The cultural and political relationship between Japan and the United States is often praised for its equity, collaboration, and mutual respect. To many, the alliance between Japan and the United States serves as a testament for overcoming a violent and antagonistic past. However, the impact of the United States occupation and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is rarely discussed in light of this alliance. The economic revival, while important to Japan's reentry into the global market, inevitably obscured continuing paternalistic interactions between Japan and the United States. Using postcolonial theory from Homi K. Bhahba, Frantz Fanon, and Hiroshi Yoshioka as a foundation, this study examines the ways Japan was colonized during and after the seven-year occupation by the United States.;The following is a close assessment of two texts and their political significance at two specific points in history. Akira Kurosawa's1948 noir film Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi) shaped the identity of postwar Japan; Yasuhiro Nightow's Trigun manga series navigates cultural amnesia and American exceptionalism during the 1990s after the Bubble Economy fell into recession in 1995. These texts are worthy of simultaneous assessment because of the ways they incorporate American archetypes, iconography, and themes into their work while still adhering to Japanese cultural concerns. Kurosawa and Nightow render worlds that reflect collaborative effort between the two cultures but in reality reveal social inequalities, thus creating a space for resistance. The "grey moralities" exhibited in Drunken Angel and Trigun through their characters, narratives, and the cultural circumstances in which they were created, offers a space for the colonized Japanese subject to push back against systems of oppression using popular culture that comes to be appreciated by both the colonizer and the colonized.
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