Persistently postwar
media and the politics of memory in Japan

Introduction. The politics of media and memory representation in Japan / Blai Guarne, Artur Lozano-Mendez, Dolores P. Martinez -- The death of certainty : memory, guilt and redemption in Ikiru / Dolores P. Martinez -- Postwar narratives and the avant-garde documentary : Tokyo 1958 and Furyo Shonen / Marcos Centeno Martin -- Radical subjectivity as a counter to Japanese humanist cinema : Oshima Nagisa's Nuberu bagu / Ferran de Vargas -- Recreating memory? : the drama Watashi wa kai ni naritai and its remakes / Griseldis Krisch -- From myth to cult : tragic heroes, parody and gender politics in the 1960s-1970s 'bad girls' cinema of Japan / Laura Treglia -- Collective remorse for the past : Japanese film and TV representations of the 1960s student movement / Katsuyuki Hidaka -- Depicting the persistence of being postwar : Eden of the East / Artur Lozano-Mende -- Rethinking anime in East Asia : creative labour in transnational production, or, what gets lost in translation / Tomohiro Morisawa -- Conclusion. The persistence of trauma / Dolores P. Martinez, Blai Guarne and Artur Lozano-Mendez.

"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 functions as much more than a simple ideological tool"--