===
1 0] Acknowledgments
This book is a result of my longtime interest in the defeated nations of World War II. As an adolescent moving with my family, I shuttled between the cultures of both the losers and the winners—Japan, England, and Germany—and could not help but notice how “the war” seemed to influence the way people carried themselves. Many questions stayed with me from that time, and this book is part of my attempt to answer them.
In the years of research leading to the publication of this book, I have accrued encouragement, information, advice, and criticism from many people. I am grateful to all of them for freely giving their time and knowledge. Special thanks are due to the many people who guided me and collaborated with me during fieldwork, especially the informants, respondents, and those who provided crucial introductions to people whose views have shaped my understanding of cultural trauma and war memory.
In the early phases of the study, when war memory became a central focus of my academic interest, I developed a method of shadow comparisons that underlies this book. Albrecht Funk was an early influence from whom I learned so much through our discussions comparing the German and Japanese cases. His enthusiasm for this project was invaluable from the beginning. Iris Landgraf also helped me learn about the younger generation in Germany, which she exemplified. My fieldwork in Hamburg would not have been possible without the help of Herbert Worm, Matthias Heyl, Yasuko Hashimoto Richter, Tommy Richter, and over a dozen local informants and interviewees who welcomed me and guided me with their knowledge.
In Japan, I learned much about the complexities of war memory from the wisdom, courage, and kindness of many people. Watanabe Shin generously provided crucial contacts for my fieldwork in Yokohama. I am indebted to Koshio Masayoshi and Kobayashi Katsunori of Kanagawa Prefecture for introductions, and over a dozen local informants and interviewees who generously took the time from their busy lives to guide me with their knowledge. I am especially thankful to Miwa Seiko for facilitating my work in Yokohama, and for her friendship and assistance over many years. Many others offered hospitality when I visited different sites, especially Kazashi Nobuo in Hiroshima, Yamabe Masahiko, and Watanabe Mina in Tokyo. Young Japanese participants in my focus group interviews were forthcoming with gusto while finishing all the pizza. Thank you for sharing your experiences with me. Iwata Eriko facilitated these focus groups with enthusiasm and tenacity. I also appreciated the discussions with Kohno Kensuke and Hara Yumiko at the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute in the early phases of this research.
As the project evolved, I benefited greatly from the intellectual exchange at the Yale University Center for Cultural Sociology. I am grateful to Jeffrey Alexander for inviting me to join the Cultural Trauma Project. His generous advice and guidance has been invaluable. I am also grateful to Ron Eyerman for sharing his wealth of knowledge on cultural trauma. My chapter “Cultural Trauma of a Fallen Nation: Japan, 1945” appearing in the Cultural Trauma Project publication Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering, edited by Ron Eyerman, Jeffrey C. Alexander, and Elizabeth Breese (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2011) comprises the kernel of ideas from which The Long Defeat developed; parts of that chapter have found their way into chapters 1 and 3 of this volume. The Center’s workshops were important in crystallizing my approach to the study of cultural trauma and memory. I gained much also from the comments by Elizabeth Breese, Phil Smith, Bernhard Giesen, and other participants of the workshops.
I much appreciated the financial resources that made it possible for me to carry out the different phases of this project, especially a grant from the Abe Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership. I am grateful to Frank Baldwin for his early support and to Takuya Toda-Ozaki for his ongoing counsel. Faculty research grants from the University of Pittsburgh, especially the Japan Council, the Asian Studies Center, the University Center for International Studies, Acknowledgments xi
and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences were critical in carrying out the latter phases of this study. Publication of this book has been aided by grants from the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Endowed Publication Fund and the Japan Iron and Steel Federation Endowment.
Hiroyuki Nagahashi Good, the Japanese studies librarian at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library, has been a pillar of support and invaluable at all phases of this research. Kazuyo Good also aided me with various library requests. At the early phase of research, I received support from Sachie Noguchi, who is now at Columbia University’s East Asian Library, and Maureen Donovan at Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library. My work would not have been possible without the many research assistants who helped me with the painstaking work of data collection, analysis, organization and management: Patrick Altdorfer, Christiane Munder, Georg Menz, Masahiro Okamoto, Yasumi Moroishi, Yasumasa Komori, Sachiko Akiyama, Eriko Iwata, Shuso Itaoka, Yoichiro Ishikawa, and Yoshimi Miyamoto.
Many colleagues and friends have stimulated my thinking and conceptualization on cultural analysis during the years in which this project has been in the making. Many thanks are due to the successive chairs of my department who extended support to me during this long-term project: the late Norman Hummon, Patrick Doreian, John Markoff, Kathleen Blee, and Suzanne Staggenborg. I also appreciate the staff at the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh for their valuable support. My colleagues at the Japan Council of the University of Pittsburgh were generous with their support and warm encouragement, especially Keith Brown, Tom Rimer, Hiroshi Nara, Richard Smethurst, Mae Smethurst, Brenda Jordan, Gabriella Lukacs, David Mills, and the late Keiko McDonald. For their constructive comments on parts or all of the draft manuscript, I am especially grateful to Kathy Blee, John Markoff, Hiroshi Nara, and Dick Smethurst. Thank you, Dick, for letting me audit your HIST1000. I would also like to acknowledge the support and friendship of colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, especially Hideo Watanabe, Janelle Greenberg, Martin Greenberg, Alberta Sbragia, Sabine von Dirke, Amy Remensnyder (now at Brown University), and Ellis Krauss (now at the University of California, San Diego).
This book has also greatly benefited from the discussions at lectures and seminars I have given at various institutions—among them Yale University, Harvard University, Cornell University, University of San Francisco, University of Georgia, University of Texas, Austin,
University of Virginia, George Washington University, Metropolitan State University, UCLA, the Hiroshima Peace Institute, the London School of Economics, as well as the University of Pittsburgh. I am grateful to the organizers of these events for their gracious invitations. The discussions greatly helped shape my arguments. I am especially indebted to insightful comments over the years from Alexis Dudden, Jeffrey Olick, Helmut Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar,
Mariko Tamanoi, Andrew Gordon, Ted Bestor, Len Schoppa, Barry Schwartz, Mikyoung Kim, Laura Hein, Mark Selden, Franziska Seraphim, and Peter Katzenstein. I have also been fortunate to receive warm encouragement from Bill Kelly, John Campbell, Sheldon Garon, Fred Notehelfer, Mary Brinton, Patricia Steinhoff, Norma Field, Robert Smith, and John Traphagan.
