SAVAŞ DÖNEMİNDE KÜLTÜRE SIĞINMAK: TONNERU NO MORI 1945’TE JAPON KIRSALININ KÜLTÜREL MOTİFLERİ
TAKING REFUGE IN CULTURE IN WARTIME: JAPANESE RURAL CULTURAL MOTIFS IN TONNERU NO MORI 1945

Summary/Abstract: Narratives of wartime in Japan are varied, and it can be argued that the most important reason for this is a collective trauma that differs from person to person. In Japanese children's literature, it can be observed that some children's novels with the theme of war draw attention to the rural cultural structure. The examples about the importance of rural areas, cultural texture and conventional structure that observed in wartime period can be seen in Japanese children’s literature. In this study, the protagonist's adaptation process to a different social environment in the novel Tonneru no Mori 1945 (2015) by Eiko Kadono, is analysed in the context of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. The Japanese cultural motifs of the war conditions and the countryside in which they took refuge to get away from this are clearly visible in the novel which is a literary adaptation of the story of the evacuation from Tokyo. Unlike urban life, the rural area offers a life in touch with nature and this life causes the protagonist to have biophobic feelings. Protagonist Iko's biophobic feelings arise due to a road called ‘forest tunnel’(tonneru no mori) on the route between school and home in the rural area where she lives after Tokyo. It is seen that the protagonist's father Seizō supports the psychosocial development of his child to overcome this feeling by teaching the values of nature belief in Japanese culture. This study points to the functionality of literature as an example of the Japanese way of teaching cultural structure to children and indicates that children can be modelled for culture learning through literary texts.

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