Inserting Japanese-American Memories into Japan’s War Narrative: National Identities, Divided Loyalty and Revisionism in Two Homelands

Abstract

Engaging with the ‘transnational turn’ in collective memory studies, this article examines how national and transnational elements intersect in cultural memory-making of the Pacific War in contemporary Japan. Through a case study of a recent Japanese television drama (Two Homelands, 2019) about Japanese Americans who were caught up between two countries at war, it argues that the incorporation of transnational Nikkei memories into Japanese national war memory on a popular cultural level both challenges and reinforces the dominant war narratives in Japan. Ultimately, Two Homelands uses Nikkei voices and their wartime experience of racial discrimination and internment to reinterpret Japan’s role in the Pacific War and promote the revisionist-nationalist narrative of the war. As such, the drama exemplifies the desire within Japan to rehabilitate the persisting cultural trauma of the war and defeat.