The Funeral of Afterimages

Why the Modern Soul Feels Homeless

Is the motherland merely the residual image of an illusion and substance that once possessed a tactile reality? Why is it that human beings can endure living while clutching nothing but these afterimages? I have been contemplating these questions recently. I feel that this theme of the motherland is one that everyone will eventually be forced to confront in earnest; simultaneously, it is a subject that demands a renewed questioning of “what one is.” In yesterday’s article, I examined Japan—my own motherland—specifically focusing on the period before and after the Second World War, and the subsequent economic reconstruction. I traced the sequence of movements that formed the root of this potent residual image, weaving it together with the history of Japanese cinema.

However, as I mentioned yesterday, whether through books, still images, or film, one may sense the wind and scent of a specific era to a certain degree, but one can never touch the heat that lies at its core. That experience is reserved absolutely for those who stood in that place, in that time. This is the fatal limit of history. Therefore, the true history that a human being can know is, in the end, only speakable through the context of their own life: in which era they were born, where they were raised, and where they currently stand.

Indeed, while I cannot verbalize the heat of the youth in the late 1930s or the late 1960s that we examined in detail yesterday, I can at least articulate the heat of the era in which I have lived. In my case, this coincided with the “Lost Decades,” a time when that intense heat which once enveloped Japan had vanished, replaced by a gradual but certain chill that came to rule the atmosphere. Our predecessors, deluded into believing that economic growth was the sole future, pretended that the true issues—those of the motherland’s sovereignty and independence—did not exist. They postponed the problems, justifying their negligence with the notion that as long as there was economic prosperity, nothing else mattered. Here lies the form of the debt accumulated within the residual image of the motherland.

However, as the people of developed nations came to understand throughout the twentieth century, human beings cannot attain true tranquility through economic prosperity alone. While an economic foundation is essential for sustenance, twentieth-century prosperity was excessive, and it did not contribute to the cultivation of the individual human spirit. As I continue my personal contemplation regarding the motherland, it seems there is no lesson more precise than the trajectory of Japan from the postwar period to its present form. Or rather, compared to Europe, which, from a context of individualism, retained the possibility of questioning the meaning of human existence simultaneously with its critique of excessive economic prosperity, Japan abandoned the possibility of such questioning from the start. Consequently, it established itself as the world’s most advanced, ultra-egoistic tribe devoted to the supremacy of profit.