ABSTRACT
A shared and assumed national history is a critical part of a national identity – a shared ‘story we tell ourselves.’1 One of the dominant discursive state and national narratives of self at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympiad was that Japan had been reborn; it was no longer the feared and despised (although defeated) enemy of a world war, but rather a peaceful internationalist. It was the shared national history that created this present self with the post-war Constitution and nuclear horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki serving as the twin pillars of this new facet of Japanese national identity. This required a careful and nuanced balancing act – premised on inventing a new, forward looking Japan that was different from its martial past, while at the same time selectively remembering and misremembering the past, both consciously and unconsciously, to emphasise certain aspects of it while erasing problematic portions.
