Defamiliarising the postwar: The enigma of Oda Makoto

Abstract

Oda Makoto is known in contemporary Japanese society as a prolific novelist, fierce social critic and controversial political activist. After travelling extensively throughout America and East Asia Oda's seminal travel narratives broke Japanese postwar isolationism and reinvented the postwar conceptualisation of the journey. As one of the intellectual founding fathers of the Beheiren movement Oda was an outspoken social critic in the 1960s and 1970s whose legacy of civil disobedience is currently more valid than ever before. This paper demonstrates that Oda is one of the few counter-hegemonic voices that speak out against revisionist national tendencies found in postwar Japanese discourse. Oda employs techniques of estrangement to reconceptualise established cultural tropes such as the mythology of Hiroshima, the higaisha discourse and indigenous Korean alterity. Oda's unravelling of discursive formations is explored through an analysis of three works: Nan demo mite yarō (1961), Hiroshima (1981) and Gyokusai (1999).