Few cultures had as rich a vocabulary for pictures of specific places as did eighteenth-century Japan. Why then did yet another word, shinkeizu (literally “true-view pictures”), come into being in the late eighteenth century? The answer is that none of the existing terms satisfactorily articulated the ideological essence of a new kind of painting advocated by a group of artists who sought to incorporate into their work styles and concepts associated with the art of the Chinese literatus. These Japanese masters came to constitute a school known as Nanga (the Japanese interpretation of the Chinese “Southern school” of painting; it was also called bunjinga, “literati painting”). For a picture (zu) of a given scene (kei) to be profound, argued the connoisseurs of Nanga, the artist must experience the vista at first hand and then absorb and transmit its essential reality (shin). It was in the circle of the brilliant literati artist Ike Taiga (1723–76) that the concept ofshinkeizu became the integral element of the new Japanese conception of depictions of actual scenes.

For many japanese the events of August 1945 placed their country in a special position. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave Japan the dubious distinction of being the only country to have sustained atomic bomb attacks. Acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration meant that the military government was eradicated overnight, along with the extraordinary status of the emperor who had presided over it. Although the emperor himself remained on the throne, democracy came to Japan, and with it an entree into the international economic community.

In ōta yōko's (1903?–63) novel Han-ningen (Half-Human, 1954) the heroine, named Oda Atsuko, is like author Ōta herself a famous A-bomb writer suffering from severe depression. She enters the hospital in an attempt to cure an addiction to tranquilizers whose intemperate use derives from very real, but to the medical profession opaque, neuroses ultimately due to the trauma of Hiroshima. No treatment proves totally effective. Medicine can only hope to counter illness, not history, and Oda's deepest torments remain chronic. She continues to be plagued by a frustration linked in the novel's fifth chapter with the choices she has faced in the seven years since the end of the Second World War: suicide, flight, or the writing of a “good work of literature.” Throughout the novel Oda dismisses suicide as not in her nature; Ota, in her essay “Ikinokori no shinri” (The psychology of survival, 1952), concludes that no Japanese writer can abandon Japan, and her heroine here concurs. Of Oda's three alternatives all that is left is the writing of a good work, but that too seems elusive. What constitutes “good” is unclear. Just how she might recognize such a work (ii sakuhin to wa nanimono ka) is a literary problem inextricably bound with Oda's physical and psychological problems, and all have arisen from her presence at Hiroshima's destruction on August 6, 1945.

My country “is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women,” goes one of the most frequently quoted gender-related adages. Japanologists might be tempted to attribute this uncourtly utterance to a learned nobleman of Heian Japan (794–1185) embittered by the outpouring of vernacular narratives from women's writing brushes that were eclipsing male endeavors to emulate Chinese classics, or to an exasperated modern Japanese novelist in reference to the neo-Heian phenomenon, namely, the renaissance of women's literature in postwar Japan. Actually it was Nathaniel Hawthorne (1855:141) who made the now infamous sexist remark in chagrin at American women who were churning out best-sellers in force. Thereafter, this phenomenon abated for a full century, but since the 1960s, Western women writers have made a glorious resurgence, marked by unprecedented degrees of output and worldwide market domination in a genre known as the romance fiction. The title of the first romance series and the name of its publisher, Harlequin, has become something like a generic term with multiple signification.

In japan in the late 1980s, a society that is arguably one of the most modern, pragmatic, and materialist in the world, the problem of the emperor system initially seems almost irrelevant. And yet the imperial house continues to excite controversy and concern, as is clear in the full-scale media coverage given to an imperial visit or an imperial illness, and this controversy is on a far deeper and more divisive level than would be the case for such ostensible equivalents as the British royal family. The reasons behind this excitement are both obvious and problematic: the emperor is of course tied to the war and the whole complex of emotions that middle-aged Japanese feel toward it, but on a broader level the imperial house is also tied to modern Japanese history as a whole and thus to the conception that Japanese have of themselves in the postwar period.