Masao Miura’s Memoirs from a Historian’s and Anthropologist’s Points of View

Abstract

This publication presents a discussion of arguments raised in the article on “Masao Miura’s Autobiographical Narrative: Un-Soviet Practices in Soviet Kazakhstan [Avtobiograficheskii narrativ Masao Miury: nesovetskie praktiki v sovetskom Kazakhstane]”, by Elza-Bair Guchinova who examines the memoirs of Masao Miura about life in the USSR and thinks over Miura’s behavioral patterns and his strategies of adaptation within a new social context. Miura’s biography was unique: at the age of 13, he was convicted and, after serving time in a labor camp, deported to Kazakhstan where he lived for 54 years before returning to Japan. The article’s author pays particular attention to narrative techniques in Miura’s stories about rural Kazakhstan in the 1940s and 1950s – an environment inhabited by many repressed individuals and marked by pockets of archaism within a rapidly modernizing region. Sergey Kim responds to the issue of critical interpretation of sources related to the epoch under consideration in his comment entitled “Masao Miura’s Memoirs as a Historical Source”.