Empire of Hope asks how emotions become meaningful in political life. In a diverse array of cases from recent Japanese history, David Leheny shows how sentimental portrayals of the nation and its global role reflect a durable story of hopefulness about the country's postwar path. From the medical treatment of conjoined Vietnamese children, victims of Agent Orange, the global promotion of Japanese popular culture, a tragic maritime accident involving a US Navy submarine, to the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, this story has shaped the way in which political figures, writers, officials, and observers have depicted what the nation feels.

Expressions of national emotion do several things: they construct the boundaries of the national body, they inform and discipline appropriate expression, and they depoliticize messy problems that threaten to produce divisive questions about winners and losers. Most important, they work because they appear to be natural, simple and expected expressions of how the nation shares feeling, even when they paper over the extraordinary divergence in how the nation's citizens experience each incident. In making its arguments, Empire of Hope challenges how we read the relations between emotion and politics by arguing-unlike those who build from the neuroscientific turn in the social sciences or those developing affect theory in the humanities-that the focus should be on emotional representation rather than on emotion itself.

About the Author

David Leheny is Professor in the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University. He is the author of Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan and Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure.

Reviews

Leheny provides readers with rich case studies to explore contentious national collective sentiment and identity.

-- Youngmi Lim, Musashi University * Crosscurrents *

Empire of Hope should be essential reading for anyone interested in the study of hope, emotions, or contemporary Japan. A most welcome and much needed recasting of the lost decades, the book demonstrates with great cogency how narratives of hopefulness have been embedded in the complicated emotional and political life of contemporary Japan. And it acknowledges feelings and experiences of precarity, without telling a reductive story of despair or reifying the sense that all that was good has been lost. Empire of Hope reminds us that 30 years hence, the notion of a lost Japan may very well prove to be as outdated and obsolete as that of a miraculous Japan that could be number one.

* Journal of Japanese Studies *

Empire of Hope should be read above all by those international relations scholars who focus primarily on power. It will challenge their assumptions and enrich their understanding of Japan in ways few other studies have in recent years.

* PACIFIC AFFAIRS *



Book Information
ISBN 9781501729072
Author David Leheny
Format Hardback
Page Count 246
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 24mm