Against Forgetting: Three Generations of Artists in Japan in Dialogue About the Legacies of World War II 忘却に抗う−−第 二次世界大戦の遺物にとりくむ三世代の日本人芸術家
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Volume 9 | Issue 30 | Number 1 | Article ID 3573 | Jul 20, 2011 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Against Forgetting: Three Generations of Artists in Japan in Dialogue about the Legacies of World War II 忘却に抗う−−第 二次世界大戦の遺物にとりくむ三世代の日本人芸術家 Laura Hein, Rebecca Jennison Against Forgetting: Threeglobally is not surprising.2 They show us how to Generations of Artists in Japan in convey the complex and sometimes messy Dialogue about the Legacies of individuality of actors. When we appreciate the ways that people are simultaneously well- World War II meaning, bigoted, intelligent, obtuse, flawed, internally contradictory, and/or troubled human Rebecca Jennison and Laura Hein beings, it is easier to recognize the individuality Although international consensus has it that of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, while the Japanese people are unusually reluctant to still acknowledging the actions that divided face their own wartime past, this generalization them as groups. Artistic work also directs our has never been entirely true, as regular readers attention to the processes of imagination and to of The Asia Pacific Journal already know. Like affective linking, explaining why some acts of human beings everywhere, since 1945 Japanese historical imagination feel so much more have debated the lessons of war and disagreed satisfying than do others. Finally, identifying about its meaning among themselves. And, these contradictory qualities helps indicate a also like people everywhere, many Japanese standpoint that can make reconciliation regret both official policies and widespread possible. individual behaviors of the past. They not only Of course, the style in which people imagine desire reconciliation with Koreans, Chinese, the past is not the same for everyone. One and other Asians, but also recognize that, as obvious difference is generational. While Japanese, they cannot dictate its terms. Some debates over war remembrance have have already entered into cross-national reverberated through Japanese society at dialogue about the war and the colonial regular intervals ever since 1945, their nature violence that reached its crescendo during the war years. Moreover, precisely because is shifting as the generations of people who reflection on such issues is uncomfortable, they experienced the 1940s “join the great majority” 3 struggle over how to do so, often turning to that will one day claim us all. In many ways, oblique or refracted approaches, what Dora 2010 served as a powerful symbolic reminder Apel calls “the sideways glance,” such as of that generational shift in Japan because so through literary or artistic expression.1 Both many significant twentieth-century events were this ambivalence and these strategies are commemorated— including the 100th human rather than Japanese traits. anniversary of the annexation and colonization of the Korean Peninsula by Japan, the 55th year th Visual artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers since World War II ended, the 60 anniversary have far more experience expressing complex of the beginning of the Korean War and the 10th and contradictory emotions than do historians, anniversary of the 2000 International Women’s so their prominent role in memory studies War Crimes Tribunal.4 In East Asia as 1 9 | 30 | 1 APJ | JF elsewhere, the grey-haired individuals who Marianne Hirsch has written about the testified to their direct personal experiences of differences between acts of remembrance by war and colonial domination have had their say people with first-generation experience of the and now are yielding to people who have no war versus those of their children. She calls choice but to make a larger imaginative leap in this second-generation experience order to understand the wartime past. "postmemory," and also differentiates it from the preoccupations of historians or others Dialogue Across Generations: Individual interested in more far-flung outposts of the memories, Postremembrance, andpast. Difficult experiences–as World War II was Imaginative Reconstruction for nearly everyone in East Asia–mark people in ways that profoundly affect their child-rearing People who lived through the war in Japan need practices.5 Her primary example, Art little prompting to remember how that era Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, smelled, sounded, and felt, as one of us realized brilliantly evokes the ways that Art’s parents’ last year when an older friend casuallyharrowing experiences in occupied Poland and mentioned that she would instantly recognize Auschwitz shaped his identity despite his far the sound of a B-29 plane overhead even more comfortable childhood in New York City. though it had been decades since she heard In the opening pages of that memoir, young Art one. These individuals also carry in their heads expects sympathy when some other kids roller- the internal logic of Japanese society in the skate off without him. Instead, his father stops 1940s. By contrast, the social ethos and sawing a board: “Friends? Your friends? If you institutional environment of the wartime era lock them together in a room with no food for a are so distant now that it is extremely hard to week then you could see what it is, friends!” imagine twenty-somethings of today’s Japan Small wonder that Art feels compelled to conforming to its outmoded expectations. understand the forces that shaped his father’s Young Japanese today—like youngworld view, or to express that quest Americans—can barely fathom many elements artistically.6 of the wartime cognitive universe, such as its rigid class and gender hierarchies or the casual Hirsch’s work has been very influential because daily violence meted out within military ranks. it builds on Freudian theory about how They have no choice but to piece together individuals respond to trauma—through isolated fragments of the past, using a variety unconscious processes of repression and of strategies to shape their images of the war displacement. Properly speaking, years. And, while all generations interpret the “postmemory” refers only to a single historical events of the decades before their generation: the people who pursue birth through assumptions that differ from remembrance in order to make the baffling those of their parents, such shifts are especially conditions of their own upbringing more pronounced when social change is ascomprehensible. Their personal histories momentous and as abrupt as it was for mid- include elements that are completely twentieth century Japanese. irreconcilable with the rest of their lives. The lives of postrememberers are indelibly marked And what of the generation in between, “by traumatic events that can be neither particularly individuals born in the 1940s and understood nor recreated.” In her formulation, 1950s? Although they do not remember the their response to that dilemma is war, they still experienced it in a profound and “postmemory,” which is “a powerful and very distinctive--although indirect--manner asparticular form of memory precisely because its numerous memoirs and commentaries attest. connection to its object or source is mediated 2 9 | 30 | 1 APJ | JF not through recollection but through ansuch as Hirsch and Cathy Caruth remains imaginative investment and creation.”7 Hirsch highly influential precisely because they actually waffles on whether “postmemory” can ground it in Freudian theory.11 extend to a third generation, both in her book and a recent essay, but, either way, her One way to retain their rigorous explanation for contention is that family stories andindividual behavior while opening it out to photographs are the mechanisms by which become a social phenomenon is to treat people reframe the years before their birth as postmemory, like memory itself, as a strategy essential to their identities.8 Some of these that incorporates intergenerational effects may stretch beyond a single generation dialogue—which functions as a kind of talk- but they are surely most powerful for the therapy--as well as an internal psychological children of the people directly traumatized. As process. Depictions of the past frequently she explains, “postmemorial work ….strives to develop out of intergenerational dialogue, reactivate and reembody more distant particularly as the event in question recedes in social/national and archival/cultural memorial time. This is one reason why people so often structures by reinvesting them with resonant only begin talking about the past openly and individual and familial forms of mediation and frequently a decade or more after an important aesthetic expression.”9 Most valuably, she calls event. Hirsch identifies family photographs attention to the profound emotional investment and family stories as key to postremembrance in the past by people too young to remember it but this misdirects attention to the talismanic and explains why this occurs.object when the emotional power comes from Postrememberers feel an intense desire to the process of conveying historical knowledge, make their own sense out of that past to something that artists integrate into the address the profound cognitive dissonance making of new and intensely personal created by growing up in the homes of people talismanic objects in the form of paintings, still responding to already-vanished events. prints, collages, videos, and other art media. The members of the generation that Hirsch, like other memory studies scholars, has remembers World War II across the globe have struggled with how to expand this analysis to embarked on remembrance in