In the case of contemporary Japan, the two apocalyptic incidents of 1995, the Kobe Earthquake and the Subway Sarin Incident, decisively made Japanese society as an imagined community insecure and unreliable.Ĭritic and playwright Betsuyaku Minoru refers to this communal space as the middle ground, and claims that its role in fiction has changed. However, once the premise of grand narratives was no longer trusted since the 1980s due to the end of the Cold War and postmodernization, it became increasingly difficult to communicate by relying on consensus in these imagined communities. Until the 1980s, people communicated in a modern communal space supported by modern ideologies that forced each member to share the reality created by grand narratives or worldviews. Grand narratives such as ideologies and cultural/political movements have been shared by various types of imagined communities. Benedict Anderson calls the concept of a communal space in which ideologies are supported and social norms are defined “imagined communities,” that is, virtual communal spaces in which individuals can meet others and which exceed the limitations of existing village communities Anderson explains that cultural imaginations create such communal space.

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