Cultures of (Dis)remembrance and the Effects of Discourse at the Hiyoshidai Tunnels

Abstract

This paper examines the early postwar history of the physical remains of World War II through the example of Keio University’s Hiyoshi Campus. During the war, the Japanese Imperial Navy’s Combined Fleet used this site as their headquarters, and they built a massive underground tunnel system there. Furthermore, after the war, the campus was confiscated and used by the U.S. Occupation Eighth Army until 1949. Yet this history of the Hiyoshi Campus was almost completely forgotten until the late 1980s. This paper argues that the reasons for this lie in the postwar history of the site and the university. Namely, Keio intellectuals in the early postwar sought to portray the school as an historical pioneer of liberal democracy in Japan. Yet in this historical rewriting, instances of liberal cooperation with militarism such as Keio’s wartime past became inconvenient truths, and the physical wartime remains on campus, as visible reminders of this past, became unwanted and undesirable anachronisms. In this way, the paper argues that the forgetting of war sites such as the Hiyoshidai tunnels was, in some ways, a byproduct of the creation of a liberal-democratic postwar Japan.