2018 Volume 69 Issue 3 Pages 406-423
The life courses of people with military experience is an important research theme in historical sociology, in terms of how they influenced the formation of postwar society. This paper focuses on leaders of veterans' groups and women's residents' groups who have built memorials for fallen soldiers.
This is a case study of the process of building memorials for fallen soldiers of graduates from the Japanese naval school for airplane pilots before WWII: Yokaren. The question here is how graduates were able to build large-scale memorials, despite the fact that they were generally young and low in social position. Previous studies have mainly explored the collective consciousness such as oime, which made veterans feel indebted to fallen soldiers. This study aims to explore the lives of leaders between the war and post-war periods, when they acquired resources and abilities that enabled them to build large-scale memorials, with a focus on their military experiences.
Veteran leaders have received support from influential politicians and enterprises through their connections with former generals and officers who had trained them in school. Leaders of women's residents' groups located in the same area as the memorials also played an important role by actively helping and bringing together veterans, based on their experiences of military assistance during the war.
The theoretical implications of this paper lie in the experience- (keiken) oriented model, with an emphasis on the leaders' accumulation of resources and abilities, despite a consciousness-oriented model.
