In this talk, Prof. David Leheny will introduce his book Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline (Cornell University Press, 2018), focusing on case studies illustrating how a national narrative of “the long postwar” has shaped the ways in which emotion can be deployed in Japanese debates about politics, status, and international relations. The book challenges new analyses of emotion and politics more broadly by focusing on the role of narrative in structuring emotional claims that are usually distant from the actual feelings of actors themselves.