The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory

by Michael S. Molasky

Overview

How do the Japanese and Okinawans remember Occupation? How is memory constructed and transmitted? Michael Molasky explores these questions through careful, sensitive readings of literature from mainland Japan and Okinawa. This book sheds light on difficult issues of war, violence, prostitution, colonialism and post-colonialism in the context of the Occupations of Japan and Okinawa.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415260442
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/08/2001
Series:	Routledge Studies in Asia's Transformations
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Molasky, Michael S.

Table of Contents

Preface. Introduction: Burned-Out Ruins and Barbed-Wire Fences. The Occupation of Japan as History. The Occupation in Mainland Japanese Literature and Criticism. Okinawa: From Premodern Kingdom to Japanese Prefecture. The Battle of Okinawa and the American Occupation (1945-1972). Chapter Summaries. Notes Chapter One: Roads to No-Man's Land. Language,Landscape and Gender in The American School. Gender, History and the Construction of Victimhood in The Cocktail Party. Fact and Fiction. Notes Chapter Two: A Base Town In The Literary Imagination. An Okinawan Boy. The Town That Went Pale. Children of Mixed Blood and the Remaking of Koza. Notes Chapter Three: A Darker Shade of Difference. Representing Blacks in Postwar Japan. Race and Narrative Ambivalance in Prize Stock. Reporting Truth, Imagining Motives: Painting on Black Canvas. Poetry of Protest: Arakawa Akira's The Coloured Race. Notes Chapter Four: Female Floodwalls. The Recreation and Amusement Association. Prostitution After the RAA. Prostitution and the Japanese Publishing Industry. The Chastity of Japan. Female Floodwall. Notes Chapter Five: Ambivalent Allegories. The Generational Logic of Guests From Afar. Prostitution and Other Honest Jobs: The Only Ones. Caste and Outcasts: Women of a Base Town. Marriage, Money and Desire: The Women of Chitose, Hokkaido. Notes Chapter Six: The Occupier Within. Reproducing The Occupation: Human Sheep. Style as Story: Narrative Technique and Memory in American Hijiki. Notes Epilogue: Occupation Literature in the Post-Vietnam Era. Okinawan Literature Since the Vietnam War. Saegusa Kazuko's A Winter's Death. Notes.

Editorial Reviews

A searching, sometimes searing, exploration of Japanese fiction about the doubled occupation of Japan and Okinawa by the United States and the doubled colonialism.

Carol Gluck

This study of Japanese fiction ... makes plain the literary effects of Japan's own experience of foreign domination. That Molasky is sensitive not just to the political contents of this literature, but to its racial, sexual and gender import as well, speaks to the breadth of his critical acumen—not to mention the depth of the Japanese colonial experience itself.

John Whittier Treat

Molasky's excellent study of Japanese occupation literature is thoroughly researched, well written, and contributes substantially to our understanding of an extremely important but heretofore largely neglected area of postwar Japanese literature.. —The Journal of Asian Studies

David C. Stahl

'Molasky's excellent study of Japanese occupation literature is thoroughly researched, well written, and contributes substantially to our understanding of an extremely important but heretofore largely neglected area of postwar Japanese literature.' - The Journal of Asian Studies

'The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory is a definitive work, the result of a Herculean task. Researchers for years to come will be indebted by this groundbreaking project.' - H-Japan

'Molasky's excellent study of Japanese occupation literature is thoroughly researched, well written, and contributes substantially to our understanding of an extremely important but heretofore largely neglected area of postwar Japanese literature.' - The Journal of Asian Studies

'The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory is a definitive work, the result of a Herculean task. Researchers for years to come will be indebted by this groundbreaking project.' - H-Japan

'The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory, is brilliantly realistic from a diverse range of historical, sociological and literary perspectives'- Wendy Ella Wright, electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies , 2007

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