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Japanese Swords as Symbols of Historical Amnesia: Touken Ranbu and the Sword Boom in Popular Media
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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This essay analyses the Japanese sword boom in popular media in the 21st century, situating Touken Ranbu, an online video game franchise, within its wider political and historical context. In the first two decades of the 21st century, government, commercial, and semi-public institutions, such as museums, extensively deployed positive depictions of Japanese swords in popular media, including anime, manga, TV, and films in public relations campaigns. As a historical ideological icon, swords have been used to signify class in the Edo period (1603-1868) and to justify the Japanese Empire's expansion into Asia during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945). By emphasizing the object's symbolism and aestheticism, the sword boom of the 21st century is following a similar trajectory. Popular representations of swords in media culture selectively feature historical episodes that are deemed politically uncontroversial and beneficial for promoting a sense of national pride. This practice systematically ignores the shadow of modern Japanese history in which swords played a central role, such as the controversial wartime “contest to kill one hundred people using a sword” (hyakunin giri kyoso) in China in 1937. The recent notable rise of this idealized symbolism exemplifies the mechanism through which historical revisionism—serving neo-nationalist/right-wing interests—infiltrates Japanese society through popular culture. The sword has been mobilized in contemporary Japanese media as a symbolic cultural commodity to influence consumers' knowledge and consciousness and to condition their views of modern Japanese history.
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