ABSTRACT
How does popular visual culture record the recent past, especially the contested past? American movies have found it easy to lionize the unsullied heroism of the Second World War, even filtered decades later through the imperialist disasters of Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. British movies and comics for decades traded on simple good-guy/bad-guy tropes in their depiction of the fight against Nazi Germany. As a loser in the war and the reluctant host of profound cultural changes imposed afterwards from outside, Japan has a more troubled relationship with its past, one that is reflected in popular culture. For much of the postwar period, Japan produced some of the most unblinking antiwar movies ever made. In recent years, however, a wave of popular culture has complicated and often muddied the history of the war. Hyakuta Naoki, Yamada Muneki and Kobayashi Yoshinori have sought to recalibrate the historical record in print. Movies such as Pride, Yamato and Forever Zero have celebrated Imperial Japan’s military achievements even while casting ambiguous looks at the result. This year’s Gift of Fire for the first time dramatizes Japan’s attempts to build a nuclear bomb. At the extreme end of this wave is the xenophobia and racism of books and comics that sell anti-American fantasies to young males. This chapter examines whether such distortions and fantasies are harmless, even cathartic, or do they warrant serious study and concern?
