Abstract

From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation’s social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan’s past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media function as much more than a simple ideological tool.

Dolores P. Martinez is an Emeritus Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London and Research Associate at ISCA, University of Oxford.  She has authored and edited numerous books, most recently Assembling Japan (2015), and Gender and Japanese Society (2014) and is co-editor of the Berghahn Books series Asian Anthropologies.

Artur Lozano-Méndez teaches Japanese Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He holds a doctorate in Translation and Intercultural Studies. His publications include ‘Mamoru Oshii's Exploration of the Potentialities of Consciousness in a Globalised Capitalist Network’ (Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2015) and El Japón contemporáneo. Una aproximación desde los estudios culturales (2016).

“Persistently Postwar uses a variety of detailed case studies to demonstrate how the contested legacy of the Asia-Pacific War has helped to shape the artistic and intellectual life of postwar Japan. This thought-provoking and highly readable collection of essays leaves the reader with deep insights into not only depictions of war in Japanese popular culture, but also how the war has affected broader cultural production from yakuza films to the anime industry.” • Philip Seaton, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

Blai Guarné is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the East Asian Studies Programme at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has been Visiting Fellow at the University of Tokyo and a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University. His publications include Antropología de Japón (Bellaterra 2017) and Escaping Japan: Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-first Century (Routledge 2018).