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JAPAN STUDIES REVIEW VOLUME SEVEN 2003 a Publication of the Southern Japan Seminar and Florida International University JAPAN STUDIES REVIEW VOLUME SEVEN 2003 A Publication of the Southern Japan Seminar and Florida International University CONTENTS Editor’s Introduction i Re: Subscriptions, Submissions and Comments iii ARTICLES The Fifty-Year War: Rashomon, After Life, and Japanese Film Narratives of Remembering Mike Sugimoto 1 The Tanka Poetry of Yosano Akiko: Transformation of Tradition Through the Female Voice Harriet D. Grissom 21 Civil Servant or Obedient Servant? Ideal(ized) Officials in 16th Century Japan Ronald K. Frank 33 The Farce of the “Great Russian Salvation Tour”: The Legacy of Aum Shinrikyo in Mother Russia Daniel A. Metraux 47 Anime and Historical Inversion in Miyazaki Hayao’s Princess Mononoke John A. Tucker 65 BOOK REVIEWS Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to 1930s By Elise K. Tipton and John Clark Reviewed by Scott P. O’Bryan 103 A Bilingual Guide to the Japanese Economy By NHK International Reviewed by Kiyoshi Kawahito 106 Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyo By Ian Reader Reviewed by Daniel A. Metraux 108 Toyota-shiki Saikyono Keiei: Naze Toyota wa Kawaritsuzukeru no ka (The Toyota Style of Strongest Management: Why Toyota Keeps Changing) By Shibata, Masaharu and Hideharu Kaneda Reviewed by Kinko Ito 112 Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism By Richard M. Jaffe Reviewed by Steven Heine 115 Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan By Herbert P. Bix and Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912 By Donald Keene Reviewed by John A. Tucker 117 CONTRIBUTORS/EDITORS THE FIFTY-YEAR WAR: RASHOMON, AFTER LIFE, AND JAPANESE FILM NARRATIVES OF REMEMBERING Mike Sugimoto University of Puget Sound The end of the twentieth-century coincided with a rush of academic and artistic works focusing upon, appropriately enough, the theme of memory and commemoration, in particular of the key events surrounding World War II, such as the Holocaust and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. This paper examines questions concerning war memory—both individual and collective—as they are presented in the 1950 Kurosawa Akira film classic, Rashomon,1 and Kore-eda Hirokazu’s 1998 After Life.2 I first consider the Occupation-era films allegorically, as a sign of the ongoing problem concerning acknowledgement of Japanese responsibility for World War II, and then go on to analyze them philosophically; that is, as examples of an unresolved epistemological crisis in modernity. The recent film After Life suggests that, fifty years after Rashomon, the problem of memory remains a major concern as reflected in the inability of contemporary Japanese to grapple with the issue of wartime responsibility. Although I believe that both films treat the theme of war and memory rather directly, I examine their narrative forms as a sign of their philosophic significance, in other words, the ways in which the films’ structure—as film narrative—expresses remembering and reveals what may be called an epistemology of memory. In short, I maintain that the problem of memory posed in these films not only relates to the question of war guilt, but to larger questions regarding the unstable nature of modern knowledge and the relationship between images and history as modern acts of knowing. Stating this differently, philosophically speaking, modernity itself may have a “memory problem.” Both films problematize these issues by raising the question of whether it is possible for film narrative to convey and to visualize the content or substance of truth. 1 Rashomon, Dir. Kurosawa Akira, Daiei Studios, 1950. 2 After Life, Dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Engine Films, 1998. 2 MIKE SUGIMOTO But first of all, why discuss Rashomon, a film that premiered at the Venice Film Festival over fifty years ago? Following a provocative interpretation of the condition of postwar Germany by Eric Santner in his book, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany),3 I contend that Japan, since the war, has not yet faced and worked through its own sense of traumatic loss. Loss here is defined as the sudden rupture of national identity once mobilized for a total war effort under the emperor and imperial ideology (as in the case of Nazism and the Hitler cult) in the wake of a prospering postwar society. In the case of Japan, the prewar/postwar divide marks a transformation yet to be adequately understood, despite the massive efforts of social scientists and Occupation policy theorists. Conventional theories characterize the split in terms of the ideology of modernization theory as a story of transition from a pre-modern or feudal society to a modern society tied to the transformative agency of democratic capitalism under the sway of the United States.4 Within a reading of the famous Freudian text, “Memory and Melancholia,”5 Santner distinguishes two