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This article takes up the notion of the "child redeemer" to explore how the future in contemporary Japan has been depicted or represented in post-3/11 art and literature via the deployment of the figure of the child. In particular, it focusses on the statue called The Sun Child created by Yanobe Kenji in 2012, and the novel The Emissary [Kentōshi] written by Tawada Yōko in 2014. Both Yanobe and Tawada respond to the Fukushima nuclear disaster by using the figure of the child as a means of imagining and representing a future for Japan in the aftermath of environmental crisis. However, these two texts (visual and literary) imagine starkly different kinds of futurity as they extrapolate both foreseeable and unforeseeable futures through this child figure. I draw upon Lee Edelman's queer theory of "reproductive futurism" and José E. Muñoz's notion of "queer futurity" to analyse how Yanobe and Tawada attempt to translate the precarious future emerging in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe into their visual and literary works. I argue that The Sun Child reiterates a developmentalist ideology of futurity, whereas The Emissary portrays an alternative futurity, imagining new ways of living in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Nagasaki was reinvented from an imperial city to an “International Cultural, Christian city” and elicits the continuity of Japanese imperialism in postwar Nagasaki as well as the discontinuity between the war and postwar periods in the city. The paper seeks to determine what history and whose memory have been excluded or erased in the process of remaking Nagasaki into an international Christian city; it examines the particular historical and political conditions that enabled Nagai Takashi, Urakami Catholics and Kitamura Seibou’s Memorial Peace Statue to symbolize Nagasaki’s atomic bomb memory and postwar city identity as an “International Christian city” that “prays.” While Nagai is widely known as a spiritual, religious leader in postwar Nagasaki/Japan, and Kitamura’s Peace Memorial statue dominates Nagasaki’s commemoration space, this paper analyses how US dominance over Japan enabled the country to rehabilitate its imperial past and to revive the imperial legacy by appropriating the GHQ’s (General Headquarters of the Allied Powers’) demilitarization and Christianization policies. It argues that Nagasaki’s postwar reconstruction signifies the failure of what Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) calls the “deimperialization” of Japanese consciousness and subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]