Published In

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-2025

Subjects

Cultural trauma

Abstract

The legacy of a perpetrator past has always occupied a troubling place in Japan’s national culture. As in many post-confict societies, remembering dark history has been shrouded in uneasy trepidation, reticence, and remorse. Almost eight decades after World War II ended, the task of remembering Japan’s perpetrator past has now passed to the postwar generations who have become the carrier groups of perpetrator trauma. This paper explores the cultural trauma of war inherited by the children of veterans who fought in the Sino-Japan War, whose lives were indelibly marked by their fathers’ legacy of violence and guilt. I examine three recent memoirs by the second generation that probe their fathers’ broken lives. The memory work of these writers—Murakami Haruki, Henmi Yō, and Itō Hideko—show that haunting legacies of war can be transmitted across generations even when they are shrouded in silence. This study points a new direction in cultural trauma research that foregrounds intergenerational memory in the cultural trauma process.

Rights

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Locate the Document

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-024-00229-5

DOI

10.1057/s41290-024-00229-5

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43559

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