2025 Theses Doctoral

Countervisions of Postwar Japan

Nardy, Deanna

The story of Japan’s postwar period typically goes something like this: after total defeat comes the American Occupation (1945-1952) and Japan’s subsequent geopolitical incorporation into U.S. global foreign strategy vis-à-vis the Cold War (1947-1991), Korean War (1950-1953), and Vietnam War (1955-1975), which, while triggering Japan’s miraculous economic recovery, also heralds the characteristic countercultural movements of the 1960s, the eventual failure of which is often symbolized by the 1970 renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and the Osaka Expo.

This dissertation seeks to challenge this timeline by analyzing previously unlooked-at texts and the various ways Japanese and Okinawans tried to work through the question of how to be human in the new postwar society and global order. Drawing from decolonial and black studies theorists that have linked cultural practices to methods of social relation, and the importance of a sociality based in mutual recognition to resistance to the dehumanizing effects of coloniality, this dissertation takes up three mediums of literary and image-making practice—the translation of black literature, kashihon (rental) manga, and the photography of Ishikawa Mao—in an effort to theorize alternative modes of being human proposed in Japan’s postwar period. From the different routes and mediums explored in the cases herein—be they counter-American Studies, counter-mainstream, or counter-mingling—emerge the possibility of alternative narrating, history-making, and reading that can be both recuperated and recuperative.

First, I contextualize the sudden interest of Japanese scholars in the translation of Anglophone black literature beginning in the 1950s. Focusing on Hayakawa Publishing’s thirteen-volume The Complete Works of Black Literature (Kokujin bungaku zenshū, 1961-1963), and its head editor Hashimoto Fukuo (橋本福夫, 1906-1987), Chapter 1 argues that the translation and framing of black literature within the anthology was purposefully aimed at the field of American Studies, openly criticizing Western humanism through the questioning of what it means to write the human in literature. Building upon the collective efforts of the Association of Negro Studies (Kokujin kenkyū no kai), a research collective founded in 1954 and to which Hashimoto and many contributors of the anthology belonged, Hashimoto presents black literature to caution Japanese readers against the seductiveness of two powerful but flawed reading frameworks: the nationalist, race-based one that led to the militarism of the war, and the Communist one that failed to stop it. By presenting black writers’ protest against their dehumanization, whether it be Wright and Ellison’s rupture from the Communist Party, Baldwin’s break with religion, or Hughes’ eschewing of middle-class aspiration, Hashimoto warns the Japanese public of accepting systems that deny them their full humanity and seeks, through compiling black literature, other possibilities of belonging.

I then pivot to the postwar phenomenon of kashihon (rental) manga. Drawing primarily from the scholarship of the Kashihon manga-shi kenkyū-kai (The Research Society for the History of Kashihon Manga, est. 1999), Chapter 2 weaves together firsthand testimony from kashihon manga artists and former owners of rental bookstores to provide a detailed material history of the rental market, attending to its alternative sites of production, distribution, and circulation, as well as the gendered aspects of its labor and readership. As the first in-depth English-language study of kashihon manga, Chapter 2 makes clear the class-based distinctions that defined the rental manga reading economy from that of mainstream children’s magazines and newspapers. From the look and feel of the rental books themselves to the unscrupulous practices of the printing houses that provided them, Chapter 2 demonstrates the stakes of the kashihon market to lay the foundation for understanding the counter-mainstream manga form it fostered.

Chapter 3 introduces the illegitimate spawn of this alternative reading economy: gekiga (lit: “dramatic pictures”). After providing a history of how gekiga came to be, I introduce Ishiko Junzō’s theory of gekiga’s techniques and themes before zooming in on one of gekiga’s progenitors: Satō Masaaki (佐藤まさあき, 1937-2004). While mainstream children’s magazines and newspapers of the early postwar period touted beautiful youth with impervious bodies and democratic ideals, I argue that Satō’s vulnerable and vengeful protagonists, in conjunction with the violent aesthetics of gekiga, present a visual indictment of narratives of the healthy postwar economic and social body. A close reading of Satō’s The Man with a Black Scar (Kuroi kizuato no otoko, serialized from 1961-1962) ultimately reveals the frustrated desires of a class unable to recover from the war, and unwilling to silently accept its new place in postwar society.

Finally, Chapter 4 turns to the photography of native Okinawan Ishikawa Mao (石川真生, 1953-). Including a chapter on Okinawa in a dissertation titled Countervisions of Postwar Japan demands a rethinking of postwar Japanese experience in terms of time, place, and personhood. Ishikawa’s photography, I contend, is oppositional to more famous visual narratives of postwar Okinawa, such as those articulated by Tōmatsu Shōmei, Tokiwa Tokiyo, and Kitajima Keizō. By analyzing Ishikawa’s Akabanaa (“Red Flower”) series, which encompasses her time working at bars in the segregated districts of Koza and Kin Town between 1975 and 1977, I argue that Ishikawa’s photographic praxis strips three particularly entrenched postwar Japanese images— The Black Soldier, the Mixed-Child, and the Prostitute—of their explanatory power, instead reimagining the relationship between Japan, America, and Okinawa as based on something outside of their colonial military history.