Many good people have shared my life throughout the time I have been working on this book. Keith Brown has been a wise and trusted friend throughout my career at Pittsburgh. Kathy Blee cajoled me to finish the book and believed that it could be done even when I faltered. Hiroshi Nara was always ready to cheer me on. I shared many good suppers and companionship with Esther Sales and Pat Doreian. Lucy Fischer and Mark Wicclair have been thoughtful and delightful companions, as have Linda Serody and Alan Meisel. JoAnn Brickley shared the gift of her friendship and counsel. My dear friends Tamara Horowitz and Keiko McDonald did not live to see this book completed but their special influences are embedded in it.
At Oxford University Press, I would like to thank my editor James Cook for his special interest in this work and his thoughtful guidance. I am also indebted to India Gray and David Joseph for intelligent copyediting and efficient production, and Peter Worger for assistance. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press for their comments on the manuscript which greatly aided the revision of this book. I also want to thank Mitch Reyes and Jennifer Kapczynski for their critical feedback on chapter 1 at the Lewis and Clark College’s Writing Retreat. Mary Susannah Robbins held me to a rigorous writing schedule, gave me valuable feedback, and encouraged me to carry on at a crucial time when writing the book.
Finally, I want to express my deepest appreciation to my husband David Barnard whose loving and abiding support made the journey of this project possible. I am so lucky to count him as my life partner, best friend, supporter-in-chief, and editor extraordinaire. He not only read and edited every word and comma in the manuscript, but he also lived and breathed them with me. This book is lovingly dedicated to him.
THE LONG DEFEAT
1] Cultural Memory in a Fallen Nation
Growing up in Tokyo in the 1960s, my daily trip home from grade school took me through a crowded walkway at Shinjuku station bustling with small shops and kiosks. It was a long, busy passageway that connected a new subway line and a suburban line at one of the largest commuter hubs of the city. Sometime in the early 1960s, this walkway came to be lined everyday with amputated middle-aged men wearing tattered cotton military uniforms that revealed conspicuously their missing arms, artificial legs, glass eyes, and other disfigurements. Some would sit still on the ground or keep their heads bowed—motionless as commuters hurried by. Others played melancholy, amateurish tunes on a harmonica or an accordion. It took some time for me as a child to realize these men were there to collect money from the passersby, and that their war misery was on display, in a sense, for that purpose. These traces of war were easy to find when we children looked around and paid attention. Sometimes we saw them in plain view, like the panhandling veterans. Other times we caught or overheard woeful stories in family conversations—air raids endured, properties destroyed, relatives lost. As children we did not know how the Asia-Pacific War came about, or what exactly to make of it, but we understood that it was the single most destructive ordeal that the adults had experienced. Something dreadful had happened. Early images and perceptions like these would ultimately color our understanding of the war as a national trauma.
How do memories of national trauma remain so relevant to culture and society long after the event? Why do the memories of difficult experiences endure, and even intensify, despite people’s impulse to avoid remembering dreadful pasts and to move on? This book explores these questions by examining Japan’s culture of defeat up to the present day. I survey the stakes of war memory after the defeat in World War II and show how and why defeat has become an indelible part of Japan’s national collective life, especially in recent decades. I probe into the heart of the war memories that lie at the root of the current disputes and escalating frictions in East Asia that have come to be known collectively as Japan’s “history problem.”
Memories of difficult experiences like war and defeat endure for many reasons: the nation’s trajectory may change profoundly, as it did when Japan surrendered sovereignty in 1945; collective life must be regenerated from a catastrophic national fall; and losers face the predicament of living with a discredited, tainted past. In this process, the vanquished mobilize new and revised narratives to explain grievous national failures, mourn the dead, redirect blame, and recover from the burdens of stigma and guilt.1 The task of making a coherent story for the vanquished is at the same time a project of repairing the moral backbone of a broken society. This precarious project lies at the heart of Japan’s culture of defeat, a painful probe into the meaning of being Japanese. Understanding this project is crucial for assessing Japan’s choices—nationalism, pacifism, or reconciliationism—to address the national and international tensions it faces today.
The influence of defeat on Japan’s postwar culture has been immense, long-lasting, and complicated.2 Japan lost sovereignty after surrendering in 1945, and it was occupied for seven years by the winners, who imposed radical reforms in nearly all aspects of society from governance and law, to economy and education. Japan’s perpetrator guilt in the war was defined explicitly at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials (1946–1948), which indicted Japan’s military leadership for committing crimes against peace and other violations of war conventions. At the same time, the tribunal and numerous other war crimes trials in Asia overlooked the possible guilt of many others in the military, bureaucracy, government, business, and—controversially—the Emperor. Since then, long-standing fissures have emerged within Japanese society over who was responsible for the war and who was guilty. These fissures continue today. Underlying the fissures are two fundamental questions: Why did we fight an unwinnable war? Why did they kill and die for a lost cause? In answering these questions, people bring different narratives to bear, debate different rational positions, and opt for different solutions; but ultimately, the answers are formed by personal and political reactions to the memories of massive failure, injustice, and suffering. At the heart of these debates are concerns not only about war responsibility but also about national belonging, the relations between the individual and the state, and relations between the living and the dead.
Japan’s war memory is one of the most crucial issues of the global memory culture on wars and atrocities that has surged since the 1990s. There are many volatile, unresolved issues: the territorial disputes with China, Korea, and Russia;3 the treatment of war guilt and war criminals at commemorations (“the Yasukuni problem”);4 and the claims for compensation and apology by wartime forced laborers, forced sex workers (“comfort women”),5 and prisoners of war (POWs). Conflicting memories of the troubled past that underlie them also fuel Japan’s national controversies—called the “historical consciousness problem” (rekishi ninshiki mondai). Far from arriving at a national consensus after seventy years, the cleavage separating different war memories and historical claims deepened in the 1990s with many disputes: the mandate to use patriotic symbols (the national flag and anthem)6 and inculcating patriotism in schools; the treatment of Japan’s atrocities (e.g., the Nanjing massacre) in textbooks and popular culture;7 and the claims for compensation and health care by the victims of air raids and atomic bombings.8 These issues continue to test the core of Japan’s postwar identity and culminate today in the critical question of remilitarization, altering the pacifist constitution that has anchored national life since 1947.
