Popular culture and historical memories of war in AsiaFrom victim’s history to historical revisionism and
construction of patriotic memories
Throughout the postwar period, numerous manga, films, anime, and works of popular fiction in
Japan have depicted the Asia-Pacific War. As Japan recovered from wartime devastation, achieved
its “miracle economy,” and eventually transformed into an affluent consumer society and the
world’s second largest economy, war was never absent from its popular culture. Many well-
known first-generation manga artists like Mizuki Shigeru, Tezuka Osamu, and Chiba Tetsuya
drew war manga, depicting the tragedy of war based on their own experiences. In the 1950s and
1960s, boys’ manga magazines published triumphant stories of heroic boy pilots (Nakar 2006),
while some children’s stories and popular novels continued to point to Japan’s wartime atroci-
ties (Penny 2006). Japan’s experience of the atomic bombs produced—once the suppression of
explicitly atom-bomb related themes was lifted—countless narratives and images of suffering,
the most iconic being Nakazawa Keiji’s autobiographical manga, Barefoot Gen (1973–1985)
with its strong anti-war message. The trauma of having become the only nation to have suf-
fered A-bomb attacks has also found expression in the recurring images of nuclear apocalypse
in Japanese popular culture (Napier 1993, 2001; Lamarre 2008). There has been a steady flow
of films—both animated and live action—that depict the Asia-Pacific War: The Towers of Lilies
(1953), The Burmese Harp (1956, 1985), Storm over the Pacific (1960), Animentary: The Decision
(1970), Tsushimamaru: Good-bye, Okinawa (1982), and Kayoko’s Diary (1991) to name a few. Some
carry explicit anti-war messages while others express a generalized sense of tragedy. Many focus
on human dramas set against the backdrop of the war. All of these films fuse memory, consump-
tion, and entertainment, animating the past with affective power and imagination.
While by no means monolithic, postwar Japanese popular cultural treatment of the Asia-
Pacific War has generally highlighted Japanese suffering and the desire for peace. By doing so,
it neglected Japan’s war responsibility and reproduced a “victims’ history” (Napier 2001, 164).
Widely acclaimed films such as Black Rain (1989), as well as anime like Glass Rabbit (1979),
Grave of the Fireflies (1988), and Giovanni’s Island (2014), utilize the victimhood trope, sidestep-
ping the issue of Japan’s victims. They tell sentimental human melodramas that focus on family,
personal loss, and suffering. War serves as a background for human suffering and resilience.
Women and children appear as innocent victims to emphasize the tragedy of the war. Interest-
ingly, while such postwar victim narratives depict Japanese people as the victims of war, nuclear
bombs, and the Japanese military, they rarely point fingers at America or the Allies. Scenes of
battles with enemies are rare, while depictions of bombs and air raids are plentiful. Cities are
burned by bombers operated by faceless (and nationality-less) pilots; even the nuclear attacks
are depicted as if they were a form of natural disaster. Given that the United States had become
postwar Japan’s foremost ally, benefactor, and protector, any hostility towards the United States as
Japan’s former enemy was, in the new context of Cold War geopolitics, well repressed.
While these anti-war cultural representations do not directly promote nationalism, they are
nation-centric in the sense that they tell the nation’s story to a national audience, with little
regard for Japan’s other. We may also note here that by the mid-1970s some nationalistic ele-
ments crept back into popular culture with the hugely successful anime feature Space Battleship
Yamato (1977–1983). In this series, Japan’s World War II battleship is resurrected to fight an evil
alien empire and protect the earth with kamikaze-style suicide attacks. Nationalism in Yamato,
however, is embedded in fantasy science fiction and clearly distanced from reality; it also pre-
sents pacifist desires and ambivalence towards fighting and killing (Takekawa 2013; Napier 2005;
Mizuno 2007). Yamato’s nationalism is not of a militant kind, and even though we could read
in it a hesitant step towards revisiting Japan’s pacifist stance, it falls in a different category from