Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace
Oleg Benesch · Ran Zwigenberg
May 2019 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
About this ebook
An innovative examination of heritage politics in Japan, showing how castles have been used to re-invent and recapture competing versions of the pre-imperial past and project possibilities for Japan's future. Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg argue that Japan's modern transformations can be traced through its castles. They examine how castle preservation and reconstruction campaigns served as symbolic ways to assert particular views of the past and were crucial in the making of an idealized premodern history. Castles have been used to craft identities, to create and erase memories, and to symbolically join tradition and modernity. Until 1945, they served as physical and symbolic links between the modern military and the nation's premodern martial heritage. After 1945, castles were cleansed of military elements and transformed into public cultural spaces that celebrated both modernity and the pre-imperial past. What were once signs of military power have become symbols of Japan's idealized peaceful past.
An innovative examination of heritage politics in Japan, showing how castles have been used to re-invent and recapture competing versions of the pre-imperial past and project possibilities for Japan's future. Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg argue that Japan's modern transformations can be traced ...
About the author
Oleg Benesch is Senior Lecturer in East Asian History at the University of York. He is the author of Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan (2014).
Ran Zwigenberg is Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University. His first book, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge, 2014), won the Association for Asian Studies John W. Hall Book Award in 2016.
Oleg Benesch is Senior Lecturer in East Asian History at the University of York. He is the author of Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan (2014).
Ran Zwigenberg is Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University. His first book, Hiroshi...
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