Arakawa Comes to America: A Case Study in Collective Forgetting

This article takes the work of the Japanese artist Shusaku Arakawa (1936 – 2010) as a jumping-off point to reexamine the historicization of the US-Japanese relationship in the early Cold War. Namely, the erasure of time and memory in Arakawa's work and surrounding criticism is read as a metonym for the larger dissolution of extreme mutual hostility into uneasy cooperation against the Soviets. After delving into the political and economic history of the American Occupation and the global emergence of Japanese contemporary art, the piece returns to probe nuclear allusions in Arakawa's paintings executed after his emigration to the United States in 1961.