Postwar Japan and the Politics of Mourning: The Meaning and the Limits of War Experiences

Abstract | After the 1990s, a series of intense debates developed in Japanese society regarding the memories of the Asia-Pacific War. At the center of this so-called “memory war ” stands the fact that legitimate mourning of the large number of war victims has yet to take place. This study sheds light on the perspectives of the ‘war-experience theorists, ’ who advocated most strongly for how to remember and commemorate the war dead who sacrificed their lives for the nation, and it explores their significance and limitations. For them, mourning should not be an accustomed ceremony that tries to ‘make sense ’ of the soldiers ’ deaths through the composition of a ‘story ’ (such as sacrifice for the nation) that enables the living to put an end to the tragedy. Rather, by taking an extreme stance of ‘refusing to mourn, ’ they continuously criticized nationalistic mourning rituals that attempted to monumentalize the war. Essentially, this method was closer to true ‘mourning, ’ in that their purpose was to create ‘communion ’ between the dead and the living. The war experience theorists were unable to make convincing arguments in postwar Japanese society and eventually disintegrated as a group because they were never able t