The Struggle over the Literary Representation of War Memory

Join Associate Professor Akito Sakasai and Associate Professor Younglong Kim for this Inagaki Seminar series event online as they explore the topic of "The Struggle over the Literary Representation of War Memory".

This event is delivered in partnership with the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) Global Japan Office.

About Inagaki Seminar #45

This workshop brings together Akito Sakasai (The University of Tokyo) and Younglong Kim (Otsuma Women’s University) to explore how postwar Japanese literature has shaped the memory of World War II.

Sakasai examines how discourses on “resistance” emerged in the years between Japan’s defeat and the San Francisco Peace Treaty. He analyzes how the absence of literary resistance during the war led to the conceptual importation of French resistance literature, which helped construct an idealized notion of national resistance. He argues that this transplanted idea, molded by the framework of the postwar nation-state, ultimately obscured the unresolved legacies of the Japanese empire.

Kim focuses on the literary representation of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) and asks why, despite being one of the most severely prosecuted war crimes, atrocities against POWs have left little mark on Japan’s cultural memory. She argues that such violence has often been reframed through discourses of cultural or normative difference rather than through the lens of perpetrator/victim. By highlighting the complicity between imperial powers in shaping these discourses, she calls attention to the invisibility of Asia-Pacific victims and urges us to consider what shared norms are necessary to prevent future violence.

About the speakers

Akito Sakasai is an associate professor of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Literature, affiliated with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo. He studied at Waseda University (BA), the University of Tokyo (MA and PhD), and Harvard University as a Fulbright research fellow. He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 2016. His first monograph, Charred Ruins—A Discussion of Postwar Spaces was published in 2018 by Seikyu-sha and translated into Korean in 2020. His research topic covers modern and contemporary Japanese literature, focusing on novels and poetry written from the 1930s to the 1950s. The main objective of his research is to analyze the impact of Japanese imperialism during this period and the resistance of people to it through literary expressions.

Younglong Kim is an associate professor of Department of Japanese Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities at Otsuma Women’s University. Her research field is modern and contemporary Japanese literature through the interdisciplinary approach, “Law and Literature”. She repositioned literary works from the 1920s to the 1940s as works under the Peace Preservation Law regime in her first monograph, The Novel and “Historical Time”: Ibuse Masuji, Nakano Shigeharu, Kobayashi Takiji, Dazai Osamu (2018, Seori Shobō) and investigated war crimes trials in Japanese literature in Literature Relitigates War: From the Tokyo Trials to the Present (2023, Iwanami Shoten). She is also the co-editor of Rethinking ‘Speech Control’ in Modern Japan (2019, Kachōsha).

Facilitator of this Inagaki Seminar on Japan

Dr Jonathan Glade, Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies
Asia Institute, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne

About the Inagaki Seminar on Japan Series

This seminar series is named after Mr Senkichi 'Moshi' Inagaki, the pioneer of Japanese language instruction at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Moshi Inagaki arrived in Australia from Japan in 1897 and commenced teaching of Japanese language at the University of Melbourne in 1919.

Launched in 2017, the Inagaki Seminar on Japan features talks from expert speakers on current topics on Japan within the areas of society, politics, language, and culture, as well as on the Australia-Japan relationship.

Today, the Inagaki Seminar continues to provide updated knowledge on Japan to Japan-interested audiences. Learn about past and upcoming Inagaki Seminars on Japan

Event Format

This event is an online only event delivered via Zoom.

Please register to receive the Zoom details and a reminder email will be sent immediately prior to the online event.

Contact and Accessibility

If you have specific requirements, please don't hesitate to contact us.

For inquiries, please contact Simon Bian at sbian@unimelb.edu.au

Image credit

Archival photo for Moshi Inagaki

Pages/book photo by Vrînceanu Iulia on Unsplash

Privacy Statements

The University of Melbourne and Humanitix collect your personal information to manage your registration and to contact you regarding an event. Your information may also be used by the University and Humanitix for analysis, quality assurance and planning purposes. For further information, please refer to the University’s General Privacy Statement and Humanitix's Privacy and Cookie Policy.