Competing futures: War narratives in postwar Japanese architecture, 1945-1970

Abstract

This dissertation examines the trajectory of postwar Japanese architecture from 1945 to 1970 as a process of overcoming the nation?s war legacy. The task of overcoming the war was not restricted to the physical recovery from wartime destruction and postwar ruins but also included the psychological and symbolic process of coming to terms with the recurring memories of this troubled past. Drawing on memory and trauma studies which have emerged as a crucial element in narrating postwar history, this study traces the progression of war narratives in Japanese architecture against the backdrop of Japan?s socio-political complexity and the global Cold War context. This dissertation focuses on the tropes of the future which prevailed in Japanese architecture and urbanism during the 1960s because these products of futuristic imagination serve as a rich text through which to discuss the dialectic between forgetting and remembering the war. The dissertation?s central argument is that visionary designs for future cities, which accommodated the postwar society?s progressive aspirations to build a brave new world, were deeply infiltrated by the traumatic memories of wartime past and a persistent anxiety over nuclear war.