Yoshikuni Igarashi

Professor of History

Yoshikuni Igarashi’s research focuses on Japanese cultural history during the interwar and post-WWII periods. His first book, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970 (Princeton UP, 2000), reads the absent presence of war memories in post-WWII Japan. By examining the tension between the repression and the expression of the trauma of the war, it contemplates the impact of the war and defeat on postwar Japanese society. Igarashi’s second book, Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers (Columbia UP, 2016) discusses the former soldiers who belatedly returned to postwar Japan after the end of the Asia Pacific War. It pays particular attention to Japanese POWs detained in Siberian labor camps and soldiers who survived in the jungles of the South Pacific for more than a quarter century. His third monograph, Japan, 1972: Masculinity in the Age of Mass Consumption and Metavisuality (Columbia UP, 2021) focuses on the radical economic, social, and cultural transformation of Japanese society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, stemming from the development of mass consumer society, and analyzes Japanese society’s anxiety-ridden and often violent responses to that transformation. Igarashi continues to work on cases that further substantiate the year 1972 as a pivotal moment in postwar Japanese history. He has also begun to explore visual representations of Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s atomic memories.