Embodied Memories, Emotional Geographies: Nakamoto Takako's Diary of the Anpo Struggle

Abstract

In this article I carry out a close reading of Nakamoto Takako's book, My Diary of the Anpo Struggle (1963). Nakamoto was a writer and activist who was active in leftwing politics, the labour movement and the proletarian literature movement in the 1920s and 1930s and returned to the movement after 1945. Her published diary recounts her participation in the struggle against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty and her other political activities. The book is a mixture of personal memory and political history and provides us with a distinctive ‘map’ of one person's emotional geography of Tokyo.