Narrating “Mobilities”: Post-Colonial Imaginings in Postwar Japan

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

The panel brings together participants in a Japan-based international, interdisciplinary research project to discuss their recently published volume (“Kikyō” no monogatari, Idō no katari: Sengo nihon ni okeru posuto-koroniaru no sōzōryoku, Heibonsha, 2014). Inspired partly by work in the emerging field of Mobility Studies, the book (whose contributors are social scientists, historians, and literary scholars) asks what critical pressure the problematic of “mobility” can bring to bear on the study of postwar Japan. On the one hand, massive movement of people in contemporary globalization has prompted social scientists and historians to reconsider the assumption that “mobility” is an exceptional state while settled populations are the norm. On the other hand, literary narratives, unlike policy studies produced in the social sciences, offer narrations from the perspectives of mobile subjects themselves, rather than the perspectives of receiving countries (and their regulating authorities). The book under discussion, extending such new research, poses powerful challenges to postwar constructions of Japan as a homogeneous society, one that is and has not been a country of immigration. Why have tales of postwar repatriation been largely excluded from postwar literature unless subsumed within a nationalistic narrative of “home-coming”? What complexities attend very construction of a narrating subject in zainichi tales of displacement under Japanese colonialism? Who are the drifters in Kirino Natsuo’s Tokyo Island? Panel papers take up literary topoi that in some cases have been relegated to the margins of postwar Japanese Studies, yet unsettle its very boundaries.

Area of Study

• Japan

Session Organizer

• Brett de Bary, Cornell University

Chair

• Brett de Bary, Cornell University

Individual Presentations

• Tracing the Demobilized: The Requiem Novels of Yagi Yoshinori - Hideto Tsuboi, International Research Center for Japanese Studies

• Other Places, Others’ Places, as Produced in the Experience of Mobility - Yumi Hirata, Osaka University

• Reconsidering "Location" from the Perspective of Mobility - Toshio Iyotani, Hitotsubashi University

Discussant

• Naoki Sakai, Cornell University