Locating Heisei in Japanese Fiction and Film

The Historical Imagination of the Lost Decades

Marc Yamada

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367345501
• eBook ISBN: 9781000712438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides the first interdisciplinary examination of the popular fiction and film of the "lost decades" of Japan's Heisei period (1989–2019).

Presenting original analysis of major Heisei writers, filmmakers, and manga artists, the chapters examine the work of Urasawa Naoki, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Murakami Haruki, and Shinkai Makoto, among others. Through the work of these cultural figures, the book also explores the struggle to define the history of Heisei—three decades of economic stagnation, social malaise, and natural disaster. In particular, it explores the dissonance between the dominant history of Japan's recent past and the representation of this past in the popular imagination of the period. In so doing, this book argues that traumatic events from the years leading up to Heisei complicate the narration of a cohesive sense of history for the period, requiring works of fiction and film to explore new connections to the past.

Incorporating literary and film theory to assess the works of culture, Locating Heisei in Japanese Fiction and Film will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese culture, society, and history.

Part 1

Historicizing Heisei

1 Historicizing Heisei in fiction and film

The Heisei period came to an end on April 30, 2019, with the abdication of Emperor Akihito from the Chrysanthemum Throne, which he had assumed when his father, Hirohito, died in 1989. At that point, however, another event marking the end of Heisei had already occurred, albeit with much less fanfare. In July 2018, Asahara Shōkō, the former leader of the apocalyptic religious group Aum Shinri Kyō, was put to death, along with 12 of his accomplices, for his role in the 1995 Tokyo subway gas attacks: an event that killed several passengers, injured scores more, and captivated the Japanese public for several years. It is not difficult to identify a causality between these two events: Asahara’s execution, carried out shortly after the announcement of Akihito’s abdication, was part of the national plan to tie up loose ends, leaving the traumas of Heisei behind, as the nation eagerly looks forward to a new era.

Indeed, the Heisei period has come to be known as the “Lost Era” (ushinawareta jidai) in recent Japanese history. It is often characterized by its three decades of economic stagnation, social malaise, and natural disaster. When the experience of the “lost decade” (ushinawareta jū-nen) of the 1990s extended into the millennial period, the consensus was that the 20-year episode should be renamed the “lost decades” to account for the persistence of the economic and social problems that accompanied the recession in the early 1990s (Funabashi and Kushner 2015, xx). Now that Heisei is coming to an end, it has become clear that post-bubble malaise has endured throughout the 2010s, compounded by the traumas of natural disaster (the 2011 earthquake and tsunami) and the effects of global climate change, which have wreaked havoc in Japan in recent years. It should be noted, however, that the March 2011 disaster centered in Fukushima created an opportunity for writers and critics to reevaluate contemporary Japanese history through other paradigms, including the nuclear bombings of 1945, over-development in the postwar period, and other issues. For this reason, this study will largely focus on works of Heisei fiction produced before the 3/11 disaster.

Foremost among the things that were “lost” during this era is the momentum of the high-growth economy of the 1970s and 1980s. The economic bubble of the 1980s, which was spurred by an increase in lending in the 1970s, burst in the early 1990s due, in part, to the ineffective fiscal policies implemented by the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan (Gordon 2015, 78). This led to the collapse of the stock market in 1990 and the real estate market in 1991, ushering in the beginning of an era of stagnation and sluggish growth that endured throughout the Heisei period.

Also lost during this time was the social bedrock that provided the foundation for Japan’s rapid growth. The bursting of the bubble resulted in the transformation of the job market and the family structure. Deregulated labor markets during the 1980s and 1990s helped grow the economy, but these policies also increased the number of underpaid workers in dead-end jobs, leading to the development of two demographic groups that have come to represent the flip side of the optimistic image of the “salary man” of the high-growth period (Gordon 2015, 80). The subclass of people who lack employment or are underemployed, known as furītā, grew during this time due to the decline of full-time employment opportunities in the private sector. Likewise, the social demographic known as NEET (not in education, employment, or training) represented even more of a threat to the economic health of the nation. NEETs constituted a large segment of society, close to two million in 2002, who were neither employed in a full-time capacity nor seeking education or training to become part of the workforce in the future (Gordon 2015, 80). These employment trends, moreover, impacted the family structure, leading to a decline in marriage and birth rates and an increase in divorce, and in the number of “parasite singles,” who lived at home and were hesitant to start their own families amidst the economic uncertainty of the time.

In a more abstract sense, the Heisei period also represents the loss of history. The very name “lost decades” suggests a fissure in the unfolding of historical time. This book examines the representation of this temporal gap in the popular fiction and film of the Heisei period. Although not a work of historiography, it deals with the representation of the past in fictional texts that challenge accepted notions of history. For this reason, the discussion will reference the following historiographical terms as a way of establishing a context for the analysis of specific fictional works. Dominant history refers to accepted notions of the past that have been framed and propagated in official accounts, journalism, and news media. Somewhat related to this idea is the term grand narrative, or master narrative: an overarching story that aims to provide a comprehensive account of historical experience. The grand narrative of Japanese high growth, then, refers to the story that Japan used to provide a totalizing account of the national experience in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. The unfolding of the grand narrative of high growth was based on the logic of linear history, which assumes that events unfold in chronological order based on a cause-and-effect logic focused on an end goal, such as modernization or enlightenment. In contrast to these more objective ways of representing the past, the term historical imaginary is used in this study to refer to the way the past is framed in the imagination of the Heisei period, as mediated through works of literature, film, manga, and anime during this time.

