Chigusha Yamaura published an article entitled 'An Imagined Shrinking Community: Japanese Nationalism and the Chronology of the Future'
Dr Chigusa Yamaura's most recent publication 'An Imagined Shrinking Community: Japanese Nationalism and the Chronology of the Future' in Japanese Studies (January 2024) is based on her recent book Marriage and Marriageability: The Practices of Matchmaking between Men from Japan and Women from Northeast China (Cornell University Press, 2020).
How should we understand the relationship between nationalism and discourses of national decline, and more specifically the discourses of a shrinking nation? Driven by this question, this article highlights how bleak imaginings of the future also work to construct the relationship of the individual to the putative national community, creating forms of sentimental national belonging. This article analyses an emerging genre of best-selling books in Japan, Mirai no nenpyō [The chronology of the future] series, that present a dismal vision of Japan’s national demographic future. Their goal is to provoke a sense of national urgency by encouraging Japanese nationals to feel personally the shrinking nation through imagining its coming consequences for everyday life. Such narrations of an imagined shrinking community act to create a timeless sense of national belonging, with daily lived experience in the imagined future interpreted through the lens of the contracting nation. Importantly, the future that these discourses present is nationalized within boundaries separating it from global developments and intercourse. Ultimately, this form of nationalism is constituted not by dying for the nation, but instead by people seeing the continued stability of everyday life as intricately tied to the fate of the national community.
