From Cultural Erasure to Historical Recovery: Nishio Kanji and the ‘Burned Books’ of American-Occupied Japan

The “plundering of cultural heritage in developing nations” need not be strictly limited to physical culture. Moreover, nations not now categorized as “developing” can also have been victims of cultural plunder. In this paper, I introduce the funsho (burned books) that American occupation authorities ordered removed from physical collections and from historical and cultural memory in occupied Japan after the Second World War. This paper explores how the historical and cultural consequences of this erasure connect the tactic to other episodes of American domination in different regions. It describes the efforts of Japanese scholars, including historian Nishio Kanji and other public intellectuals, to recover the funsho to counter the American Occupation’s attempts at historical blackout, thereby reclaiming a non-Western-centric, accurate history of not only America in Asia but also of American actions within the United States.