Whereabouts of Otome: The Birth of Modern Female Images]. Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 2003.
Landy, Marcia. “Introduction.” In The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by M. Landy, 1–22. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83–109.
Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. London: Routledge, 1993.
Mizuno, Hiromi. “When Pacifist Japan Fights: Historicizing Desires in Anime.” Mechademia 2 (2007): 104–123.
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History. New York: Verso, 2005.
Narita, Ryūichi. “Sōsetsu, Sensō to jendā” [Critical Review, War and Gender]. In Kindai nihon no bunkashi 8: Kanjō, kioku, sensō 1935–1955 (2) [The Cultural History of Modern Japan 8: Emotion, Memory, and War in 1935–1955, vol. 2], edited by Y. Komori, N. Sakai, S. Shimazono, K. Chino, and R. Narita, 1–53. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002.
Napier, Susan J. “No More Words: Barefoot Gen, Grave of the Fireflies, and ‘Victim’s History.’” In Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, 161–174. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Ott, Brian L., and Robert L. Mack. Critical Media Studies: An Introduction. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Peterson, V. Spike. “Gendered Identities, Ideologies, and Practices in the Context of War and Militarism.” In Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspective, edited by L. Sjoberg and S. Via, 17–29. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.
Presence, Stephen. “An Investigation of Affect in the Cinema: Spectacle and the Melodramatic Rhetoric in Nil by Mouth.” Frames Cinema Journal 2 (2013). Accessed January 30, 2016. http://framescinemajournal.com/article/an-investigation-of-affect-in-the-cinema-spectacle-and-the-melodramatic-rhetoric-in-nil-by-mouth/.
Reynolds, David. “World War II and Modern Meanings.” Diplomatic History 25, no. 3 (2001): 457–472.
Rosenstone, Robert A. “History in Words/History in Images: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film.” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1173–1185.
Sakamoto, Rumi. “Mobilizing Affect for Collective War Memory: Kamikaze Images in Yūshūkan.” Cultural Studies 29, no. 2 (2015): 158–184.
Schwartz, Barry, and Mikyoung Kim. “Introduction: Northeast Asia’s Memory Problem.” In Northeast Asia’s Difficult Past: Essays in Collective Memory, edited by M. Kim and B. Schwart, 1–29. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Seaton, Phillip A. Japan’s Contested War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II. London: Routledge, 2007.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity.” In Constructing Masculinity, edited by M. Berger, B. Wallis, and S. Watson, 11–20. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Shouse, Eric. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” M/C Journal 8, no. 6 (2005). Accessed January 20, 2016. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php.
Sjoberg, Laura. “Gendering the Empire’s Soldiers: Gender Ideologies, the U.S. Military, and the ‘War on Terror.’” In Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives, edited by L. Sjoberg and S. Via, 209–218. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.
Studlar, Gaylyn. “Cruise-ing into the Millennium: Performative Masculinity, Stardom, and the All-American Boy’s Body.” In Ladies and Gentleman, Boys and Girls: Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century, edited by M. Pomerance, 171–184. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001.
Tan, Ed S. H. 1994. “Film-Induced Affect as a Witness Emotion.” Poetics 23 (1994): 7–32.
Todeschini, Maya Morioka. “‘Death and the Maiden’: Female Hibakusha as Cultural Heroines, and the Politics of A-bomb Memory.” In Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, edited by M. Broderick, 222–255. London: Kegan Paul International, 1996.
Turner, Graeme. Films as Social Practice. New York, NY: Routledge, 1988.
Wakakuwa, Midori. Sensō ga tsukuru joseizō: Dainiji sekai taisenka no nihon josei dōin no shikakuteki puropaganda [Female Images Shaped by the War: Visual Propaganda for Mobilizing Japanese Women in WWII]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2000.
Yoneyama, Lisa. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Yumechiyo nikki [The Diary of Yumechiyo]. Dir. Kirio Urayama. Toei Company, 1985. Film.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 15H03149.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Yoshida, K. (2019). Mediating Otome in the Discourse of War Memory: Complexity of Memory-Making Through Postwar Japanese War Films. In: Berndt, J., Nagaike, K., Ogi, F. (eds) Shōjo Across Media. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01485-8_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01485-8_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01484-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01485-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)