The difficulty of coming to terms with national trauma is known to many national cultures that have been transformed by memories of catastrophic military failure: examples include postwar Germany and Turkey, post–Algerian War France, and post–Civil War and post–Vietnam America.9 Facing the challenges of culpability for death, violence, and loss, some nations have responded by mythologizing the lost cause as in the post–Civil War American South;10 some by martyring the dead soldiers as in post–World War I Germany;11 while others have chosen to focus on recovery through radical reform, as in post–Ottoman Turkey.12 Research suggests that nations suffering the crisis of defeat or conquest respond with persistent attempts to overcome humiliation and disgrace, although they differ in approach. This book surveys Japan’s case after World War II, building on German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s work Culture of Defeat.13
By tracing the many ways in which the vanquished recount their war memories to postwar generations, I move beyond established methods that focus on formal policies and speeches and instead examine the textures of historical and moral understanding in the everyday life of the broader postwar culture. I survey the narratives of war that circulate in families, popular media, and schools to assess how people have come to terms with the difficult national legacy of trauma, loss, guilt, and shame. I focus mainly on the decades between 1985 and 2015, when war memory took a transnational and global turn. My analysis finds that Japan’s war memories are not only deeply encoded in the everyday culture but are also much more varied than the single, caricatured image of “amnesia” depicted by Western media. I suggest that there is no “collective” memory in Japan; rather, multiple memories of war and defeat with different moral frames coexist and vie for legitimacy. I make this case by identifying different trauma narratives that emerged for different social groups with diverse political interests. I then extend this inquiry to probe how negative memory influences and motivates postwar national identity.
Cultural Trauma, Memory, and National Identity
Maurice Halbwachs suggested that collective memory is always selective according to different conditions of remembering the past.14 Memories are not fixed or immutable but are representations of reality that are subjectively constructed to fit the present. The struggle for control over memory is rooted in the conflict and interplay between social, political, and cultural interests and values in particular present conditions. Memories of wars, massacres, atrocities, invasions, and other instances of mass violence and death become significant referents for subsequent collective life when people choose to make them especially relevant to who they are and what it means to be a member of that society. Some events become more significant than others because we manage to make them more consequential in later years to better understand ourselves and our society. Jeffrey Alexander has called this process “cultural trauma,” which occurs “when members of a collective feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.”15 The horrendous event emerges as a significant referent in the collective consciousness, not because it is in some way naturally ineffaceable but because it generates a structure of discourse that normalizes it in collective life over time.16 In the process, the memory of the event is made culturally relevant, remembered as an overwhelmingly damaging and problematic collective experience and incorporated, along with all of its attendant negative emotions, as part of collective identity.17
Those persistent negative emotions are the most powerful motivator of moral conduct and are critical for understanding how cultural trauma is regenerated over time.18 Cultures remembering negative historical events are driven to overcome the emotions and sentiments that accompany them. Those sentiments have been continually reinscribed in memory and passed on to successive generations. They include the desire to repair a damaged reputation; the aspiration to recover respect in the eyes of the world; the wish to mourn losses and recover from censure; the longing to find meaning and dignity in the face of failure; the hope to shield family and relatives from recrimination; and the urge to minimize the event or pretend it never happened. Satisfying these yearnings and hopes is a long, ongoing project not only to refashion memories but also to mend a broken society. In this recovery project, memories are realigned and reproduced—to heal, bring justice, and regain moral status in the world—with varying degrees of success. Understanding this repair project is crucial to explaining the persistence of the cultural trauma, the culture of defeat, and also Japan’s “history problem.”
Today we live in an emerging “culture of memory” where remembering the national past has become vitally relevant for living in the present.19 Oral history movements, new museum and memorial constructions, and political movements to right past wrongs have proliferated around the world especially since the 1980s. They are all examples of a trend in which remembering the past has become a crucial experience for forging collective identity.20 The 1990s through the 2010s—the period covered in this book—has also been a crucial time for Japan to look anew into the national past to envision its future. This has reignited past political feuds and old controversies over how to narrate national history, and reawakened the public consciousness that continues unabated through today. The post–World War II generation, now two-thirds of the population, has entered the fray as new stakeholders to play their roles in framing the national script. The different positions of the generations have meant that people bring more diverse motivations to reframe the history of the lost war. At the same time, rapidly changing geopolitics has brought new uncertainties about unresolved war issues vis-à-vis Japan’s Asian neighbors, such as the spiraling lawsuits filed against Japan for compensation claims, demands for apology,21 and the contested descriptions of events in history textbooks. These issues and others refueled since the 1980s prefigured Japan’s history problem, the ramifications of which underlie and aggravate many of Japan’s most vexing challenges in its international relations today: the rising popular antagonism toward Japan in East Asia; the increasingly provocative territorial skirmishes with China, South Korea, and Russia; and the persistent belligerence from North Korea.
The culture of memory arises at a significant time of growing awareness that historical knowledge is neither fixed nor uniform. Universal claims for truth are increasingly suspect for many in late modernity, posing challenges to the act of framing a national metanarrative. There is increasing recognition that historical representations have become subjective, political projects in this search for usable pasts.22 It seems no longer possible today to produce a single, definitive public history shared commonly and objectively within and among nations.23 This poses a special challenge in East Asian societies like Japan where legitimate and valid knowledge of national history has heretofore been centralized by the state.24 In a post–Cold War world that requires a broader reorganization of knowledge, the contradiction between the historical relativism that has emerged in the global arena on the one hand, and, on the other, the goal of official history which is to inculcate a particular truth has become increasingly acute.25 In these times of flux, it is not surprising that Japan has seen a surge of acrimonious disputes and, indeed, a rise in neonationalism among those who perceive global change as threatening to their self-identity.
Contentions over war memory across the East Asia region strike at the core of Japan’s project to recover its moral foothold in the long wake of its calamitous defeat. Several issues stand out as particularly inflammable: the redress for wartime sexual forced labor (“comfort women”); the culpability for brutal massacres (especially the Nanjing massacre); and the attempts to rehabilitate the perpetrators and war criminals as martyrs (the Yasukuni Shrine). Predictably, this type of project is fraught with deep fissures among stakeholders who embrace diverse perspectives and goals. The carriers of memory—Japanese intellectuals, educators, politicians, lawyers, commentators, media critics, activists, and others who retell the past—assign different meanings to the national fall, complicating the prospect of forging a unified national metanarrative.
My analysis of the deep fissures in Japan’s postwar memory builds on German sociologist Bernhard Giesen’s typologies that illuminate the different constructions of trauma narratives in civil society.26 I propose that there are three categories of conflicting trauma narratives vying for moral superiority within the complex landscape of cultural memory in Japan. They are different in how much they emphasize human failures and how they depict the moral character of heroes, victims, and perpetrators of the war. They are also different in how they perceive the relationship between winner and loser, and the stakes of memory. In short, they differ in the moral interpretations of defeat and in the courses they chart for national recovery.
