午夜剧场

It all started when I consulted my mentor about wanting to publish my doctoral dissertation. I had previously discussed the concept of my dissertation with Professor Eiji Oguma, who was my academic advisor during my undergraduate years, while accompanying him on a trip to interview his father, a former Siberian internee, during my time as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellow (PD).

The professor introduced me to Mr. Naoki Takahashi, a senior member of our research group. Mr. Takahashi is an editor who had previously handled the professor's own books, and he graciously approved the publication plan for my dissertation. While it was all well and good that I had begun revising the dissertation, things began to go off track from there.

My interest in the history of remaining soldiers dates back to the summer of my 20th year, when I met an 85-year-old former remaining soldier during an Indonesian language field training program and was astonished by his narrative. Subsequently, I attempted to interview a total of ten former remaining soldiers both in Japan and abroad, describing their history from the standpoint of documentary positivism.

However, the individuals involved passed away one after another, and I faced the challenge of how to pass on their experiences. Therefore, I turned my attention to visual media such as documentaries and films, expanded my research scope from Indonesia to the whole of Asia, and in this book, I clarified what kind of existence the remaining soldiers actually were and how they were viewed by their homeland, focusing on the conflict between the two.

As a result, unlike my dissertation, which was centered on the life histories of remaining soldiers and the national history of Indonesia, I ended up writing much of it from scratch. Learning from the precedence of journalism, I moved back and forth between the boundaries of history and memory of remaining soldiers, aiming for a comprehensive academic work that transcends conventional country- and region-specific case studies.

Consequently, it took an unexpected amount of time to submit the manuscript, and I caused a great deal of trouble for Mr. Takahashi. Afterward, it was Mr. Kenta Ito, also a junior member of the research group, who took over the editorial duties and guided the project to completion. With Mr. Ito's advice, I worked on creating the index, which was an arduous task. It is now a fond memory how we put our heads together in the laboratory over the notation of Indonesian surnames.

In the future, I would like to utilize the knowledge gained in this book to decipher the ego-documents of remaining soldiers and reconstruct the history of the 20th century from there.

Eiichi Hayashi

Shinyosha

352 pages, 3,740 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of publication.