Contribution to Book
War and Nationalism in Recent Japanese Cinema: Yamato, Kamikaze, Trauma, and Forgetting the Postwar
Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia
(2016)
Abstract
An article on on Yamato (Otokotachi no Yamato, 2005), Sato Jun’ya’s box office hit that was produced by the maverick Kadokawa Haruki about the ill-fated battleship Yamato. Taking into consideration not only the long history of films on the Yamato, but also some contemporary kamikaze war films, I argued that the film is not just reworking wartime memory for the sake present-day historical revisionism towards WWII, but that it is utilizing its own depiction of violence to create a kind of “vicarious trauma” whose main effect is a forgetting of the postwar and its own traumatic history of the Cold War.
Keywords
- Japanese cinema,
- war films,
- World War II,
- kamikaze,
- Yamato,
- memory,
- trauma,
- postwar
Disciplines
Publication Date
2016
Editor
Chiho Sawada and Michael Berry
Publisher
University of Hawai’i Press
Citation Information
Aaron Gerow. "War and Nationalism in Recent Japanese Cinema: Yamato, Kamikaze, Trauma, and Forgetting the Postwar" HonoluluDivided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia (2016) p. 196 - 219 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/aarongerow/74/