‘전후’와 폭력

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to show how it was possible for the Japanese people post-war to live under their new peace constitution in the time of the Cold War through an analysis of the discourse surrounding the violence of the Cold War. This is a problem in the sense that post-war Japan is not often thought of as a major factor in the Cold War. When considering this issue, it is important to consider the Constitution of Japan because it, the peace constitution, resolves that Japan permanently refrain from conflict settlement by force. The Constitution thus separated Japan from the world of the Cold War on logical and sometimes emotional grounds. Such a Japan is a place of peace independent of violence, such as war. Thus the Constitution was accompanied by a geopolitical imagination which envisioned the external as war and the internal as peace. In that sense, the Korean War, US military bases and nuclear power were regarded as serious threats to how post-war Japan viewed itself. Such events were constant reminders that Japan was involved with the Cold War, disturbing the imaginary boundaries set by the constitution. This article deals with the following issue: How can the reality of post-war Japan be reinterpreted and converged in the imaginary post-war? To this end, this article has reviewed representations of Cold War violence by targeting the discourse of the peace movement, fiction, pop culture, and news articles. The Korean War and Korean-Japanese conflicts were regarded as external party violence and, in that way, kept separate from post-war Japan. Meanwhile, the U.S. military bases in Japan, throughout the 1950s, were represented as perpetrators of violence. However, since the number of bases plunged in 1960, American violence was converted in Japan to mean guardian of violence. In the context of at least 1950, Korean, Japanese and U.S. military bases were considered to be outside intruders capable of implicating Japan in the Cold War. Finally, nuclear energy is used in conjunction with the discourse of peace, I looked at the process of the acceptance of nuclear power in Japan. Here, it was confirmed that Japanese memories of atomic warfare did not stand in the way of the introduction of nuclear energy. This gave rise to the idea that only Japan could achieve the peaceful use of nuclear power.