Article Title: the Fifty Year War: Rashomon, After Life, And

ISSN: 1500-0713 ______________________________________________________________ Article Title: The Fifty Year War: Rashomon, After Life, and Japanese Film Narratives as Remembering Author(s): Mike Sugimoto Source: Japanese Studies Review, Vol. VII (2003), pp. 21-41 Stable URL: https://asian.fiu.edu/projects-and-grants/ japan-studies-review/journal-archive/volume-vii-2003/ sugimoto-the-fifty-year-war.pdf The Fifty Year War: Rashomon, After Life, and Japanese Film Narratives of Remembering Mike Sugimoto University of Pugent Sound The end of the twentieth-century coincided with a rush of academic and artistic works focusing upon, appropriately, 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, Rashomon1 and Kore-eda Hirokazu's 1998 After Life.2 I read the Occupation-era film allegorically, as a sign of the ongoing problem concerning acknowledgement of Japanese war responsibility, while later analyzing it philosophically; that is, as an example of an unresolved epistemological crisis in modernity. The contemporary film After Life suggests that, fifty years after Rashomon, the problem of memory remains unresolved as seen in the inability of contemporary Japanese to grapple sufficiently with wartime responsibility. Although both films treat, I believe, 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 narratives--acts of remembering reveals what may be called an epistemology of memory. In short, I believe that the problem of memory posed in the films not only relate to the question of war responsibility, but to larger questions regarding the unstable nature of modern knowledge itself, the relationship between images and history as modern acts of knowing. Stating differently, philosophically speaking, modernity itself may have a “memory problem.” Both films problematize these issues in terms of the possibility or not of film narrative to convey, to visualize, truth content. But first of all, why discuss Rashomon, a film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival over fifty years ago? Following a provocative 1 Directed by Kurosawa Akira. 87 minutes. Daiei Studios, (1950). 2 Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. 118 minutes. Engine Films, (1998). 22 Mike Sugimoto interpretation of the condition of postwar Germany by Eric Santner in his book, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany, I contend that postwar Japan has not yet faced, or yet worked through, its own traumatic loss. Loss here being defined as the sudden rupture of national identity once mobilized for total war under Emperor and imperial ideology (or Nazism and the Hitler cult) in the wake of prosperous, 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 to characterize the split in terms of the ideology of modernization theory, that is, a story of transition from a pr-modern or feudal society to a modern society tied to the transformative agency of democratic capitalism under the United States.3 Within a reading of the famous Freudian text, "Memory and Melancholia,"4 Santner sees loss as distinguished by two experiences labeled as mourning and melancholy (quoting Freud): In mourning it is the world, which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.5 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 experiencing the loss of his or her own control--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 reality of death--can potentially work through the traumatic loss to a state of health. In a word, "successful," mourning. 3 See J. Victor Koschmann's Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1996). 4 Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey London: Hogarth Press, (1953-1974), 14: 244-245. 5 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 246. The Fifty Year War 23 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.6 While I cannot here, 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, also remains in an unresolved melancholic state. And 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 or Germany.7 Allow me now to illustrate from statements reported in the New York Times. The first made by the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishikawa, 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 earthquake8 The term, sangokujin, literally, “third country person,” was coined during the American Occupation to simply 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. 6 Lyotard links this unresolved melancholy philosophically 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. ("Ticket to a New Decor," trans. Brian Massumi and W. G. J. Niesluchowski, in Copyright 1 [Fall, 1997]: 10, pp. 14-15. Originally cited in Santner, 164n 13). 7 Memory studies in the academy have flowed from Jewish studies of the Holocaust to Japanese analysis of war guilt and victimization to now Vietnam studies by American scholars. 8 Howard French, “Tokyo Politician’s Earthquake Drill is Militarist Moment,” New York Times, (September 4, 2000). 24 Mike Sugimoto The second quote was made on May 15th, when then Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori called Japan: a divine nation with the emperor at its center 9 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 Earthquake10 in September of 1923, which leveled Tokyo. 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 and the political alliance with the United States. Prime Minister Mori’s affirmation of the emperor system underscores prewar ideology. Both statements raise concern about the persistent nature of certain prewar social structures which was complicit with those beliefs in the period bracketed as the “postwar.” These statements by professional politicians seriously problematized the notion that the past has been overcome. On the contrary, I would contend that this notion of the past as something to overcome an integral part of modernity which establishes the past as the mise-en-sine or staging of its own legitimacy, ideologically speaking. What this fails to acknowledge is the degree to which modernity and theories of modernization require a certain temporization (religious, irrational, feudal, communal) and spatialization (non-western, the East) of the past, in order to sustain its own representation as the efficient, rational, secular, individuated, techno-scientific fulfillment in the present. 11 I 9 Sonni Efron, “Japan Premier’s Remarks of ‘Divine Nation’ Stir Uproar,” Los Angeles Times, (May 21, 2000). 10 The earthquake was the worst of the modern period, with 100,000 deaths, 550,000 buildings destroyed. See Concise Dictionary of Modern Japan, compiled by Janet E. Hunter Berkeley: University of California Press, (1984), p. 86. 11 This ultimately figures in characterizations of fascism as an insufficiently modernized remnant of a religious past, which was rekindled, rather than understand it as a development of enlightenment rationalism. Because modern discourses on enlightenment and rationalized society marginalize and mutually exclude religious discourses as irrational and, therefore, "pre- The Fifty Year War 25 contend that,

Load more