![]() ![]() ![]() Oleg Benesch is Reader in East Asian History at the University of York. This talk builds on Ran Zwigenberg and my recent monograph and examines the history of Japan’s castles from the late nineteenth century to the present to provide a new approach to narratives of continuity and change in modern Japan. Shorn of their overt militarism, castles became symbols of local and regional identity, linking these to their “safe” premodern pasts by skipping over problematic aspects of imperial modernity. After 1945, castles were at the centre of the postwar transition. ![]() From the turn of the twentieth century to the end of the Second World War, castles contributed both symbolically and physically to the militarization of Japanese society. Contemporary celebration of castles obscures their troubled modern history, however, when the vast majority of these structures were abandoned, dismantled, or destroyed before being reinvented as physical links to an idealized martial past. ![]() Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and PeaceĬastles are some of Japan’s most iconic structures, and have become prominent symbols of local, regional, and national identity. ![]()
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