Social Science Research Council

"The Advent of Interpreters: Redemption and Prolepsis in Japanese Grassroots Historiography"

The grassroots historiography movement in Japan known as Fudangi ('Recording the Everyday') has been active since the 1960s. Its stated aim is to mobilize "ordinary people" to produce written records of everyday life in the genre of "personal history" (jibunshi), which it claims it created. The participants have marshaled unique networks of textual circulation. Their leader was convinced that this project would enable networks of "friendship" as a condition of a truly "democracy" that he saw postwar Japan promised but never delivered. The central concern of my ethnography is to determine how Fudangi documenters anticipate the coming of future readers, and how this anticipation structures in advance the mode of producing histories. Today, jibunshi is part of common parlance in Japanese, referring to a popular genre of historiography practiced largely by near - or post-retirement 'amateur' writers. The texts of jibunshi, though manifold in form and content, reveal one salient problem in the politics of 'postwar' national history and nostalgic remembering that now haunts today's Japan with a call for the "balancing" (seisan) of the (wartime) past. This problem has to do with the entitlement and desire to speak of the past from the 'individual' perspective. For Fudangi - a pointedly anti-establishmentarian association of 'original' jibunshi practitioners - this voicing of particularism has to be carefully negotiated with respect to a boundary between legitimacy and intimacy of textual circulation. While hoping to incorporate their texts into a national narrative, the participants also desire to fashion new, 'minor' spheres of groupness that encompass their histories-writ-small in apposition, if not opposition, to such dominant narrative. The participants' central anxieties today lie in how to recontextualize the textual vestiges of their 'movement' in order to prefigure what sociocultural type this named social formation will be remembered by posterity as a historical token of. The contestation and confusion around this typification manifests a struggle to reassemble the project's archives around a reproducible emblem of identity-in-time.