ABSTRACT
Today Japan’s postwar ruins lie buried beneath the skyscrapers and mammoth department stores of the nation’s prosperity. Yet Japanese prosperity has proven fragile, and distant memories continue to lurk just beneath the brittle surface of everyday life. Literature can be a powerful catalyst for releasing memories-both personal and social-that have lain dormant for decades, thereby confronting us with, in Paul Fussell’s words, “our own buried lives.”1 Fussell coins this expression in his study of English literary accounts of World War I. Compared to that somber body of writing and to Japan’s own ponderous literature about the Pacific War, Japanese stories of the American occupation, while never eluding war’s shadow, are refreshingly lighthearted. Laced with humor and a bittersweet nostalgia, these narratives relish the unlikely contradictions and ironies of postwar life: hope and optimism amidst widespread suffering; new freedoms brought not by domestic leaders but by the foreign occupiers; fervent wartime xenophobes who suddenly embrace American fashion, the English language, and proclaim democracy to be the nation’s ideological savior. This book explores how the occupation has been remembered, recreated, and disseminated through a wide range of literary works written in Japanese. I examine stories by both women and men, by writers from Okinawa as well as from Japan’s main islands. I do not try to explicate what happened during the occupation or why, for historians and social scientists have already shed much light on these issues. Instead I address a different set of questions: How has Japan’s experience of the occupation been recreated when filtered through the literary imagination? Men have clearly dominated the nation’s literary record of the era; in what ways does Japanese women’s writing offer a “counter-history” to these dominant male narratives? Finally, but at the heart of this inquiry, how have Okinawan writers represented their region’s distinct experience of American military occupation, and what can Okinawan literature teach us about
historical memory in postwar Japan? I pursue these questions through the literature of both well-known and obscure writers, and I discuss stories available in English translation while introducing other works culled from Japanese-language newspapers, popular magazines, and from publications deemed either too local or lowbrow for inclusion in standard literary studies. In addition, I draw on documents from U.S. military sources, Japanese municipal archives, and personal collections. In short, this book intersperses literary analysis with discussions of postwar history and juxtaposes writing by men and women, by mainland Japanese and Okinawans. The result is an interdisciplinary, comparative inquiry into the literature of two integrally related but separate instances of American military occupation in East Asia.2 Roughly half of this book is devoted to literature written by Japanese men; the remainder explores writing by Okinawans and by Japanese women.
