Persistently Postwar: Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1785339591 ISBN 13: 9781785339592

Publisher: Berghahn Books, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

“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

About this edition

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1785339591
• ISBN 13: 9781785339592
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208
• Editor: Guarné Blai, Lozano-Méndez Artur, Martinez Dolores P.