19th May 2009
Dr Hideko Mitsui
The Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies is pleased to offer an opportunity to discuss with Dr Mitsui her recent research on cosmopolitanism in Japan in the context of the culture of the Second World War. Specifically she traces the biographies of two historical figures from wartime Japan who have been remembered as traitors or heroes at different historical time periods in post-war Japan. She interrogates the shifting interpretive frames that informed the specific modes of remembering their biographies, demonstrating the processes through which the figure of a cosmopolitan becomes visible and recognisable in a given society, and how people attribute different meanings to biography as exemplar of a ‘good life’.