Human Bullets: A study of the representations of the war dead in modern Japan

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This study examines the representations of the war dead in modern Japan, focusing on the crushed bodies of the Human Bullets (Niku-Dan). The research objects of this study are visual representations and media discourses.This study deepens our understanding of how and why these representations of the war dead were so beautifully described, generating widely shared empathy for their heroic and tragic stories. In the background, beneath the level of empathy, some people attempted to comprehend the reality of battles with massive casualties. These descriptions of death come from two sources. The first is the vision of the battle of the Bushi or Samurai (feudal warriors), a narrative that the Japanese find exciting. The second is the representation of modern arms and their new power, depicting the Japanese people as capable of managing the new energy of modern technology. The crushed bodies lie at the intersection of these two sources, as a symbol of the modern nation.