A Tale of Three Moralities: The Divided Narratives of a Cultural Trauma
Moral understandings of war vary in time, place, historical context, and political-cultural traditions.27 In the just war theory rooted in the Western Augustinian Christian tradition, war is theorized and justified by the idea that the use of mass political violence can be ethically appropriate.28 World War II was an example of such a just war for the Allied powers that defeated the Axis powers who were deemed to be unjust aggressors. This perspective rooted in Western theology, however, is not a cultural universal across the wide spectrum of human history. More pragmatic and ubiquitous is the realist, crude recognition that a “good war” is a war that ends in victory, expands political power, and promotes national interests. In the long history of warfare in Japan, different standards have prevailed: the premedieval system of legitimating war by authorization of the imperial court; the feudal system of legitimating warfare by victory;29 and, in modernity, fitfully adapting to the West-initiated system of regulating wars by international conventions and treaties. It is therefore not surprising that along the way, Japan has embraced degrees of realism and relativism in constructing notions of good and bad wars without subscribing to absolutist principles. Although the just war philosophy does not readily “fit” in a Japanese cultural context that evolved outside the Judeo-Christian civilizational orbit and grew from polytheistic traditions where moral relativism is a pragmatic way of life,30 Japan nevertheless adopted the concept to justify its actions in World Wars I and II. In Japan’s adaptation, the just war framework meant that the Asia-Pacific War was the “Sacred War” fought for the Emperor to protect the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” from Euro-American, white, colonial aggression. After the national collapse of 1945, many reacted to the abrupt inversion of moral order that rendered their “right war” to be the “wrong war” by reverting back to a realist moral relativism (kateba kangun, makereba zokugun).
This abrupt inversion of the moral order, and widespread cynicism about war, all but ensured that conflicting trauma narratives would emerge in postwar Japanese society. Over the decades, three categories of trauma narratives have emerged, diverse but deeply etched in the national sentiment. They are different in how they assess the moral import of military and political actions, and in how they characterize the negative legacy of failures and losses in the war. Each points Japan in a different direction for shaping its future.
The first category of narratives emphasizes the stories of fallen national heroes. These narratives embrace a “fortunate fall” argument, which justifies the war and national sacrifices in hindsight by claiming that the peace and prosperity of today are built on those sacrifices of the past. These heroic narratives tend to promote a discourse of indebtedness that is heard often in official speeches at commemorations. It is an ameliorative narrative intended to cultivate pride in national belonging; at the same time it diverts attention from the culpability of the state in starting and losing the war.
A second narrative promotes empathy and identification with the tragic victims of defeat. Here a vision of “catastrophe” prevails—an unmitigated tragedy of epic proportions—accentuating the total carnage and destruction wrought by ferocious military violence. This discourse of suffering and antimilitarism is found often in family stories; popular culture stories; and the pacifist embrace of the victims in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and scores of other cities crushed by atomic bombings and indiscriminate air raids. This narrative also tends to divert attention, in this case from the suffering of distant others that the Japanese victimized in Asia.
The third type of narrative contrasts with the first two by emphasizing Japan’s perpetrator acts of imperialism, invasion, and exploitation in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. This is a narrative of a “dark descent to hell,” stressing the violence and harm that Japan inflicted, with varied attribution of malicious intent. The most difficult and controversial of the three narratives, this vision, and its discourse of regret, is often found in investigative journalism, the news media, documentaries, academic publications, and intellectual discussions as well as some veterans’ memoirs and oral histories. Civic movements and friendship organizations dedicated to reconciliation in East Asia largely presuppose the acceptance of this perpetrator narrative.
This cacophony of memory narratives, far apart in moral sentiments and interests, accounts for the disarray in the nation’s representation of its metahistory. This problem is evident even in the naming of the war: “the Pacific War” became a standard name for the war imposed by the US occupation and is still often used in the fortunate fall narrative. A countervailing name, used by Japanese progressive intellectuals and educators, also gained ground and is often used in the dark descent narrative; this name “the Fifteen-Year War” recognized the salience of Japanese imperial aggression in East Asia for a decade preceding the war in the Pacific. Subsequent designations used to sidestep such naming politics have been “the Asia-Pacific War,” “the Shōwa War,” “World War II,” and, as people became weary of the political baggage that each name carried, the war ultimately came to be called “the last world war,” “that war,” and even “that unfortunate period of the past.” This problem of representing “that war” arises at every turn, from commemorative speeches and history textbooks to museum exhibits. The hundreds of regional, specialized “peace” museums scattered across the nation must address this history problem by not presenting a comprehensive national history of the war; rather, they present partial stories of cultural trauma, selectively emphasizing perpetrators, victims, or heroes. Thus the common Western criticism that Japan leaves so much of war history unexamined points the finger in the wrong direction: it is not about national amnesia but about a stalemate in a fierce, multivocal struggle over national legacy and the meaning of being Japanese.
Narrating Fallen Heroes: The Fortunate Fall
From Robert E. Lee of the American Confederacy to German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel in World Wars I and II, to John Wayne in the film Green Berets (1968), there are many stories of well-known heroes of a lost war. Regardless of where and how the heroes fought, these popular narratives allow their actions and even their downfall to be framed as an act of courage and selfless sacrifice. Historian George Mosse explored this proclivity to celebrate fallen soldiers by examining how the war dead were martyred in Germany after World War I to dissipate the pain of failure and to relieve the guilt of the survivors.31 Martyrdom allows the living to say that soldiers did not die in vain. In the Japanese version, the narratives of fallen heroes often also claim redemption for them in that their death ostensibly contributed to making Japan’s future better and brighter—the “fortunate fall.”
A well-known example of this genre in Japan is the story of the fallen heroes on the battleship Yamato, one of the most iconic narratives of sacrifice for a greater cause in Japan’s World War II history. The largest battleship ever built, it sank north of Okinawa in April 1945 with a crew of 3,000 men as it was deployed for a tactically dubious suicide sortie only months before Japan’s defeat. This patriotic tale recounts the last moments of the men in the battleship and the torment among the young officers as they desperately questioned the meaning of their impending death for a war that was certain to end in defeat.
Moments before the ship sank under an overwhelming bombardment by seven hundred American bombers, Captain Usubuchi makes the now-famous statement that his impending death is rendered worthwhile because his sacrifice can serve as an awakening, a rallying cry for a better national future:
Japan has paid too little attention to progress. We have been too finicky, too wedded to selfish ethics; we have forgotten true progress. How else can Japan be saved except by losing and coming to its senses? If Japan does not come to its senses now, when will it be saved?
