The Heritage of Resentment and Shame in Postwar Japan
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Volume 15 | Issue 1 | Number 4 | Article ID 4998 | Jan 01, 2017 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus The Heritage of Resentment and Shame in Postwar Japan Jung-Sun Han Abstract long as it is moral.2 This paper focuses on civic activities toAlthough Améry’s point about resentful conserve underground sites that reveal the memories of the past was based on the dark heritage of wartime forced labor in Japan. European Jewish experience of Nazi crimes, the At times collaborating and at other times “retrospective grudge” could be shared by competing with others, various local groups Koreans who experienced wartime injustice seek to bring these shameful heritages to the under Imperial Japan. Marginalized in postwar center of the Japanese memory-scape. In doing reconstruction and development, Koreans in so, these movements challenge Japan’sJapan, some of whom are the decendents of homogenizing national war memories and carve colonial and wartime migrant laborers, have out a democratic public sphere to renegotiate encapsulated their resentments in memories of understanding of the war heritage. the darkness of underground tunnels and shelters built at the end of World War II. Keywords: dark heritage, heritage of resentment, heritage of shame, heritageWhen total war finally reached the Japanese preservation, forced labor, resident Korean home islands in the form of massive air strikes in spring 1945, the nation had already begun to Introduction build countless underground barracks, trenches, bunkers, shelters, and tunnels to Resentment, writes Jean Améry, a victim and house military headquarters, national survivor of Nazi persecution, is an absurd sense institutions and facilities, industrial plants, for it “desires two impossible things: regression ammunition, equipment, and machines, as well into the past and nullification of what 1 as to protect the imperial family. Known as happened.” Yet, the absurd sense of “underground warehouses” (chika sōko), The resentment can play a moral function in that it defies “natural” time-sense. Améry continues: Imperial Army ordered the construction of “underground warehouses” chika( sōko) in Natural consciousness of time actually is rooted Matsushiro (Nagano Prefecture), Asakawa in the physiological process of wound-healing (Tokyo), Rakuten (Aichi Prefecture), Takatsuki and became part of the social conception of (Osaka), and Yamae (Fukuoka Prefecture), to reality. But precisely for this reason it is not name a few places. The Imperial Navy set out only extramoral, but alsoanti moral in to build underground tunnels in Hiyoshi character. Man has the right and the privilege (Kanazawa Prefecture) about a week after the to declare himself to be in disagreement with fall of Saipan in July 1944. When the wartime every natural occurrence, including theDiet passed the “Urgent Dispersal of Plants biological healing that time brings about. What Act” in February 1945 in an attempt to happened, happened. This sentence is just as continuously produce munitions in the face of true as it is hostile to morals and intellect. The US air raids, the result was an “underground moral power to resist contains the protest, the factory boom.”3 A reported 100 underground revolt against reality, which is rational only as aircraft plants alone were built throughout the 1 15 | 1 | 4 APJ | JF Japanese archipelago from late 1944 to the end conveys a literal meaning since these of the war.4 The scale of these underground underground sites were literally dark. For this projects was so extensive that the United purpose, I will first introduce the Japanese States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), grassroots movement to conserve war-related established by the Secretary of War in 1944, sites as the heritage of shame by centering on conducted a “special study” of underground the activities of the Japanese Network to manufacturing projects. According to a USSBS Protect War-Related Sites. Second, I will report, “Because the dispersal of aircraft and examine the civic activities to conserve the engine manufacturing plants to underground heritage of resentments initiated by ethnic locations proved to be far more extensive than Koreans in Japan and responded to by had been suspected, a special study ofconscientious Japanese citizens. In so doing, I underground plants was undertaken by the bring into focus shameful and the resentful Aircraft Division.”5 memories that challenge the tendentious war memories of victimhood in Japanese society.9 In Although the exact number of laborersthe meantime, I also probe the tension between mobilized for the construction of underground the shameful and the resentful heritage to facilities is unknown and the nature of their