| Summary/Abstract |
Between 2005 and 2006 a female journalist Sasa Yukie (b. 1974) participated in and documented the commemoration of Japanese soldiers who died in the Pacific Islands during the Pacific War with other veterans and the families of deceased soldiers. Sasa’s book, Onna hitori gyokusai no shima o yuku (2007), integrates her travel experience, impressions of her fellow travellers, historical accounts, and reflections on battlefields and commemoration sites. This article charts the two-stage process of Sasa’s emerging historical consciousness in this travelogue. The first phase involves her growing empathy with her fellow tour members. Sasa follows a well-established Japanese literary trope that exalts the protagonists’ loss to a noble cause. Thus, Sasa turns tour members and dead soldiers into tragic yet honourable heroes on her terms rather than theirs. The second phase involves Sasa’s transformation into a passionate advocate for the greater recognition of and respect for deceased soldiers, veterans, and bereaved families. This article is a critical reading of this text, and argues that her travel experience was an impetus for Sasa’s nationalistic tendencies. Her reduction of the memories of war and Islanders into metaphors of hōganbiiki discourages questions about the responsibilities and suffering of those involved and implicated in the war. I argue that this book is significant because it enabled Sasa to carve a particular journalistic niche as a journalist-activist promoting the interests of Pacific War veterans.
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