ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an in-depth review and analysis of literature that encompasses four discrete but related subject areas, before developing a theoretical framework for this study. The first section in this chapter reviews the body of literature concerning the concept of history, which is an appropriate starting point for this study. The second section expands the discussion to include collective memory, and considers how the two concepts have become related and even indistinguishable from each other, while noting that history’s emotional aspects are receiving increasing attention and are leading to media’s evocation of nostalgia for the recent past, which in turn links to Japanese people’s personal histories. The third section introduces Shōwa nostalgia, with the late Shōwa period being ‘remembered’ as an idyllic period. The fourth section considers the influence of the Second World War on Japanese intellectual thought, and how the US relationship impacted Japan’s identity after the war. The role of the war as portrayed in the media, and the influence of other cultural products – such as films – as they pertain to Shōwa nostalgia, are examined in detail. The concluding section describes and develops a new theoretical framework for understanding Shōwa nostalgia, and exposes a fundamental flaw in the scholarly work that has been conducted on this subject to date; namely, that most scholars have assumed that the end of the Second World War marked the beginning of contemporary Japan.
