Asian Art and Architecture Commons^™

Murakami-Ego : Collective Culpability And Selective Retention., Yun Kweon Jeong

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to argue that Murakami’s art expresses the Japanese’s psychological suffering by showing their struggle between remembering themselves as victims but forgetting themselves as aggressors. I apply the Mitscherlichs’ psychoanalisys of the Germans’s psyche to the Japanese because their people have had similar experiences. The first section examines the history of Japan surrounding WWII in order to demonstrate its effects on the Japanese people’s psyche. The second section introduces Otaku to better understand Murakami’s art. The third section examines how selective retention works on the Japanese’s psyche. The fourth section analyzes how Murakami’s art represents …