ABSTRACT
One book that earned journalistic acclaim and triggered a controversy in Japanese intellectual fora from 1997 to 1998 was Discussing Post-Defeat Japan by literary critic Kato Norihiro (1998). In problematizing the basic mode of being of postwar Japan, Kato uses the idea of ‘twistedness’ as the key to understanding what he calls ‘post-defeat’ Japanese society. While war-defeated Japan has had this ‘twistedness’ built into its core, he argues, the Japanese society has ignored it and been behaving as though it did not exist.
