Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline
David Leheny
Abstract
How do emotions become meaningful in public life? Closely examining key episodes in Japanese politics, Empire of Hope examines the varied roles that feelings play in contemporary politics. They construct the boundaries of the national body, they inform and discipline appropriate expression, and they depoliticize messy problems that could quickly produce divisive questions about winners and losers. And most important, they work because they appear to be so natural: the simple and expected expression of how the nation shares feelings, even when they paper over the extraordinary divergence in how ... More
How do emotions become meaningful in public life? Closely examining key episodes in Japanese politics, Empire of Hope examines the varied roles that feelings play in contemporary politics. They construct the boundaries of the national body, they inform and discipline appropriate expression, and they depoliticize messy problems that could quickly produce divisive questions about winners and losers. And most important, they work because they appear to be so natural: the simple and expected expression of how the nation shares feelings, even when they paper over the extraordinary divergence in how the nation’s members experience each incident. By emphasizing the embeddedness of emotional expression in national narratives, the book challenges recent arguments in the social sciences and humanities about role that emotions should play in political analysis. A unique array of case studies — from the medical treatment of two Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange to the global promotion of Japanese popular culture, and from a tragic maritime accident involving a US Navy submarine to the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster — illustrates the myriad ways in which political expression of feelings matter even as they are divorced from the messiness of people’s emotional lives.
Keywords:
Japan,
Affect Theory,
Narrative,
National Identity,
International Relations,
Politics
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501729072 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: May 2019 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501729072.001.0001 |
