Mixed Memories: Constructions of War Memory at Three Sites in Hawai'i and Japan (original) (raw)
Related papers
Japan's Contested Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II
Social Science Japan Journal, 2008
Japan's Contested Memories: The "Memory Rifts" in Historical Consciousness of World War II. Phillip A. Seaton. London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 258pp. (ISBN 0-415-39915-7) During the past decade or so, a host of public events, media reports and scholarly works that have appeared in regard to Japanese memories of World War Two. Probably the most striking example is the fifty year anniversary of the end of the war that aroused intense interest through films about Pearl Harbor, exhibitions about the dropping of the atomic bombs, the portrayal of the war in textbooks, literary works about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rituals of commemoration for the war dead, or revelations about atrocities committed during the conflict. It is within this context that Seaton's superb book on "Japan's Contested Memories" should be seen. In this volume, Seaton, who is based in Hokkaido University, seeks to show that while intensely debated and challenged, there is an underlying "order" to these memories and the ways in which they are socially generated.
War and Peace: War Memories and Museums in Japan
How is war remembered in public places in Japan? The high profile 'peace' museums of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Yushukan, the museum that is attached to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, have dominated both the English and Japanese language literature about sites of remembrance since the 1990s. The thrust of much of the literature emphasises the divide between Japan's recognition of its place as a victim of atomic bombing in war, and its recognition or denial of its aggression in East and Southeast Asia. In the 21st century, other less well-known public institutions in Japan (Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots, Shokeikan Museum for Wounded Soldiers, Showakan, Okinawa Prefectural Peace Park and Memorial Museum, and Himeyuri Memorial and Museum) have produced different perspectives of Japan's wartime history. By briefly examining these lesser-known museums, we demonstrate how the concept of 'peace' has been recast in various ways to provide legitimating contexts in which to rehabilitate Japanese people's experiences during the war. This research suggests that beyond the binary of 'victim-victimiser' analyses of Japanese war memory there is room for research in this field that recognises and engages the complexity of how Japan's controversial wartime past is presented in the Japanese public domain.
Warring memories: Japan’s battle between remembering and forgetting
2019
In 1945, Japan was bombed into submission by the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This ended a period in Japan's history notorious for aggression, atrocities, and the victimisation of East Asian and captive peoples. For seven decades, the country has navigated through the memories of a traumatic past. This has created a variety of collective memories which have been shaped and reshaped through places, symbols, museums, public debate, and politics. This study investigates the collective memories portrayed at Yasukuni Shrine and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, with attention given to the associated Yūshūkan, and Peace Memorial museums. The two sites present markedly different narratives of the war and show evidence of historical revisionism by the altering of content in order to align with their respective objectives. This has produced significant collective forgetting of the unsavoury aspects to Japan's past, while creating an identity which is closely linked to the notion of nonviolence. Analysis of public debate surrounding Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to Yasukuni in 2013, and President Barack Obama's visit to Hiroshima in 2016, showed that the collective memories represented at each site, while contested, are largely effective in producing a sense of national identity among Japanese people. The two sites thus function in tandem, despite contrasting displays of the war, in their forgetting and eliciting of sympathy and gratitude to the sacrifices of the war dead. While contestation of collective memory remains, the two versions analysed in this study show that they are both significant to the production of pride in being Japanese, and in shaping Japan's internal and external identity.
Remembering Hiroshima: photographs as cultural artifacts and memory sites
Together Apart, Annual Conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ), University of Sydney, 12-14 July, 2012.
