Japan became a burnt field in the defeat of World War II. Overcoming this, we will be reborn as a new Japan. Personification Domain A nation is an abstraction. That is, it has no material form. Yet ever since the rise of nationalism, the nation has been represented visually. The nation is thus an “imagined community” that is often imagined in human form. The purposes of this iconography are clear: images of the nation were meant to reaffirm the unity of the collective and give the concept of nationhood greater immediacy (Baron, 2005: 57). We can regard the mapping COUNTRY IS A (HUMAN) BEING as a special case of embodiment: abstract concepts as the country is, has been explicated by way of “translating” it into concepts of BODY PARTS/ORGANS and their COGNITIVE ABILITIES. Go to Personification Domain >