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Hiroshima Traces
Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory
By Lisa Yoneyama UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 1999 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-91489-6
CHAPTER 1
Taming the Memoryscape
"Will it make me forget?" "No, but it will make you not mind remembering." Logan's Run (1976)
"What film are you playing in?" "A film about Peace. What else do you expect them to make in Hiroshima except a picture about Peace?" Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1961)
In 1989 the city of Hiroshima observed two commemorative events. The centennial celebrating the municipal administration's establishment marked the city's official incorporation into the modern regime during the Meiji era (1868–1912). The other event, the quadricentennial of the construction of Hiroshima Castle, commemorated an achievement that was understood to have paved the way for the city's development as an early modern castle town. The city announced that the year indicated a "turning point" (fushime), a marker that would inaugurate a new historical era. Numerous corporate and administrative events and projects were planned in order to celebrate this year of special significance.
An automobile company, for example, proposed to erect a spectacular monument. The "Peace Tower," as it was initially named, was to be the world's tallest tower; it would be marveled at as the representation of a new Hiroshima, "a symbol of akarusa (brightness and cheerfulness) and local prosperity." The design included "a light of peace" to be placed at about the same level as the bomb's explosion. At ground level, there was to be an entertainment center accommodating a shopping arcade, a festival plaza, and an international youth center. Responding to criticisms that the plan would obliterate the history of the atom bomb, a company executive defended the project: "We certainly do not mean to deny the Atom Bomb Dome. But isn't it about time to pursue not only the misery but also the pleasures of peace (heiwa no tanoshisa)?"
Any events or projects that take place within Hiroshima's public space are apparently preordained by history to embrace the ideal of "world peace." Yet the call for peace can be overwhelming. The globally disseminated slogan "No more Hiroshimas" has indeed become invaluable symbolic capital. It has endowed the city with a historical authority that is internationally acknowledged, as is the unassailable moral reason for such a call. But "No more Hiroshimas" invokes the city only as an antithesis. That this "mecca" of peace pilgrimages is simultaneously the site of the world's first atomic destruction has long entrapped city planners in a deep dilemma. Other tourist cities unabashedly commodify their names with familiar phrases like "I love New York" or "I love Kyoto"; why must the identity of this city rest on self-negation? Why must the city refrain from advertising itself with the simple slogan: "I love Hiroshima"?
This chapter explores the spatial politics of taming Hiroshima memories. We will analyze the production of "bright and cheerful peace" (akarui heiwa)—as opposed to the "dark" memories of the war and the bomb—through a municipal festival, inner-city and waterfront redevelopment projects, tourism promotion, and other corporate events such as the International Exposition. These examples illuminate the trajectories of memories, the processes through which a landscape of death is being converted into one of opulence, seductiveness, and comfort.
The taming of memory that can be observed in the city's redevelopment projects reveals local mediations and manifestations of transnational as well as national structural forces. The cultural processes we find in Hiroshima's urban renewal, such as the commodification and flattening out of history through tourist appropriations and an accelerated nostalgia for the authentic and the real, cannot be discussed without examining the global condition of advanced capitalism. At the same time, the enactment of a series of municipal planning efforts can be traced back to the national government's advocacy of the "age of localism" (chiho no jidai) in the 1970s. The various regional communities' attempts at infrastructural rebuilding, for which they sought guidance and financial aid from the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, often hampered efforts to recuperate local autonomy from metropolitan influences. The corporate and governmental joint production of the municipal festival, examined in detail below, illustrates how the category "citizens" (shimin), which in the 1960s had constituted an oppositional subjectivity of autonomous and critically engaged urban and suburban dwellers, has become grossly corporatized, at least within prevailing representations of the city and its history.
The chapter further traces a more recent rearticulation of Hiroshima's local history within the 1980s national milieu that was encapsulated in the phrase "the age of culture" (bunka no jidai). Under the aegis of late prime minister Ohira Masayoshi's cabinet, corporate and other institutions with nationalistic tendencies began to marshal the social science discourse of Nihonjinron (Japanology) into corporate and academic co-productions of knowledge about "Japaneseness." Scientifically authenticated observations about Japanese culture as unique, timeless, and politically inert were disseminated and treated as if those characteristics were constitutive of the society that had produced one of the world's most affluent economies. The engineering of "bright Hiroshima" is fully imbricated in the cultural forces of the political economy, both transnational and national.
