Description
This paper investigates how remembering significant past events such as a war led political actors in shaping collective emotions that underpin a broader discourse of national communities. By building upon emotion studies in IR, this paper investigates a creative way to link memories and embodied experiences that negotiate identity construction. The case study on anti-Japan-US security treaty protests (Anpo) of 1958-60 will demonstrate the role of everyday actors who sought independence, security, and democracy under the Japan-US hierarchical relationship in the Cold War. The political actors mobilised memories of the Asia-Pacific War and the US/Allied Occupation differently as the building block of narratives of 'peace country'. This paper examines how narratives of Japan's war and fascism foregrounded emotional contestations. The analysis of the protests as a significant 'crisis in Japan-US alliance’ or 'anti-American riot' tends to marginalise the complex emotional dilemma of the locals. I showcase how embodied emotions of humiliation, anger, and fear in the protests cannot be neatly categorised into a unified form of nationalism. This study on emotional agencies seeks to facilitate theoretical discussion on memory politics and emotions in IR and engage with neglected ‘non-Western’ emotional worlds.