We will lead the way. We will die as harbingers of Japan’s new life. That’s where our real satisfaction lies, isn’t it?32
What this twenty-one-year-old officer meant by “progress” is vague enough that different meanings can be attributed to it, such as peace, justice, security, or prosperity. It is also easy to fault the logical contradiction of a young man claiming to contribute to a future that he will not experience. Yet this contradictory logic is at the core of the idea that links progress to sacrifice, which engendered the collective belief that Japan could rebound and recover. In this requiem for the dead, the courage and discipline of the men facing certain death are emphasized without directing blame or resentment toward the state leadership that ordered the mission with no fuel to return home. This story of Yamato, recounted in many films, documentaries, textbooks, and even political speeches,33 inspires ideas that range from nationalism to anti-Americanism, supranationalism, and pacifism. Avoiding condemnation of the heroes as perpetrators of an aggressive war, narratives like those of Yamato’s fallen heroes are remade and updated regularly in the popular media.34 Other examples of this genre include the bestsellers and films Eternal Zero (Eien no zero 2009, 2013) and Moon Light Summer (Gekko no natsu 1993), both about Zero fighter pilots who never returned; these successor narratives aim to mobilize indebtedness and praise for the war dead.
Narrating Victims: The Catastrophe
From the Diary of Anne Frank, now translated in sixty-seven languages, to the iconic photo of the “Napalm Girl” (1972) running naked on a road after being burned by a South Vietnamese air force attack, there are voluminous narratives of innocent victims of tragic wars and other catastrophes. Regardless of where and how the victims are persecuted, these narratives frame their suffering as the result of brutal, callous oppression, and inexcusable acts of torture and injustice. Historian Jay Winter, recounting the carnage of World War I in Europe, argued that it was important for people to make sense of the slaughter via a culture of remembrance and mourning in order to grieve and heal from the devastating experience of loss.35 This “popular piety” is evident also in the Japanese narratives of victims, and it is a key ingredient for catharsis and atonement.36 Significantly, the Japanese state and military are often the shadow perpetrators in these narratives, which explicitly or implicitly encode their culpability for the victimization.
Nakazawa Keiji’s semiautobiographical comic Barefoot Gen (1973–1987) is arguably the most iconic antiwar literature of this genre in Japan. Written by a survivor of the Hiroshima blast, the story represents unmitigated “catastrophe,” offering a tragic narrative of the obliteration of Hiroshima through an intimate family portrayal of day-to-day survival after the atomic bomb. Based on a true story, it is a powerful interweaving of personal history and world history, telling the horrific effects of the nuclear blast and radiation with rage, agony, and despair. The graphic details of the atomic blast are depicted to maximum effect.37
Gen unequivocally indicts the war as absolute evil. Moreover, the war was brought on recklessly and unnecessarily by the Japanese military and the imperial state that heartlessly and ineptly misled civilians to deathly destruction and suffering. All the suffering emanating from this atomic bomb could have been averted if only the war had been stopped earlier, if only the military state had the sense to accept the Potsdam Declaration sooner. Gen’s message is clear: authorities like the state, the military, the Emperor, the American military, and American doctors (who collected clinical data from the radiated victims) cannot ever be trusted again.38 Thus, even as the story progresses from obliteration to rebuilding new life, it carries a bitter undertone, since nothing can really undo the permanent damage to people’s lives and bodies, and the culprits are not brought to justice.
Gen’s iconic status cannot be overstated. Used widely and easily accessible in schools in the past four decades, Gen has reached successive postwar generations and shaped popular consciousness about the violence of militarism. Many have attested to the psychological trauma of learning about Hiroshima in childhood first from Gen, whether in school libraries, in peace education classes, on commercial television, or in cinemas.39 Equivalent to Anne Frank’s story as a story of victimization used to educate, Gen mobilizes empathy and pity and sends the clear message that we must take control of our own lives and have the strength to say no to war and nuclear weapons, so as never to become such victims again. Little connection is made, however, between the bomb and the fifteen-year war that preceded the blast, even though Hiroshima was a military city. The audience gains no insight from Gen that much of invaded Asia welcomed the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the time. (For example, Gen is largely rejected by Korean audiences.)40 For the most part, Gen has become a tale of victims of a brutal war, extolling the theme of suffering.
The mobilization of victimhood in stories such as Gen succeeds in feeding into the larger cultural trauma of the fallen nation and emerges not as an anti-American sentiment but an antimilitary sentiment. Stories of this genre are created up to today, with similar themes of the meaningless destruction and breakdown of moral and material order. Other examples of this genre emphasizing the helplessness of orphans and civilians on the home front are Graves of the Fireflies (1988), The Song of Sugarcane Fields (2004), and To All the Corners of the World (2007).41
Narrating Perpetrators: The Dark Descent to Hell
From Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) to the documentaries of the My Lai massacre (1968) and Francis Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979), there are many tales of infamous perpetrators of a lost war in the popular culture. Regardless of where and how the perpetrators carried out their actions, their narratives tend to frame them as disturbed, troubling men who have gone over the deep end or over to their sadistic and evil side. American historian Christopher Browning traced the history of German perpetrators in World War II who cold-bloodedly executed Polish civilians en masse as part of their regular daily jobs.42 These perpetrators were brought to justice in trials at the hands of their own countrymen in the 1960s. Japanese perpetrators of World War II, by contrast, stood trial at the hands of the victors and their victims but not their own people—a development complicated by the exoneration of the Emperor by the American occupation, and the Cold War. Nevertheless, Japanese perpetrator narratives also expose malevolent acts committed by their own people, based on the belief that uncovering and facing your own people’s dreadful past is intrinsically important for individuals and society alike. Moving forward, turning a new page, and making a clean break from the past call for self-examination of one’s moral failures. When it comes to recovery and healing from military violence in particular, this approach presumes the necessity of facing squarely the darkest and least acceptable aspects of the self.
One of the most influential figures to shape the public discourse on war guilt in postwar Japan is historian Ienaga Saburō, a prolific scholar of war history and war responsibility.43 Ienaga is also the well-known plaintiff who waged the longest legal battle against the state over how to teach the national past. Motivated by remorse at having been a passive bystander during the war, Ienaga devoted himself to righting the wrong by publishing perpetrator history in school textbooks, claiming that the state was especially culpable and responsible for the war and how it was carried out.44 His three lawsuits spanning 32 years (1965–1997) helped keep alive the critical narrative of national history in the public arena, especially the dark chapters of the war: invasion, rapes, and plunder in China; the biological experiment Unit 731; the Nanjing massacre; the forced labor of colonial subjects and POWs; and the victimization of civilians in Okinawa.45 Ienaga’s narratives hold that the war was an illegal war of aggression in violation of international conventions, driven by Japan’s economic and political ambitions to control northern China, which culminated in a 15-year conflict. He does not spare the state:
The fifteen-year war was an unrighteous, reckless war begun with unjust and improper goals and means by the Japanese state, and . . . starting the war and refusing to end the war in a timely fashion were both illegal and improper acts of the state.46
Ienaga’s lawsuits raised public awareness of Japan as perpetrator and spurred citizens’ movements and civic organizations to support his ongoing efforts. A favorable verdict for his second lawsuit emboldened other history textbook writers to increase their coverage of perpetrator history in the 1970s and 1980s.47 Scores of popular history books, novels, documentaries, even manga cartoon history books for school libraries, and other cultural media followed with robust narratives of Japanese perpetration in Asia during the periods of colonization and war. As I show in c hapters 3 and 4, teachers, activists, artists, cartoonists, and the media routinely recounted and disseminated these stories, exposing the children to Japanese acts of perpetration more than had been done in the past, thereby reproducing the cultural trauma of the war for the next generation. However, such public reckoning with perpetrator history has also been met by fierce rebuttals, such as the defamation suit filed against Ōe Kenzaburo, the Nobel laureate whose “Okinawa Notes” in 1970 referred to the involvement of the Japanese military in the mass suicides of Okinawan civilians.48 Updated perpetrator narratives today are reproduced nationally in the media by journalists and academics; in the international arena they have successfully engaged broader media through feminist and human rights activists.