REMAPPING HISTORY
The 1980s' refashioning of national as well as regional images occurred at a time of general consensus that the country had been experiencing what were often labeled postindustrial or post-Fordist global trends. A 1988 proposal by an inquiry commission proffered the vision of Hiroshima as an "International Peace and Cultural City."7 Originally outlined in 1970, the proposal was restated so that the city might establish a municipal environment that fully anticipated features of the "coming new age," taking into account further advances in internationalization, high technology, high-level information systems, the overall aging of society, and what it called "diversification of individuals' values." The making of Hiroshima into a "messe (trade show and market) and convention city," or messe konbenshon shiti, was confirmed as the most desirable objective for future development. In order to achieve this goal the city urged the rapid "internationalization" of the city and its people, further technological advancement, and improvements in its ability to dispatch "higher quality" information. These guidelines—Hiroshima's attempt to carve out a new regional identity in the rapidly approaching new century—were the municipal government's response to the central government's promotion of the "age of localism" in the 1970s and the "age of culture" in the 1980s.
The dazzling images of the new age, embellished by "internationalization," "high technology," "high-level information society," or trade shows and conventions—almost every element of the late capitalist urban desire was included—were exploited in Hiroshima's late-twentieth-century city planning. These concepts serve as tantalizing and sweeping images that are both descriptive and prescriptive, providing urban planners with everything from necessary causes, motives, and future goals to the means with which to achieve what is to come. Yet Hiroshima differs significantly from other Japanese cities in one important respect: there, urban planners have had to negotiate the signs of peace and late capitalist prosperity with the memory of the atomic destruction.
Such negotiations are not simple. The Hiroshima prefectural government held a "Sea and Island Exposition" to coincide with the centennial of the municipality, and a city official who was centrally involved in its production explained to me that he did not necessarily wish to exploit the familiar notion of Hiroshima as a sacred site for peace when advertising the Expo. He put it bluntly:
Peace is too often associated with the atomic bomb, and the Expo should not offer an uptight (katai) image—it must be a festive occasion, a matsuri. I would rather like people to think about peace at the Peace Memorial Park; and at the Expo, people should genuinely enjoy themselves.... We cannot forever rely on the Atom Bomb Dome or Peace Memorial Park. We are aiming to get rid of the gloominess (kurasa). It is not desirable to bring in any political color; for people are allergic to it.
Thus, even as he identifies the city as the site for peace, he displays a profound desire to avoid remembering it as the site of atomic annihilation. The statement of this administrator, who has been involved in a number of city cultural projects, betrays the powerful associations that connect the bomb, signs of peace, and oppositional politics. It also reveals the strategies by which he and other urban planners have been and will be attempting to reconcile images of peace and the bomb with the city's new features. To be sure, the official was not dismissing as insignificant the tourists who visit Hiroshima to at least "think about peace." Most who have been engaged in city planning do indeed acknowledge that artifacts and monuments of the past, including the Atom Bomb Dome and Peace Memorial Park, are valuable resources. But his statement does suggest a spatializing strategy whereby visitors might be channeled onto different urban topographies that are defined by dissonant temporalities.
While the strategy outlined by the city administrator was to avoid "political color" by simply suppressing the concept of peace in promotional campaigns, other urban planning and tourism projects have sought to change the texture of the concept of peace itself. The meanings of the new sites that signify a "bright" Hiroshima, for instance, were produced in opposition to the mnemonic sites associated with the atom bomb. According to the city's Office of Tourism, the new Hiroshima Contemporary Museum was deliberately constructed to represent the future, bright and full of potential, not the dark and ghastly past. A contemporary museum of art is also considered to be a prerequisite for any world-class urban metropolis, along with a convention center, subway system, and city university. "If other cities [such as Kyoto or Nara] dwell upon tradition and historical heritage, we will advertise ourselves with everything that is new," explained a city official at the Office of Tourism.
Although some have been troubled by the move to exploit history as a new image for the city, others have apparently succeeded in excavating Hiroshima's past without summoning memories of the war and the atom bomb. A tourist pamphlet demonstrates how memory of the atom bomb has become decentered in recent representations of history. On the second page, headlined "Historical Fugue," are pictures of Hiroshima Castle and several temples. The text reads: "High waves called 'the Trends of the Age' have rolled over Hiroshima, as they have in other places. These historic buildings, still standing, have witnessed history itself, and can tell us its meaning over the ages." While remaining uninformed about the atom bomb's complete destruction of the castle, tourists will "breathe the great passage of time in such historic places."