The photograph is both text and object. It is a mnemonic device, a trigger for the remembrance and memorialisation of events borne out of direct and indirect experience. Photographs are also memory sites (Nora 1989) that connect the past with the present. In 1947, two years after the atomic bomb exploded over the Japanese city of Hiroshima killing tens of thousands of civilians, the author’s father served in Hiroshima as part of an Australian contingency of the British Commonwealth Occupational Forces (B.C.O.F.) deployed to assist in the rebuilding of the city. The graphic photographs, which depict the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, packaged as souvenirs for the occupying troops have shaped Keep’s memories of this catastrophic event. Using the field of memory studies as a theoretical framework in which to interrogate Keep’s family photographs, this paper examines how these particular photographic artifacts have helped to shape the authors understanding and memories of post-war Hiroshima. Dean Keep’s research is concerned with exploring the nexus between emerging digital technologies and memory/remembrance. Other research areas include mobile media, digital imaging and the production of hybrid narrative forms.
Journal of Next Generation Forum, 2021
This article situates the animated film adaptation In This Corner of the World in a broader cultural context of popular memory and examines the creative process of telling stories of World War II by non-war victim contemporary artists. Contrary to existing research concerning the manga's adaptation and medium specificity, the article builds on the concept of "prosthetic memory" to suggest that the diegetic film re-embodies the Japanese practice of WWII storytelling by personalizing public history and rehistoricizes the truth of Japanese war survivors in a commodified form. The article then undertakes a comparative analysis of the film's depictions and the testimonies of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) to evince the paradigm shift in WWII narratives in Japan.
Cultures of (Dis)remembrance and the Effects of Discourse at the Hiyoshidai Tunnels
Japan Review, 2018
This paper examines the early postwar history of the physical remains of World War II through the example of Keio University’s Hiyoshi Campus. During the war, the Japanese Imperial Navy’s Combined Fleet used this site as their headquarters, and they built a massive underground tunnel system there. Furthermore, after the war, the campus was confiscated and used by the U.S. Occupation Eighth Army until 1949. Yet this history of the Hiyoshi Campus was almost completely forgotten until the late 1980s. This paper argues that the reasons for this lie in the postwar history of the site and the university. Namely, Keio intellectuals in the early postwar sought to portray the school as an historical pioneer of liberal democracy in Japan. Yet in this historical rewriting, instances of liberal cooperation with militarism such as Keio’s wartime past became inconvenient truths, and the physical wartime remains on campus, as visible reminders of this past, became unwanted and undesirable anachronisms. In this way, the paper argues that the forgetting of war sites such as the Hiyoshidai tunnels was, in some ways, a byproduct of the creation of a liberal-democratic postwar Japan.
A lost war in living memory: Japan’s Second World War
European Review, 2003
We examine the strata of memory in Japan’s recollections of the wartime experience and explore the shaping and releasing of memory in Japan, seeking to penetrate and recover individual Japanese experience. Individual memories that seemed tightly contained, when released were told with great emotional intensity and authenticity. That there has been little public discourse does not mean that individual Japanese have forgotten that war, but that the conflict – a war with no generally accepted name or firmly fixed start or end – seems disconnected from the private memories of the wartime generation. Japan was defeated thoroughly and completely, and in the history of memory we see no well-established narrative form for telling the tale of the defeated. In Japan's public memory of the war, War itself is often the enemy, and the Japanese its victims. Such a view is ahistorical and unsatisfactory to nations and peoples throughout Asia and the Pacific. The prevailing myths during Japan&#...
Hiroshima: the Origins of Global Memory Culture, (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
2014
In 1962, a Hiroshima peace delegation and an Auschwitz survivor's organization exchanged relics and testimonies, including the bones and ashes of Auschwitz victims. This symbolic encounter, in which the dead were literally conscripted in the service of the politics of the living, serves as a cornerstone of this volume, capturing how memory was utilized to rebuild and redefine a shattered world. This is a powerful study of the contentious history of remembrance and the commemoration of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in the context of the global development of Holocaust and World War II memory. Emphasizing the importance of nuclear issues in the 1950s and 1960s, Zwigenberg traces the rise of global commemoration culture through the reconstruction of Hiroshima as a 'City of Bright Peace', memorials and museums, global tourism, developments in psychiatry, and the emergence of the figure of the survivor-witness and its consequences for global memory practices.