Since the 1980s the lay autobiographical genre of history-writing known as jibunshi (‘self-history’) has been a mass cultural practice among ordinary Japanese people. This is a genre of amateur life history purposefully produced and circulated largely outside the institutional loci of knowledge such as academia and the media, centering on narratives of everyday life. Especially popular among the members of the elderly population, the genre has provided its practitioners with a means of retrospective examination of personal life through literacy practice. Situating jibunshi at concrete sites of its deployment, I explore how the practice of life history shapes ideologies of the everyday in postwar Japan.

My ethnography follows the story of Fudangi (‘Recording the Everyday’), a ‘life-document’ citizens' movement. Allegedly the coiner of the genre name jibunshi, this movement has put forward since the 1960s a project of grassroots historiography, termed ‘Everybody's Writing.’ I explore how participants in this movement construct a practical philosophy of writing, “the record,” through which they lay claim to the very category of the ordinary as a felt reality. Central to this philosophy is the idea of ‘no-name’ (mumei): people without fame. I argue that this ideological stance to the no-name constitutes a critique of the hegemony of fame (yumei) and that it gives us a cue to understanding everyday life as a contingent site of redemption in modernity. Staying ‘no-name,’ Fudangi participants articulate one possible art of living at the unending end of Japan's long postwar.

Rather than categories of identity, knowledge, and value, privileged in studies of the self and narration, I discuss alterity, ignorance, and valuelessness. Rather than treating memory in relation to the past and the present, I discuss proleptic imagination and acts of self-forgetting in the present. Rather than seeing ritual as a spectacular performance of sociocultural differences, I discuss the pleasure of indifference and the unspectacular. Rather than seeing communication as reciprocal, I discuss the reality of no-dialogue, in which no one listens and no one cares, to seize the possibility that it is the no-name who do care.