Postwar Tokyo: Capital of a Ruined Empire (with Dr. Seiji M. Lippit)

The 2016 John Howes Lecture in Japanese Studies with Dr. Seiji M. Lippit (University of California, Los Angeles). Presented by the Department of Asian Studies, UBC.

Thursday, November 17, 2016 at the University of British Columbia.

Abstract: In the aftermath of World War II, the city of Tokyo lay in a state of devastation. The capital of what had once been a massive overseas empire was reduced to ruins by the unrelenting Allied aerial bombardment and now faced occupation by a foreign military power for the first time in the nation’s history. At the same time, the city was also the site of a remarkable efflorescence of literature and culture in the immediate postwar period, as intellectuals and artists, many of them returning to the city from the countryside or from overseas territories, grappled with a simultaneous sense of immense loss and hopeful visions of the future. This talk examines ways in which the city of Tokyo—as both a material site and as a space of representation—shaped one of the most productive periods in modern cultural history. It focuses in particular on Tokyo’s materialization of a core contradiction underlying the experience of this historical moment: the city embodied on the one hand a sense of radical historical rupture, while, at the same time, it also framed the spectral return of the imperial past, which haunted the reconstruction of the city and the nation in the years after the war. The talk will examine a number of recurrent themes and images in literature and popular culture, including representations of the capital in ruins, the city under occupation, and the cultural space of the black markets.

[paulokano]

thanks for sharing. i don't know how i feel about 'black markets', seems like a particular imposition of what commerce and capitalism ought to be. informal markets, and non-eurocentric places of exchange may benefit from a more nuanced understanding. potlatches were banned in 1885 in canada, but i think there is much we can learn from indigenous, and other modes of exchange and reciprocity.