argue that the places designed to facilitate labor is still fiercely debated, numerousplural remembrance is pivotal in envisaging records, documents, testimonies, and stories historical reconciliation and negotiating make clear that the substantial portion of historical injustices both at subnational and mobilized laborers were Koreans deported from international levels. the peninsula under increasing coercion and were subjected to harsh conditions.6 It is Conserving the Heritage of Shame: The believed that some 700,000 Koreans were Matsushiro Case* recruited or dispatched to Japan between 1939 and 1945. Many of them perished without a The Japanese Network to Protect War-Related trace, while some made their way home after Sites (hereafter, the Network) was formed in Japan’s defeat, and others remained in Japan 1997. Articulated in numerous publications of after the war and became resident Koreans in the Network and by the involved activists and Japan (zainichi).7 scholars, war-related sites refer to “the heritage of shame” and include “the built This paper examines the operational forces and structures and materials that were produced to the social conditions in which the physical execute Japan’s aggressive wars.” The Network legacy of forced labor is transformed into dark limits war-related sites to the buildings, heritage in contemporary Japan. The term dark structures, and materials that were produced heritage is used to convey two metaphorical “from the Meiji period when the modern meanings. On the one hand, the term refers to military system was created to the early Shōwa the “heritage of shame” fu( no bunkazai), period when the Asia-Pacific War was containing the memories of modern Japan’s concluded.” These built structures and sites are imperial wars of aggression and accompanying directly related to “the aggressive wars of wartime atrocities, from which few Japanese Japan in terms of perpetration, suffering, draw pride and most prefer to leave incollaboration, or resistance.” Since most of the oblivion.8 On the other hand, it refers to the wars Japan waged in modern times were fought “heritage of resentment” from which the abroad, these war-related sites exist both in victims of Japanese wartime labor regiment and outside of Japan. As an example of work confront painful past as well as pursue present outside of Japan, in order to investigate the justice. In the meantime, the dark heritage also existence and condition of war-related sites in 2 15 | 1 | 4 APJ | JF China, the Network has carried outconservation of war-related sites are collaborative investigation with Chinesemethodologically tied to the field of archeology, scholars and activists since 1993.10 some professionals in the field were active in the Network from its inception. Actually the The Network strives to differentiate its position need for the “archeology of war-related sites” from that of other efforts to make war-related was pointed out by a scholar named Tōma sites memorials to the war dead by glorifying Shiichi in 1984. Based in Okinawa, the site of their sacrifice for the state. The glorification of the only battleground on Japanese soil during war dead and war, the Network claims, is often WWII, Tōma was deeply troubled by the social carried out at the expense of remembering practices of collecting human remains without civilian sufferings and losses caused by the any reflection on the Battle of Okinawa itself in Japanese state, let alone the suffering caused which more civilians than soldiers perished. In to other Asian people. For example, Kikuchi an article entitled “An Invitation to the Minoru, a working committee member of the Archeology of War-Related Sites,” Tōma called Network, pointed out in his report at the most for archeological research and investigation of recent symposium in 2013 that “most cases of both natural and artificial caves scattered on excavating skeletal remains from underground the island to “re-experience” the Battle of sites in Okinawa have been carried out for the Okinawa.13 This archaeology of war-related sake of memorialization and hardly for the sites became an official sub-discipline of the purpose of returning those remains to the Japanese Archaeological Association at the family members of the deceased.” It isAssociation’s Okinawa symposium in 1997.14 necessary to redefine the purpose of retrieving human remains while simultaneouslyThe Network’s first national symposium took “investigating the historical reasons for the place in Matsushiro, Nagano Prefecture in existence of underground sites, and the1997. Matsushiro is both symbolically and conditions of remains at the time ofpractically an important site in the making of excavation.” For this purpose, he calls for the dark heritage in general and of the continuous interdisciplinary collaboration Network in particular.