Post-war Japan in photographs

Abstract

Through a discourse analysis of news photographs published after the end of the Second World War, this study investigates how Japan’s new position as a defeated and occupied nation was visually negotiated in the two decades following the war in the pages of one major national Japanese English-language newspaper. It addresses, in particular, how symbolic representations of the Japanese nation were (re)defined and reinterpreted in these photographs in the aftermath of the war under the significant influence of occupation leaders eager to reorganize the Japanese press system following American models. It argues that visual representations of Japan and its leaders created shortly after the war illustrate the beginnings of a process of erasure of the past and cultural reinterpretation that scholars of the Japanese cultural environment have identified as a central component of Japanese contemporary (post)modern identity.