Saving Homeless Children of War, Making Citizens for ‘Peace’: The politics of post-war rehabilitation in US-occupied Japan and beyond

Abstract

AbstractThis article analyses Bell Hill (Kane no naru oka), the NHK radio drama designed by US-occupation personnel, and the fervent audience response, while treating this redemption story of war-affected homeless children as a trope for Japanese reorientation under American tutelage. Specifically, it examines the two major tenets of the rehabilitative vision delineated in the serial, liberal guidance based on the principles of self-government and sentimental brotherhood. Questioning the underlying assumption of post-war discourses that they were new, humanitarian fundamentals for Japan's democratic transformation, this study considers liberal principles and sentimentalism as technologies of power and the self that affected both drama's characters and receptive audiences to refigure themselves as responsible and empathetic members of the newly imagined national community. Through this approach, the article suggests a way to resist a simplistic account of Japan's post-war reorientation as either unilateral indoctrination or liberation. The historical experience is instead rearticulated as a process of self-rehabilitation within the biopolitical order of American Cold-War governmentality. This rearticulation opens a further possibility to locate the specific rendering of Japan's post-war rehabilitation within a wider trans-war continuum of human reformation projects implemented through similar technologies of power and the self in Japan and beyond.