Imag(In)Ing the War in Japan Brill’S Japanese Studies Library

Imag(in)ing the War in Japan Brill’s Japanese Studies Library Edited by Joshua Mostow (Managing Editor) Caroline Rose Kate Wildman Nakai VOLUME 34 Imag(in)ing the War in Japan Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film Edited by David Stahl and Mark Williams LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010 On the cover: Girl with skull (Nagasaki, August 10, 1945), Yamahata Yōsuke, courtesy of Yamahata Shōgo/IDG Films. Th is book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. Imag(in)ing the war in Japan : representing and responding to trauma in postwar literature and fi lm / by Mark Williams [editor]. p. cm. — (Brill’s Japanese studies library) ISBN 978-90-04-18298-1 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Japanese literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Japan—Literature and the war. 3. Motion pictures—Japan—History—20th century. 4. World War, 1939–1945— Japan—Motion pictures and the war. 5. Psychic trauma in literature. 6. Psychic trauma in motion pictures. I. Williams, Mark. PL726.67.W65I43 2010 895.6’09005—dc22 2009052564 ISSN: 0328-6512 ISBN: 978 9004 18298 1 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Th e Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Brill has made all reasonable eff orts to trace all right holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these eff orts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to Th e Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands CONTENTS Acknowledgments ............................................................................... vii Introduction ......................................................................................... 1 David C. Stahl & Mark B. Williams Chapter One Catastrophe, Memory, and Narrative: Teaching Japanese and Jewish Responses to Twentieth-Century Atrocity ............................................................................................. 27 Alan Tansman Chapter Two Murakami Haruki and the War Inside ................ 53 Jay Rubin Chapter Th ree To Make Gods and Demons Weep: Witnessing the Sublime in “Death in Midsummer” and “Patriotism” ...................................................................................... 75 Dennis Washburn Chapter Four Writing the Traumatized Self: Tenkō in the Literature of Shiina Rinzō ............................................................. 105 Mark Williams Chapter Five Okuizumi Hikaru and the Mystery of War Memory ............................................................................................ 137 Angela Yiu Chapter Six Victimization and “Response-ability”: Remembering, Representing, and Working Th rough Trauma in Grave of the Firefl ies .................................................................. 161 David C. Stahl Chapter Seven Fractious Memories in Medoruma Shun’s Tales of War ..................................................................................... 203 Davinder L. Bhowmik vi contents Chapter Eight Framing the Ruins: Th e Documentary Photographs of Yamahata Yōsuke (Nagasaki, August 10, 1945) ................................................................................................. 229 Mark Silver Chapter Nine Responsibility and Japanese Literature of the Atomic Bomb .................................................................................. 269 Karen Th ornber Chapter Ten Of Brutality and Betrayal: Youthful Fiction and the Legacy of the Asia Pacifi c War .............................................. 303 Christine E. Wiley Chapter Eleven Contesting Traumatic War Narratives: Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam .............................. 327 William Ashbaugh Index ..................................................................................................... 355 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Th e editors acknowledge with gratitude the following contributions that helped defray the costs of publication for this volume: School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds, which covered the cost of indexing; and Harpur College of Arts and Sciences, Binghamton University, which covered the cost of photograph reproduction. Th ey would also like to thank Naomi Williams, who created the Index, their anonymous reviewers, whose constructive comments and suggestions contributed greatly to the fi nal form of the work, and various colleagues at Brill who helped bring the book to publication in an effi cient, timely manner. INTRODUCTION David C. Stahl and Mark B. Williams “To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Caruth 1995: 4–5). “Representation is cognition” (Davis 2001: 5). “Th is response, this response-ability, is what I wish to call . conscience in its social form” (Des Pres 1976: 46). Introduction It is surely a truism that the contribution of art to the constitution, integration and comprehension of traumatic historical events has yet to be suffi ciently acknowledged, articulated or realized. In Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan, for example, Ernestine Schlant observes that [p]oliticians and political scientists, economists, journalists, opinion makers, and poll takers all form their conclusions according to some ‘objective’ criteria, but rarely, if ever, is literature consulted. Yet literature is the seismograph of a people’s dreams and nightmares, hopes and apprehensions . literary truth oft en goes deeper than political or eco- nomic analysis, and it refl ects the conditions and values of the society under which it was created (Schlant 1991: 1). Historians could arguably be added to Schlant’s list of those who, all too oft en, fail to “consult” literature—or fi lm for that matter—in pro- ducing their narratives of traumatic events and experiences. In fact, the undervaluation and neglect of artistic works by historians, political scientists, economists, journalists etc. help explain why so many con- stitutive elements of the Asia Pacifi c War (e.g., the Nanjing atrocities, ‘comfort women’, Hiroshima) remain controversial and insuffi ciently fathomed to this day. According to Walter Davis, traumatic events and experiences must be constituted before they can be assimilated, integrated and under- stood (Davis 2003: 142). In which case, what constituent elements of trauma are ‘missing’ or under-represented in conventional historical 2 david c. stahl and mark b. williams accounts? Th is question cuts to the heart of the matter, because what is excluded from public memory and consciousness—primary aff ects, embodied, individualized experience, psychodynamics, contingency, ideological critique—can be as signifi cant, if not more so, than what is included. Over-reliance on ‘objective’ investigation, logic and rational analysis of carefully vetted ‘historical facts’ oft en results in the traumatic stories of the past being only partially told. Contemporary scholars such as Dominick LaCapra, John Dower and Walter Davis insist that emotion is integral to the traumatic historical experience and its understanding. Dower, for instance, writes that vengeance and racial hatred were powerful sentiments that shaped the conduct of the war on both sides, and to pretend otherwise is dishonest. Sheer visceral hatred drives people at war every bit as much as valor, every bit as much as rationality, every bit as much as patriotism, loyalty, or sense of duty (Dower 1996: 86). Drawing upon their formidable powers of intuition and imagination to create potent, aff ect-charged forms and images of extreme historical violence, psychological damage and ideological contradiction, artists enable their audiences to virtually engage, internalize, ‘know’ and respond to trauma in concrete, human terms. Much of importance about the War has been systematically sup- pressed, ignored, denied, distorted, avoided, naturalized, neutralized, silenced and rendered ‘taboo’ in public, national and international discourse. Serious artists—both survivor-narrators and those with no direct experience of the deadly confl ict at home or abroad—use not only language, but also image to help constitute dissociated and mar- ginalized historical realities and, in so doing, make it possible for them to be recognized, worked over, worked through, comprehended and responded to. Such artistic representations of the brutal, disavowed actualities of the belligerent past, moreover, have profound ramifi ca- tions for contemporary conceptualizations of past, current and future identity, politics and action. In this sense, art serves as the “conscience of its community” (Davis 2007: 7). With the aforementioned issues, dynamics and interrelationships in mind, we have entitled this volume Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film. introduction

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