Divided Memories in a Culture of Defeat
As these distinct narratives show, a nation’s memory of war and especially of its defeat does not produce a monolithic, consensual picture but creates a conflictive and polyphonic public discourse. Heterogeneous memories such as these are in fact more common than people assume especially within a time span of a few generations from the event.49 For example, Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer discuss the “fractured, multiple, intersecting” memory narratives of Hitler’s war, the Nazi regime, and the Holocaust since the 1989 reunification, showing that individual accounts in the German case are also replete with contending recollections. The official German policy of contrition notwithstanding, stories of perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and collaborators coexist based on different perceptions, experiences, and self-interests. These are ultimately irreconcilable and incapable of engendering a coherent, unified account for the nation.50 In the German case, divided memories have emerged from a specific set of social and political conditions: the different West-East political regimes during the Cold War, different generational influences, diverse battlefront and other wartime experiences, and different ideological assumptions that have become inescapable for unified Germany.51
French memories of war have also failed to produce a national consensus: the discourses of resistance heroes are interspersed with perpetrator narratives of Vichy crimes and victim narratives of Nazi-occupied France in their national self-understandings.52 Similarly in Austria, victim narratives of Nazi annexation have ceded ground to righteous heroic narratives as well as perpetrator narratives of military collaboration. Each narrative offers a partial account of a “whole” that remains elusive and incongruent.53
Japan’s divided memory culture also resonates with that of post-defeat nations of World War I like Turkey after the Ottoman Empire,54 and postcommunist nations like Hungary and Poland after the Cold War.55 This recent comparative scholarship is especially insightful in illuminating the predicament of non-Western nations, defeated by Western nations, who are compelled to revise the meaning of their totalitarian pasts in a manner that conforms to the West’s expectations of how they should “come to terms” with such a past. The pervading sense that there is an “acceptable” and “civilized” way for liberal democracies to confront their totalitarian past by “seeking the truth” is a common thread that ties together the cultures of defeat in these disparate cases. As this book will also show, what is “appropriate” to remember, based on a universalized West European model, derived from the Holocaust experience and rooted in Western anti-Semitism, constrains and sets complicated hurdles on non-Western memory cultures in their efforts to address past wrongs.
In the case of Japan, the tarnished memory and ambivalent sentiments about heroes, victims, and perpetrators of the militarist totalitarian past have erupted to the surface in many proxy political disputes, such as the question of remilitarization in the new global geopolitics. From the first time Japan sent the Self-Defense Force (SDF)—as Japan’s de facto standing military is known—to join UN Peacekeeping operations overseas (in 1992, after the Gulf War) the question of whether any Japanese soldier could again harm or be harmed by another foreign national has been insistently present. As Japan developed new security legislation (2004) precipitated by 9/11 and to address North Korea’s missile threats (1998, 2006, 2009, 2013, and 2014), the contentions have been intertwined with fears of giving too much power to the SDF and trusting military leaders again. When the neonationalist faction of the parliament succeeded in revising the Basic Law of Education (2006) and brought patriotism back to public school curricula, it raised fears for some, and hope for others, that Japanese children may be induced to believe again that dying for the country was a worthy goal. These were not merely disputes between political hawks and doves, but evidence of fissures at the core of the antiwar national identity that had been fostered over the course of the long defeat.56 Today, as the geopolitical tensions in East Asia escalate and Japan’s military capabilities grow, the trepidation over possible involvement in another military conflict has also heightened. Whether people are for or against the new interpretation of the constitution that would now allow a limited level of collective self-defense (2014), the anxieties underlying this new shake-up of what “peace” means in a pacifist nation have reignited, fed by memories of the disastrous last war run by uncontrolled military power.57
In Japan’s postwar history, the chronology of the narratives of war heroes, victims, and perpetrators starts with the Tokyo War Crimes Trials (1946–1948). As one of the instigators of a world war with the largest casualty in modern history, Japan could hardly escape culpability. The total death toll of World War II is estimated at 60 million, of which one-third occurred in Asia.58 During Japan’s incursions in East and Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, an estimated 20 million Asians were killed, not only from warfare but also from civilian raids, plunder, rape, starvation, and torture.59 The civilian death toll of the Asia-Pacific War was overwhelming: around one million in Japan from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the air raids in hundreds of cities; over 16 million in China; and under 2,000 from the United States. The deaths rates among soldiers were high especially toward the end of the war: about 2.3 million Japanese soldiers died at a death rate of 38%, which was higher than that of German soldiers (33%), and 19 times that of American soldiers (2%).60 Because the Japanese military fought across the vast expanse of the Asia-Pacific region where supplies of food, medicine, and ammunition were broken off, approximately 60–70% of the soldiers died not from combat but from starvation, disease, and abandonment. Half of their remains have been repatriated but the rest are, to date, scattered across the vast region. Only a small percentage was taken prisoner given the official prohibition on surrender, and the last of them returned in 1956. It took decades to complete the repatriation of several million civilians and ex-soldiers.61
At the tribunal, Japan’s perpetrator guilt was defined explicitly by the Allies in a “victors’ justice” that blamed Japan’s military leadership for committing crimes against peace and other violations of war conventions. The indictments of perpetrators also included culpability for atrocities such as the Nanjing massacre and the Manila massacre.62 In addition to the Class A war criminals indicted at the Tokyo Trials and then executed, thousands of perpetrators in the lower ranks were tried and indicted as Class B and C war criminals for carrying out war crimes throughout East and Southeast Asia (1946–1951).63 However, national reckoning with a larger scope of guilt by untold, often lesser known perpetrators remained elusive. The Emperor—who had by then renounced his “divine” status—was not held culpable for crimes against peace and escaped prosecution. The Japanese people at large were also held unaccountable as they were said to have been misled by a deceptive militarist state. Tens of thousands of civilians were purged as collaborators of the wartime regime, but many were depurged even before the end of the occupation as the Cold War intensified in East Asia.64
The chronology after Japan regained sovereignty in 1952 is relatively straightforward. After the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) came to dominate the Japanese government in the mid-1950s, the economic imperatives of material growth and stability took priority over punishment for past deeds, while the political imperatives of security and alliance with the United States took priority over reconciliation with communist China and the Soviet Union. When these conservatives stabilized their foothold as the stewards of unprecedented economic growth in a nation determined to make up for the astronomical losses of the war, they gained institutional control over the official metanarrative of the war, which they sought to characterize as a tragic conflict fought reluctantly but bravely for national survival. In this heroic narrative, the present growth and prosperity were the hard-won rewards built on past national tragedy.