The grand narrative of Japanese high growth is based on the logic of linear history, through which events were subsumed into a unified storyline that followed the rise of the nation to the status of a global power. The dominant history of postwar Japan was given linear form by the distinctly Japanese notion of the nengō system, or the method by which eras in Japanese history are named with the ascension of a new emperor. The naming of each new era divides Japanese history into periods, as the difficulties and traumas of the previous era give way to the hope and promise of a new one. However, the Heisei period represented the breakdown of this teleological way of understanding history. For Japan, history had been propelled through the end of the Shōwa period (1926–1989) by rapid economic development in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the start of Heisei offered a chance to turn the page on the war and realize the fruits of postwar development, economic stagnation at the start of Heisei became a vortex in the linear flow of this metanarrative, exposing the limitations of the national story and prompting a reevaluation of the evolutionary model of history that saw Japan transform from a poor, occupied country in the decades following World War II to an economic powerhouse. Incredulity toward the capacity of this outdated metanarrative to contextualize the cultural experience of the Heisei period is the focus of this study. The inability to narrate national history in the cultural imagination is evident in the popular fiction of the Lost Era. The divide between the representation of the past in the dominant narrative of history and the experience of the past in the historical imaginary is evident in the works of literature, film, manga, and anime examined in this study. Individual chapters analyze how these works treat events ahistorically as a way of revitalizing the historical imaginary of the Lost Era by creating new relationships to the past at a time when Japan had lost its temporal bearings.

To understand the way Lost Era fiction and film historicizes the Heisei period, it is necessary to examine the effects of the linear orientations of the metanarratives of high growth that guided the nation through the early 1990s, and how the loss of these narratives impacted the historical imaginary. Up until the Heisei period, the oft-told story of Japan’s postwar development involved an undeviating course toward modernity and first-world superiority. According to historian Carol Gluck, Japan’s postwar story of development was a “remediation” of the distorted view of modernity that developed in the early twentieth century and led to the growth of fascism and the outbreak of war:

The corrected postwar modernity had to be connected to the earlier development—only not to the immediate prewar past, which had become the negative model by inversion [but to] earlier periods, either immediately, or long, before the distorted modern had taken its full shape.

(Gluck 1993, 72)

In the postwar version of this story, a newly democratic Japan overcomes wartime devastation to achieve first-world status in fewer than three decades, triumphing over its own internal unrest during the 1960s and 1970s and over other forces that threatened to derail this progress. The process of realizing this goal was synthesized into a single totalizing story that characterized the entirety of the Japanese experience during this time, involving all citizens as characters in its unfolding. Postwar Japan, Gluck argues, “traced an ever-rising national trajectory from destruction to prosperity, from international humiliation to the status of an economic superpower” (Gluck 1993, 72).

The ideal of high growth (kōdo seichō) defined the collective efforts of the country during the decades of the postwar period, becoming a source of national pride. According to Gluck, the term implied “not only a world-class GNP, but also the myth of an entirely middle-class society and the triumph of a Japanese-style modern” (Gluck 1993, 72). Japan measured its progress toward this ideal through its economic, cultural, and technological achievements. A series of major events in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s served as milestones to chart Japan’s growth:

As crests of the upward rise, the celebrants marked 1956, when the government first declared, on economic grounds, that “the postwar is over.” Next came the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, described by the prime minister as enabling “the nations of the world to engage in peaceful competition on our shores and observe the progress we have made in our society.” 1968 brought the Nobel Prize in literature and the third highest GNP in the world (“second in the free world,” which sounded even better). At Expo ‘70 Premier Sato invited foreign visitors to view Japan, “where we are building a new civilization on the foundations of an ancient tradition.”

(Gluck 1993, 72)

Continuing into the 1980s, Japan showcased its technological prowess at venues such as Expo ‘85 (The International Exposition) in Tsukuba, Japan, which brought participants from 111 countries to celebrate Japanese innovation.

Historicizing high growth

However, the recession of the 1990s cast doubt on the validity of this grand narrative in the historical imaginary. The bursting of the housing bubble early in the decade stalled the economic progress that Japan had used to measure its advancement. Indeed, the end of the bubble period brought about a “widespread mood of pessimism” about the future (Cassegard 2011, 41). According to Gluck, the 1990s was the time when the postwar period, in all of its manifestations, ended, and Japan could no longer call upon the narrative of progress that it used to give meaning to its experience (Gluck 1993, 81). Unlike the rebuilding years of the postwar period, when Japan lacked capital but had a concrete narrative to guide its experience, critic Uno Tsunehiro argues, it had acquired wealth in the 1990s but lacked a story that it could use to understand its past and project its future (Uno 2008, 17).

