Portraits of Remaining Soldiers: Their Postwar Lives and the Gaze of the Motherland

2023/03/17

It all started when I consulted my mentor about wanting to "publish my doctoral dissertation." I had spoken about the concept of my dissertation to Professor Eiji Oguma, who was my academic advisor during my undergraduate years, while accompanying him on a trip to interview his father, a former Siberian internee, during my time as a JSPS Research Fellow (PD).

The professor introduced me to Mr. Naoki Takahashi, a senior member of the seminar. Mr. Takahashi, an editor who had also worked on the professor's books, kindly approved the publication plan for my dissertation. Starting the revisions for the dissertation went well, but from there, I began to lose my way.

My interest in the history of remaining soldiers dates back to the summer I was 20, when I met an 85-year-old former remaining soldier during an Indonesian language field training program and was struck by his story. Since then, I have attempted to interview a total of ten former remaining soldiers both in Japan and abroad, describing their history from a standpoint of documentary positivism.

However, as the individuals involved passed away one after another, I faced the challenge of how to pass on their experiences. Therefore, I turned my attention to visual media such as documentaries and films, expanded my research scope from Indonesia to Asia as a whole, and in this book, I clarified what the remaining soldiers actually were and how they were viewed by their motherland, focusing on the conflict between the two.

As a result, unlike my dissertation, which was centered on the life histories of remaining soldiers and the national history of Indonesia, I ended up rewriting much of it from scratch. Learning from the precedence of journalism, I moved back and forth between the boundaries of history and memory of the remaining soldiers, aiming for a comprehensive academic book that transcends conventional country- and region-based case studies.

Consequently, it took an unexpected amount of time to submit the manuscript, and I caused trouble for Mr. Takahashi. Afterward, it was Mr. Kenta Ito, also a junior member of the seminar, who took over the editorial work and guided it to completion. With Mr. Ito's advice, I worked on creating the index, which was a grueling task. Struggling together in the lab over the notation of Indonesian surnames is now a fond memory.

In the future, I would like to use the insights gained from this book to decipher the ego-documents of remaining soldiers and reconstruct the history of the 20th century from them.

Portraits of Remaining Soldiers: Their Postwar Lives and the Gaze of the Motherland

Eiichi Hayashi

Shin-yo-sha

352 pages, 3,740 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.