The opposition, however, skeptical and distrustful of the conservative account of unmitigated progress, forcefully dissented and joined forces with myriad countervailing social groups and movements, such as the teachers’ union and pacifist movements that were in the 1960s and 1970s opposing the US-Japan Security Treaty, nuclear tests, and the Vietnam War. These groups, led by educators, intellectuals, journalists, unionists, and activists, claimed that the war had been waged by ambitious leaders of an aggressive state who carried out reckless military invasions and colonization, resulting in great pain and suffering in Asia. Centrists, in turn, staked a narrower claim, emphasizing the domestic toll that total war had inflicted on Japan, such as the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and of the thousands of air raids carried out by American forces. For the centrists, the war was a tragic conflict fought foolishly by a dysfunctional military state, only to end in a monumental defeat.
The contentious politics of memory in the 1960s and 1970s reached a point where different stakeholders came to share a measure of agreement in remembering the Japanese side of the suffering. Even if they disagreed on whom to designate as heroes, victims, and perpetrators, or how to remember Asian suffering inflicted by Japan during the war, they shared a memory of their own losses and could not deny the visible hardship that was around them. As such, the cultural trauma could be normalized as veterans and civilians, rich and poor, elite and downtrodden could at least forge a common ground in their antipathy for war. Ultimately this developed into powerful antimilitary and antinuclear sentiments that became integral to the culture of defeat.65
In the 1980s and 1990s, a global memory culture began to coalesce around emerging human rights and transitional justice movements that focused on redressing past wrongs. Pressured by neighboring East Asian nations and the international media, Japan’s long-standing problem of reckoning with the past became an international concern on many fronts: disagreements over self-justifying history textbooks, struggles over official apologies, compensation suits filed by former colonial subjects and victims, controversial commemorations of the war dead and war criminals, disputes over museum exhibits, and others. A most significant example was the redress for former “comfort women” who were forced as sex workers to service Japanese soldiers during wartime, and who began to break their silence and claim redress from the Japanese government. Emerging as a transnational feminist movement against sexual violence, the “comfort women” case succeeded in bringing the world’s attention to victimization of women in war, while also tarnishing the carefully crafted image of “innocent” Japanese soldiers.66 Such developments were catapulted not only by global trends but also domestic events that transformed the conditions of memory making such as the death of Emperor Hirohito, the end of the monopolistic rule of the LDP, and the collapse of the bubble economy; and regional events such as the rising political, economic, and cultural importance of East Asia, especially China. The contentious disputes of these decades resulted in the growing recognition for the perpetrator past in popular culture, as well as efforts for reconciliation by broad international coalitions of citizen’s movements.
By the early 2000s, there emerged a neonationalist backlash to the efforts to bring about reconciliation to East Asia.67 It was a response to the globalization of “the history problem” that accompanied the shifting balance of political power in East Asia with China’s spectacular economic rise.68 As Japan’s anxieties grew in the face of an economic downturn, recession, unemployment and rising inequalities, its problems in the post–Cold War international order also mounted: the continuing dependence for security on the victor, the United States; the failure to be part of the victorious coalition in the Gulf War (1990); and the failure to gain permanent membership in the UN Security Council reserved for the winners of World War II (2005). Recognizing the ghost of the traumatic defeat in the deepening morass, some Japanese critics have called it “the Second Defeat” or “the Third Defeat.”69 The international and national disputes have worsened in the 2010s, most visibly in the irreconcilable claims on the border islands, the nationalists’ hate movements on both sides of the sea, and the demands for more apologies and compensations.
These deep fissures in Japan’s war memories that I have described are also reflected in scores of national public opinion surveys. For the most part, these reveal a three-way split in the national reckoning with the war legacy, divided in their evaluation of the character and conduct of the war and its consequences.70 They are divided among three answers: (1) the war was bad and should have been avoided; (2) the war was bad but could not have been avoided; and (3) the war was inevitable given the threatening circumstances of the era. This diversity in presuming Japan’s culpability corresponds to the varied memory narratives that will be shown throughout this book. National surveys confirm this trend: a 2006 survey published by the largest Japanese national newspaper Yomiuri for example revealed that one-third (34%) believed the Asia-Pacific War was a war of aggression, while another third (34%) agreed that only the Japan-China War, and not the Pacific War, qualified as a war of aggression. About 10% believed that neither conflict was a war of aggression, while 21% were undecided.71 The fissure is also evident in a 2006 survey by the Asahi newspaper with the second-largest national circulation: a third (31%) of the respondents thought that Japan waged a war of aggression in China, while less than half (45%) believe it was both a war of aggression and a war of self-defense.72 This diversity of views in the defeat culture is shown time and again in opinion polls and national surveys, and tends to hold a steady pattern across generations; they cannot be explained monocausally by generation, gender, or political party affiliation.73
Such divisiveness has its consequences, especially in a culture of defeat: asked whether they trust their political leadership, Japanese public opinion is endemically negative: only 23% of Japanese trusted their political leadership, leaving Japan ranked 127th out of 135 nations in the world.74 At the same time, asked in a comparative survey about whether they “take a positive attitude” toward themselves, the Japanese ranked lowest in self-esteem scores among 53 countries.75 It is not hard to imagine that these overall trends derive in some measure from the negative national memories of a difficult past internalized by those who long to repair and recover from that legacy.
About This Book
Collective memory studies teach us that our social act of remembering is always selective according to different conditions of remembering the past. This book assesses war memories not as fixed recall but as representations of reality that are subjectively constructed in particular present conditions. To assess such conditions of memory making as cultural constructs, it is important to take account of the sentiments, values, and motivations of ordinary people, not only decision-makers and intellectual elites. Accordingly, my analysis explores both producers and consumers of war memory and uses a wide range of sources—from personal testimonies and interviews to popular cultural media material—to explore the variety of ways that Japanese identity is shaped in families, schools, and communities.