The loss of this grand narrative, moreover, led to questions about the logic of the linear history of the nengō system that was used to represent the recent past. “When it appeared in the early 1990s that both the postwar and the modern might be reaching their ‘end’ at the same time,” Gluck argues, “the doubled historical voltage generated a powerful sort of ‘history shock’” (Gluck 2003, 303). Incredulity about the ability of linear history to account for the experience of the lost decades is evident in the struggle of the cultural imaginary to identify a sense of teleological development in the high-growth period leading up to Heisei. The inability to identify a teleological flow to recent history was due, in part, to the lack of clear historical markers that could be used to demarcate the period and chart development. Differing perspectives on two defining events from the period reveal the struggle to identify historical reference points. For many cultural critics, the defeat of the United Red Army (Rengō Sekigun) in 1972 and the Aum gas attacks in 1995 became bookends for the high-growth era, serving to situate the period within a linear view of history. The work of writers, filmmakers, and artists examined in this study, however, questions whether the unclaimed nature of these traumatic incidents allows them to serve as points of demarcation in the master narrative of the high-growth period.

That these two events are referenced repeatedly in cultural works in the Heisei period suggests their importance in defining the era. As the moment when the country turned its back on activism and embraced capitalistic prosperity, the URA incident has come to represent a symbolic beginning to high growth. The URA—an insular faction harboring a contentious relationship with mainstream Japan—signifies the last gasp of a utopian movement that manifested the deep-seated social dissatisfactions of the 1960s and early 1970s. During this time, student activists, communist groups, and other countercultural factions sought to realize a utopian vision of progress and equality by reforming Japanese education and the government. Among the most fiercely contested issues were the growth of pro-capitalistic policies, the subpar conditions at national universities, and Japan’s complicity with the US in the Vietnam War. Universities served as the center of the struggle against education and the government, with students at over 60 universities in Japan engaged in some form of protest by the end of the 1960s (Chun 2006, 203). In one of the most famous cases of activism, students involved with the Zenkyōtō (All-Campus Joint Struggle Committee) movement occupied a building at Tokyo University for several weeks between the end of 1968 and the beginning of 1969. The event generated high public interest, with 97.4% of homes tuning in to TV programming on the event at some point during the standoff (Chun 2006, 231).

Toward the end of the 1960s, various radical factions engaged in a battle over the best way to realize the overall goals of the countercultural revolution. While many advocated peaceful resistance to the status quo, others attacked educational, political, and law enforcement institutions. In 1967, students began wielding staves during protests in an effort to directly engage authority, representing an important shift in the overall strategy of the revolutionaries, who had grown tired of seeking change through passive forms of resistance and sought to force it through conflict. Confrontations grew more aggressive in 1968, as activists aimed to inspire revolution through violent clashes with police, leading to a heavy crackdown on radical groups by authorities in the closing months of 1968. In 1969, the Red Army Faction (Sekigunha) was formed with the goal of overthrowing the government and sparking revolution through bombings, hijackings, and other forms of aggression. Due to police repression, the faction went underground shortly after its formation, dividing into three groups—one that fled to North Korea, another that departed to the Middle East, and a third that remained in Japan. Those that remained in Japan merged with another militant group—Kakusa, the Japanese Communist Party Revolutionary Left Wing (Nihon Kyōsantō Kakumei Saha)—in 1971 to form the URA. In the winter of 1971–1972, the URA established training grounds in the mountains of the Gunma Prefecture to prepare members for revolution. Having attracted police attention by that time, members fled the training grounds and dispersed, moving from one hideout to another, eventually crossing into the Nagano Prefecture. There, five young radicals barricaded themselves in a lodge near Mount Asama with a hostage and held off a force of 3,000 riot police in a siege that lasted ten days and was broadcast live on NHK to a captivated audience of 60 million viewers, many of whom initially sympathized with the radicals (Igarashi 2009, 119). During the final two hours of the standoff, the combined ratings reached 87% of the national viewing audience (Chun 2006, 236).

The URA event ushered in the end of the countercultural movements and the acceleration of Japan’s period of rapid economic growth. Though many sympathized with the revolutionaries, their view of the situation quickly changed when they realized the extent of the violence caused by the URA. For many of the older generation, the severe police repression of the activists, especially toward the end of the 1960s, brought about memories of an “overbearing” military presence during prewar and wartime Japan (Steinhoff 2008, 81). However, a few weeks after the standoff ended in the death of two officers and the arrest of the radicals, several bodies of URA members were discovered buried at the Army’s training grounds, revealing a deadly internal purge that occurred during the months prior to the siege. This shocking revelation led to a sharp decline in public support for the student movements and ushered in the end of the extremist period and the beginning of an era of unprecedented prosperity (Igarashi 2009, 120). “The reform movement that captured much of the vitality of the early postwar decades,” Gavin McCormick a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on names
• Part 1 Historicizing Heisei
• Part 2 Reimagining the history of Heisei
• Part 3 Memory and history in post-Aum fiction and film
• Part 4 Revitalizing the past and imagining the future
• Index