Of course, some people questioned the forgetfulness that accompanied the manufacturing of romantic nostalgia for the castle. The castle, which had provided the nucleus for Hiroshima's development as a town in early modern Japan, was selected by the Meiji government as the location for its military headquarters during the 1894 Sino-Japanese War. This war is often considered to be the initial act of aggression in modern times that set the stage for Japan's subsequent colonial and military invasion of northeast China. After the war ended in Japan's victory, the castle became an important national site commemorating Emperor Meiji's stay in Hiroshima as commander in chief. For those who problematize the city's militarization during the early twentieth century—the period when Hiroshima flourished as a "military capital" (gunto)—the castle symbolizes the unquestionable causal link between the prewar development of the city as a major military center and its subsequent atom bombing. They also point out that military and imperial symbols continue to exist on the castle grounds even today. These include the Hiroshima National Defense Shrine (Gokoku Jinja), where the war dead are enshrined as deities, and other monuments that glorify war criminals and celebrate the war of invasion. For these observers, the castle is an unsettling mnemonic site, testimony to a failure to reconcile memories of colonialism and modernity with the nation's mainstream historiography. Yet for the promoters of tourism, and perhaps for most visitors, the Sino-Japanese War and prewar Japanese militarism belong to a now distant past. For them, these memories have been transformed into recollections remote enough to be summoned with nostalgia and even romance.
The visualization of Hiroshima that is created by particular styles of writing used to represent the city's name can also help decenter atom bomb memories within the official cityscape. The simplified kanji (Chinese ideographs) dating from the postwar era that can be employed to write "Hiroshima," and that are most commonly used in Japan today, are the most mundane form; they elicit a rather prosaic image of the city. Whereas this "Hiroshima" posits simply a geographical place, substituting the anachronistic old style of kanji suggests an old castle town and the prosperous city of late-nineteenth- and not late-twentieth-century modernity. But there is a third possibility: in tourist and municipal events, the hiragana syllabary has increasingly come into use. "Hiroshima" in hiragana symbols, with their rounded and soft curves, constructs a new, affable signifier saturated with images of the nurturing hometown, or furusato. Because hiragana is the most rudimentary form of syllabary one learns in acquiring the language, it may best convey the recently commodified notions of furusato—the motherly and domestic space of infantile innocence and nurture.
Yet "Hiroshima" has also often been written with katakana, the phonetic symbol system that is used mainly for transliterating foreign words. "Hiroshima" in katakana appears most frequently in the discourse of peace and antinuclearism; one of its original uses was to transliterate the English slogan "No more Hiroshimas." This "Hiroshima" stands for abstractions directly related to the specific historical moment of the city's bombing. It encompasses prayers for those killed by the atom bomb, peace oaths, and protests against nuclear war and violence. We should also note that Hara Tamiki, the writer who committed suicide on hearing that President Truman had considered using nuclear weapons during the Korean War, deliberately and strikingly adopted katakana in an important part of Natsu no hana (Summer Flowers), one of the earliest literary representations of Hiroshima's atomic destruction. Hara's narrator/protagonist, who believed that the sights of the immediate aftermath of atomic destruction most closely resembled "surrealist paintings," opted to compose his poem in katakana. Katakana can thus convey a sense of urgency and shattering disintegration, of something outside the everyday. It also intimates Hiroshima's cosmopolitan qualities. But precisely because it conjures up such powerful visual images of the past, "Hiroshima" in katakana effects alienation. As a sign of antiwar and antinuclear ideals, it generates inappropriate images for the city in the "age of localism" because it is too distanced from the mundane local community.
The Motomachi redevelopment project offers a useful example of how the castle's image has been appropriated. The project, initiated by a recently privatized telecommunication company, celebrated both the four-hundred-year-old castle town and the high-tech megalopolis of the twenty-first century. A close look at advertising for the project reveals the ways in which marginalization of atom bomb memories can occur through the self-exoticization of urban space.
Not surprisingly, the young employees of a real estate corporation responsible for promoting the Motomachi redevelopment project explained to me that publicizing the project was difficult because they could conceive of "nothing representative of Hiroshima other than the notion of peace"; moreover, "there haven't been any nice recent images associated with the Motomachi district." In the 1950s and the early 1960s, this stretch of riverbank—an area that the media once notoriously labeled "the atom bomb slum" district—was crowded with the temporary and illegal residences of war survivors, the economically disadvantaged, and people who had been excluded from the city's postwar housing projects. The area's distant past was reexcavated in the hopes of displacing this prevailing image. Street murals, for instance, depicted everyday scenes from the eighteenth-century castle town. To represent Motomachi's more recent history, anecdotes about the introduction of electricity, telephones, and locomotives—romantic signs of the late nineteenth century's "Civilization and Enlightenment Era" (bunmei kaika)—proliferated, while there was no acknowledgment of the military uses to which the castle and nearby compounds had been put.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hiroshima Traces by Lisa Yoneyama. Copyright © 1999 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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