Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Notes to the Heart

New Lessons in National Sentiment and Sacrifice from Recessionary Japan

ANDREA G. ARAI

In 1882 the French theologian Ernest Renan wrote “What Is a Nation?” in which he set out “to analyze an idea which, though seemingly clear, lends itself to the most dangerous misunderstandings” (Renan 1996: 42). In this seminal essay, Renan argues that, in the association of the nation and nationality with the natural and inevitable outgrowth of former dynastic realms, the historical novelty and the affective power of national identifications had been mostly overlooked. His poignant intervention was to redirect attention to the nation as a new relationship of sentiment—or what he called a “soul, a spiritual principle” (1996: 52). Born of the obligatory processes of “forgetting” and “remembering,” the nation is the result of the singular stitching together of a rich legacy of memories, or rather, remembering only the things that bond and the present-day consent that is born of forgetting to remember the differences and inequalities that are inevitable in the formation of nations. As the culmination of sentiment and sacrifice, the “large-scale solidarity” we know as the nation is regenerated through a “daily plebiscite,” or habit of “remembering to forget and forgetting to remember” the endeavors, sacrifices, and acts of devotion made in the past and those that one is prepared to make in the future (Renan 1996: 53).

Nearly a century later, Benedict Anderson returned to Renan’s discussion of the deep attachments and colossal sacrifices generated by the nation in an effort to locate the birth of this new sentiment and sacrifice within the larger context of capitalist modernity. Through his notion of “imagined communities,” Anderson uncovered the particular technologies of remembering to forget and forgetting to remember—technologies such as print capitalism and other forms of mechanical reproduction that made it possible to imagine commonality and camaraderie with fellow citizens that one is not likely to ever meet (Anderson 2006). For Anderson, these contradictory and necessarily repetitive habits of the nation that result in sentiment and sacrifice in common are historically contingent and modular; that is, within changing historical conditions, across national contexts, and as a result of the pressures that these differing national contexts place on each other, the means of regenerating this affective tie for a national citizenry may shift.

This has never been more evident than in a statement written by Takahashi Tetsuya, a well-known scholar of war memory, in reference to Japan in one of his lesser-known works, Hearts and War (Kokoro to Senso): “These days, even if you wanted to reproduce the spirit of the prewar period, it would not be possible. And, by the way, this is not what is needed today” (2003: 12). What is at stake is precisely this shifting basis for an affective relationship between citizen and nation.

The context in which Takahashi is writing is a nation in crisis—Japan in the early twenty-first century—and it is this sense of crisis that would seem to compel a shift in the forms and requisites of the rituals of forgetting and remembering.

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