Abstract
From the early days of Japan’s modern period, apocalyptic narratives warned of problems caused by progressivism and modernization: ecological change, economic gaps between advanced and less advanced nations, exploitation of the lower classes, and conflicts between different religious beliefs and ethnicities. Such distrust of progress, new scientific findings and technological developments deepened at the end of World War I. With World War II came the shocking realization that humanity had created weapons that could literally wipe out human life. After the atomic bombings, modern apocalyptic discourse in Japan underwent a crucial change: for the first time humans displaced the astronomical unknown as the force that could destroy the world.
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Notes
Ōe Kenzaburō, Man’en gannen no futtobōru (Football in the First Year of Man’en) ( Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1988 ).
John Bester as The Silent Cry (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002).
Susan J. Napier, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke ( New York: Palgrave, 2001 ), 195.
Michiko N. Wilson, The Marginal World of Ōe Kenzaburō: A Study in Themes and Techniques ( Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1986 ), 50.
Kojima Nobuo, Hōyō kazoku (An Embracing Family) ( Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1988 ).
Etō Jun, Seijuku to sōshitsu: “haha” no hōkai (Maturation and Loss: Collapse of Motherhood) ( Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993 ).
Katō Norihiro, “Man’en gannen kara no koe” (The Voice from the First Year of Man’en), in Man’en gannen no futtobōru ( Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1988 ), 465–468.
William Currie, Sogai no kōzu: Abe Kōbō, Beketto, Kafuka no shōsetsu, trans. Anzai Tetsuo (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1975 ), 7–38.
Susan J. Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity ( London, New York: Routledge, 1996 ), 199.
Yomiuri Shinbun Nijusseiki Shuzaihan, ed., Nijusseiki reisen ( The Cold War in the Twentieth Century) (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2001 ), 77–85.
Abe Kōbō, Inter Ice Age 4, trans E. Dale Saunders (New York: Tuttle, 1970) (Originally published as Daiyon kanpyōki), 170.
Abe Kōbō, Daiyon kanpyōki (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1970), 243. My translations.
Thomas Schnellbächer, “Has the Empire Sunk Yet? The Pacific in Japanese Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 29, 3 (November 2002): 382–396.
Christopher Bolton, Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe Kōbō ( Cambridge: The Harvard University Asia Center, 2009 ): 76–129.
Ōe says that he writes for Japanese audience, especially for people of his own generation. See Kazuo Ishiguro and Ōe Kenzaburō, “The Novelist in Today’s World: A Conversation,” Boundary 2, 18, 3 (Autumn 1991), 116.
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© 2014 Motoko Tanaka
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Tanaka, M. (2014). Apocalyptic Science Fiction from 1945 to the 1970s. In: Apocalypse in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373557_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373557_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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