Moving Histories: Emotion and Social Movements in Modern Japan

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

After March 11, 2011, Japanese and foreign media lauded Japanese forbearance and restraint. Likewise, during postwar reconstruction, calm and orderly response was prescribed, idealized, and instrumentalized; emotions were (to be) sublimated in the service of national rebirth. Yet trauma was equally a factor in shaping postwar, as opposition movements “emotionally mobilized” supporters by capitalizing on anger at the failed wartime regime and postwar social injustices. When A-bomb survivor Yamaguchi Sasako addressed the first World Congress against Nuclear Weapons in Hiroshima (1955), crying, “War is horrible!” the whole auditorium wept with her, galvanizing the antinuclear movement. And since 3/11, fears of radiation and distrust of the government have entangled with food security anxieties to animate citizen-based food safety movements.

Collective identity and action, key to social movements of all types, are rooted in emotional response. Historians of Europe like Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy have recently challenged common assumptions about emotions. Yet no current body of work exists on emotion in Japanese history, though a cursory glance reveals the importance of emotions in defining social imaginaries—and therefore in prescribing and proscribing action. The reification of a particularly Japanese “passionless politics” misses what happens on the ground and in the heart. This panel challenges such discourse by exploring how effective political action in Japan has also meant affective action. We examine the critical emotional dimension of emotion in formal and informal postwar social movements, demonstrating the varied and contradictory ways emotional work has shaped both mainstream and oppositional identities in Japan.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Nathan Hopson, Nagoya University

Chair

• Nathan Hopson, Nagoya University

Individual Presentations

• A Maiden Sacrifice for Postwar Democracy - Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Meiji University

• Testimony as Emotional Mobilization in the Antinuclear Movement - Ran Zwigenberg, Pennsylvania State University

• The Chosen Traumas of Postwar Tōhoku Studies - Nathan Hopson, Nagoya University

• It Came from Beyond!: Fear, Food Security and Comfort Food in Contemporary Japan - Anne McKnight, Shirayuri College

Discussant

• Hidemichi Kawanishi, Hiroshima University