Such everyday sentiments are on display in many settings: family kitchens and living rooms, school classrooms, in newspapers, on television, and on the Internet. Examining the popular narratives in these disparate places offers an insight into a wide range of moral values and motivations for remembering. To this end, I analyze the contents of popular narratives that reference the war, defeat, and colonial legacy: newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, best-selling books, high school textbooks, educational cartoons, films, animated films, television documentaries and debates, children’s stories, cram school crib notes, formal and informal speeches, biographical memoirs, Internet sites and blogs, and public and private museum exhibits. I also delve into direct and published interviews, as well as ethnographical fieldwork and focus groups interviews to elicit and decipher the cultural assumptions and values that inform the meaning of the war and the legacy of the defeat. Taking this triangulation approach allows me to consider diverse snapshots of memory communicated in everyday life in the mass media, in school classrooms and at home.76 This analysis focuses on the period 1985 to 2015 and presents a sociological account of how people refashioned and reinscribed the cultural trauma from different perspectives, while negotiating the tension between moral frameworks and emotions in these recent decades. Through this exploration, the study asks whether healing from the scars and escaping from the prison of history can ever be complete, especially if the trauma itself, in the end, is incomprehensible and irreparable.
As a book that assesses Japan’s case in the context of the global “culture of memory,” my analysis also uses a method of shadow comparisons,77 critically applying concepts and ideas generated from works on difficult memory and cultural trauma in other societies. Because the critical work on German memory is wide, varied, and thorough, I draw on it often to illuminate patterns in Japan and to derive insights into meanings by implicit or explicit comparison. In particular, I draw on the works of sociologists, psychologists, and historians of Germany: Aleida Assmann, Bernhard Giesen, Jeffrey Olick, Gabrielle Rosenthal, Dan Bar-On, Robert Moeller, Omar Bartov, Dirk Moses, Konrad Jarausch, and Michael Geyer. Other comparisons that shed light on the Japanese case are studies of post–World War I Turkey, post–Vietnam War America, and postcommunist Central Europe.
This comparative approach allows me to observe the commonalities in the meaning of cultural trauma in different cultures of defeat.78
My sociological approach builds on the work of many others. Among them are the work of American historians of contemporary Japan such as John Dower, Carol Gluck, Alexis Dudden, Laura Hein, Mark Selden, Yoshikuni Igarashi, and Franziska Seraphim, and anthropologists Mariko Tamanoi and Lisa Yoneyama. They have blazed the trail with their close observations of memory making in disparate cultural settings of Japanese society. My work is also informed by the work of Japanese sociologists such as Oguma Eiji, Yoshida Yutaka, Fukuma Yoshiaki, Sato Takumi, Ueno Chizuko, and Shirai Satoshi, and critical scholars of war memory such as Kato Naohiro, Takahashi Tetsuya, and Narita Ryūichi all of whom have illuminated many aspects of Japanese society that are inflected by the negative legacy of war and defeat.
This book is grounded in the epistemological position that the distinction between history and memory is at best blurred,79 and that memory narratives do not render definitive truths about historical events and facts.80 Rather, I see memory narratives as vehicles of communication that reveal the attachments and anxieties of the narrators in negotiating their self-identity. Interpretations of contentious difficult “facts” diverge because people want to make the past more bearable and the present more palatable. This perspective, however, raises the question of how the research can set the parameters for choosing the trauma narratives to examine from a diverse range. In this study, I have selected samples of trauma narratives by assessing their salience, relying on circulation figures, sales figures, popularity rankings, and wide distribution. Another selection criterion was the staying power of the cultural products diffusing the narratives, measured in the number of remakes and types of medium in circulation, reviews, advertising, blogs, and other audience responses. Wherever possible, I have pursued universal sampling as my sampling strategy especially for the newspaper editorials of five national newspapers (Asahi, Yomiuri, Nikkei, Mainichi, and Sankei), series of public testimonies and memoirs, as well as commemoration literatures.
After this introductory chapter, the next chapters describe how the memories of war and defeat are discussed in three areas of everyday life: the family, the popular media, and school. I illustrate a wide range of memory narratives and their narrators in those settings and consider their different national visions.
Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the former soldiers and describes how they tell their stories of their war experience. The cultural trauma has left indelible scars on many of them, and it has impacted how they told their war stories to their children and grandchildren. Surveying 430 cases, I find that many chose to present themselves as powerless victims and used that narrative to repair their biographies. Smaller contingents acknowledged their war responsibility, and fewer still talked of their war exploits. The postwar children and grandchildren, in turn, sought out stories to construct “family albums,” piecing together selected war memories to make coherent family narratives.81 This intergenerational repair project effectively transmitted the cultural trauma of war as something “close to home” rather than a worldwide event.
Chapter 3 describes how Japan remembers the war and the war dead at the annual commemorations on August 15. I show how the political performances and the popular media discourses divide rather than unite the nation over the questions of war guilt and national sacrifice. Surveying the political performances on August 15 from 1985 to 2014, as well as the media discourse surrounding those commemorations in newspaper editorials, television, and film, I find that many of Japan’s memory makers responded positively to the international pressures to right past wrongs in the 1990s, yet faced a severe backlash in the 2000s.82 Thus the impact of the global politics of regret on Japan has been mixed.83
Chapter 4 illustrates how the war is taught to Japan’s school children in the classroom and during school trips. I argue that despite being stereotypically branded by the Western media as attempting to whitewash the past, teaching of war, peace, and national history to Japan’s next generation actually succeeds in raising pacifists. The chapter covers a wide range of teaching material and memorial sites from peace museums across the country to forty-six social studies textbooks, and well-known children’s history comics (manga) series. I argue that that negative emotional memory, especially the fear of repeating violent conflicts, has been used effectively to motivate peace education. A surprising proportion of perpetrator accounts are found in the material on the war that children learn, along with accounts of heroes and victims. Such cultural trauma stories are often transformed into morality tales aimed at preventing a repetition of the national failure.
Chapter 5 considers Japan at the crossroads of becoming a “normal country”—a nation possessing the full military capability to wage war. The post–World War II generation, now two-thirds of the population, must come to many decisions in the increasingly tense and uncertain geopolitics of East Asia. I consider these questions in the international setting where the global movements for redress have intensified scrutiny on Japan’s violent past. I conclude with three strategies of overcoming Japan’s “history problem” at play today that correspond to the three trauma narratives illustrated throughout the book: nationalism, pacifism, and reconciliationism. I focus this discussion on the current dispute about revising the postwar peace constitution that has never been altered and show how the ripples of the past war directly reach decision-making today. Finally, I compare Japan’s case to Germany’s and consider the lessons that may apply transnationally.84
No comments:
Post a Comment