In Search of a New Representation of Nature in Post-war Japanese Literature

The style of Japanese traditional writing changed drastically when the wars between China, Russia, and Japan broke out around the turn of the last century. Then, many manuals on how to write and on what was worth seeing were published to establish Japanese landscape aesthetics that regarded Japan as a sacred land. This aesthetics induced a center-periphery ideology upon both colonizing and colonized peoples in the Great Japanese Empire. My chapter discusses how post-war writers, such as Kyoko Hayashi (an atomic bomb survivor) and Keizo Hino, sought to find a new way of seeing and a new style of writing.