types of experience of loss that are labeled “mourning” and “melancholy” by citing Freud: In mourning it is the world, which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.6 Although mourning and melancholy are ultimately seen as extreme ends of the same pole and are not mutually exclusive, the key difference is that, in mourning there is an awareness of separation between the individual and the lost object, whereas in melancholy separation was never sufficiently established. Thus, the melancholic subject, in experiencing loss, is primarily feeling a lack of his or her own self-control, or what Freud characterizes as a kind of narcissism. In contrast, the subject in mourning, having come to terms with genuine loss and separation—for example, the 3 Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 4 See J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 5 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), vol. 14, pp. 244-245. 6 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 246. THE FIFTY-YEAR WAR 3 reality of death—can potentially work through the traumatic loss to result constructively in a state of health. In a word, there are examples of “successful” mourning. The melancholic subject, on the other hand, continues to imagine a unity with the lost object. The object may be empirically gone, but it never really existed as a separate object or entity to begin with; thus the loss results in an unresolved melancholic state.7 While I cannot take the time to further elucidate Santner’s psychoanalytic reading, I would simply suggest that war events and war responsibility also remain problematic in the case of Japan, which arguably stands in a state of unresolved melancholy. Of course, the remembering of war-related events, such as the Japanese-American internment or atrocities committed by United States soldiers in Korea, are problems not limited to Japan and Germany.8 Allow me now to illustrate the Japanese condition with statements reported in the New York Times. The governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishikawa, made the first comment on April 10, 2000, in an address to the Ground Self-Defense Forces (SDF): Atrocious crimes have been committed again and again by sangokujin and other foreigners. We can expect them to riot in the event of a disastrous earthquake.9 The term, sangokujin, literally “third country person,” was coined during the American Occupation to refer to those in Japan who were not Japanese or of the Allied Forces. It later became an insult used by xenophobic Japanese and, in this case, was used in reference to immigrants. The second 7 Lyotard links this unresolved melancholy, philosophically speaking, to the condition of postmodernism: “Anamnesis constitutes a painful process of working through, a work of mourning, for the attachments and conflicting emotions...We have only gotten as far as a vague, apparently inexplicable, end-of-the-century melancholy,” in “Ticket to a New Decor,” trans. Brian Massumi and W. G. J. Niesluchowski, in Copyright 1/10 (1997): pp. 14-15. Originally cited in Eric Santner, Stranded Objects, p. 164 n.13. 8 Memory studies in the academy have flowed from Jewish studies of the Holocaust to Japanese analysis of war guilt and victimization to more recent Vietnam studies by American scholars. 9 Howard French, “Tokyo Politician’s Earthquake Drill is Militarist Moment,” New York Times (September 4, 2000). 4 MIKE SUGIMOTO quote was made on May 15 of the same year, when then Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori called Japan “a divine nation with the emperor at its center.”10 Both of these statements are shocking, although not entirely unusual because they demonstrate the ongoing tenacity of beliefs characteristic of prewar ultra-nationalism. The first example resurrects pernicious lies regarding Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake in September 1923, which leveled Tokyo.11 Rumors that Koreans had poisoned well water and had set fires incited vigilante groups to lynch hundreds of innocent Koreans living in Japan. When Governor Ishikawa used the term, he infused a contemporary anxiety with a prewar fabrication, thereby continuing the legacy of the prewar imperial domination of East Asia, although this time determined from the position of postwar economic success coupled with a political alliance with the United States. Prime Minister Mori’s affirmation of the emperor system also underscores prewar ideology. Both statements raise concern about the persistent nature of certain prewar social structures that remain complicit with beliefs in the period bracketed as “postwar.” The above statements by professional politicians call into question the notion that the past has been overcome. On the contrary, I contend that the very notion of the past as something to be overcome is an integral part of modernity, which establishes the past as the mise-en-sine or staging of its own legitimacy, ideologically speaking.
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