패전기 일본의 인프라 서사: 미야모토 유리코의『반슈 평야(播州平野)』재론

Infrastructure Narrative in Post-Defeat Japan: Revisiting of Yuriko Miyamoto’s Bansyu-Heiya

This article rereads Yuriko Miyamoto’s Banshu Heiya (1946) as a post-defeat infrastructure narrative rather than an author-centered or realist text. Focusing on Hiroko’s island-spanning journey, it examines how the collapse, redirection, and residue of imperial infrastructures— transportation, electricity, radio, policing, and logistics—structure human experience through the lenses of mobility and immobility. The novel maps a shift from wartime surveillance to postwar precarity: buses patrolled by gendarmes exemplify how surveillance became internalized, while the emperor’s faint radio voice demystifies sovereignty into mere electrical vibrations. Furthermore, broken rail lines transform trains into “debacle trains”, shifting them from a space of wartime mobilization to a chaotic site of institutional collapse. The military bypass road built by forced Korean laborers also demonstrates how imperial logistics disrupted ecological balance, ultimately accelerating devastating floods. While Abashiri Prison condenses absolute immobilization, the post defeat landscape forces individuals to navigate improvised networks— waiting, walking, and utilizing trucks or handcarts—to substitute for failed systems. Through these encounters, Miyamoto reveals the colonial substrate of imperial circulation and shows how its ruins persist as nonfunctional remains. Read this way, Banshu Heiya records not only material devastation but an ethical reorientation: freedom of movement emerges as a fragile, embodied practice learned in the gaps of a ruined empire, aligning with what mobility studies term “mobility justice.” Building on earlier research on the historical significance of August 15, 1945, and gendered movement, this essay argues that postwar subjectivity is fundamentally rewired through sensory encounters with damaged infrastructures.