Confronting Tragedy and Negotiating its Aftermath: A Keynote of Ruptures in Japanese Experience, from Early Meiji to Post-World War II

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Tragedy – and its affective registers of trauma, fear, pity, shame, and loss – typically arises at moments of fundamental social mutation, precipitating national soul-searching and conflicting responses to the crumbling of inherited national frameworks. How ought a nation work through this aftermath? Ought tragedy be forgotten, remembered, or subordinated to ideologies? Does ‘working through’ achieve national hope or only a horizon of hope ever receding the closer a nation comes to it?

Deploying tragedy as a heuristic device, and from the perspectives of intellectual and social history, political science, and women’s literature, this panel scrutinizes national responses to the two monumental fissures in modern Japanese experience: the Meiji Restoration and Japan’s defeat in World War II. Christopher Larcombe traces the Meiji reception of Western ‘tragedy’ as an instrument for moulding a ‘national’ subjectivity. Curtis Anderson Gayle bridges the Meiji and the postwar eras, showing that the Meiji Centennial confirmed each period’s imperative to sever the shame of past defeats from the reinvention of an affirmative future. Justin Aukema complements such ideological memorialization by examining material memorializations. Utilizing multi-media sources drawn from field research, Aukema argues that the conflicting visions of grass-roots campaigners and the national government over the preservation of war-related sites reflect larger debates about how to interpret and overcome Japan’s traumatic wartime past. Finally, Yasuko Claremont interprets the atom bomb poetry of Kurihara Sadako as an expression of pacifist anarchism, prioritizing the particularity of human experience as a source of complex hope even in the aftermath of tragic affliction.

(250)

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Yasuko Claremont, The University of Sydney

Chair

• Yasuko Claremont, The University of Sydney

Individual Presentations

• A National Subject: The Reception and Instrumentalization of the Western Concept and Genre of ‘Tragedy’ in Meiji Japan - Christopher Larcombe, The University of Sydney

• Exiting the Vanquishment of the Past and Reinventing a Future in Early Postwar Japan - Curtis Anderson Gayle, Japan Women's University

• Overcoming a Traumatic Past? Preserving Japan’s ‘Negative Heritage’ of War - Justin Aukema, Sophia University

• Horizons of Post-Tragic Hope: Postwar Anarchism in the Poetry of Kurihara Sadako (1913–2005) - Yasuko Claremont, The University of Sydney

Discussant

• Yasuko Claremont, The University of Sydney