Perkins, Chris

This paper analyses a narrative film Mitama wo Tsugumono sourced from the Yūshūkan museum adjacent to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo. Taken as a particular manifestation of the broad nationalist movement in Japan, this paper shows how the film produces a structured ideological position on the role of remembrance and national identity by framing it in terms of a specific problem: achievement of an emancipatory form of identity in the context of both the totalizing nature of capital relations and growing social malaise in Japan. In doing so it details the work done by the film to construct and legitimize what O'Dwyer (2010), after Oakeshott (1933), calls a 'practical past', whereby 'a narrative of the past is not developed for its own sake, but in order to serve certain political, moral or religious convictions and purposes.' The paper provides a reading of Mitama that emphasizes the methods through which the narrativized practical past supplies socio-cognitive resources that imply logics of first-person action through their usage. Along the way it also details articulations the film makes with current social issues to legitimize its position. The paper concludes by considering the challenge of films such as Mitama in the context of continued social and academic concerns over Japanese society under increasingly neo-liberal capitalist conditions

Inheriting the Legacy of the Souls of the War Dead:Linking Past, Present and Future at the Yūshūkan

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