Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s)
472
Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s)
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Overview
Firmly based on the insight that memory is always mediated and that the past is not a stable object, the volume demonstrates that we can intervene positively yet critically in the recovery and reinterpretation of events and experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of the past. The contributors—an international list of anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, literary scholars, and activists—show how both dominant and subjugated memories have emerged out of entanglements with such forces as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism. They consider both how the past is remembered and also what the consequences may be of privileging one set of memories over others. Specific objects of study range from photographs, animation, songs, and films to military occupations and attacks, minorities in wartime, “comfort women,” commemorative events, and postwar activism in pursuing redress and reparations.
Perilous Memories is a model for war memory intervention and will be of interest to historians and other scholars and activists engaged with collective memory, colonial studies, U.S. and Asian history, and cultural studies.
Contributors. Chen Yingzhen, Chungmoo Choi, Vicente M. Diaz, Arif Dirlik, T. Fujitani, Ishihara Masaie, Lamont Lindstrom, George Lipsitz, Marita Sturken, Toyonaga Keisaburo, Utsumi Aiko, Morio Watanabe, Geoffrey M. White, Diana Wong, Daqing Yang, Lisa Yoneyama
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822325642 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press Books |
| Publication date: | 06/21/2001 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 472 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.13(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Geoffrey M. White is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i, Senior Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, and author of Identity Through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society.
Lisa Yoneyama is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Japanese Studies at University of California, San Diego and author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory.
Read an Excerpt
Perilous Memories
The Asia-Pacific War(s)Duke University Press
Copyright © 2001 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2564-2
Chapter One
Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment MARITA STURKEN
What would the construction of history be without the occasion of the anniversary? Time is marked in increments, each signaling a collective and institutional desire to fix history in place, declare it stable, coherent, and resolved. Some anniversaries speak louder than others, and the fiftieth anniversary of an event speaks perhaps most dramatically of all: fifty years, representing half a century, a time when, unlike the hundredth anniversary, many participants are still alive, reflecting on the meaning of their lives. In the context of the historical anniversary, the conflict between the desire for history as a means of closure and memory as a means for personal and cultural catharsis is revealed.
In the years 1994 and 1995, the unfolding of history was heavily marked, and memories were called on, retold, and dramatically reenacted. The fiftieth anniversaries of the end of World War II in Europe, the end of the Asia-Pacific War, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occasioned a broad array of memory rituals and acts of remembrance-of atonements for war activities and defiant reiterations of wartime rhetoric, each with conflicting agendas. In thereconsideration of the war's meaning, memories were conjured to justify arguments both for and against the war's actions; they were both subsumed within and entangled with official narratives of history.
The tension between memory and history is an active process that moves both ways: from memory to history as well as from history to memory. Thus, whereas the memories of survivors can become part of the texts of history, historical narratives can often reshape personal memories. The process of history making is highly complex, one that takes place in the United States through a variety of cultural arenas, including the media, Hollywood narrative films, and museums in addition to the academy. This means that memories, artifacts, images, and events often get marked as historical without the aid of historians. Rather than positing memory and history as oppositional, as they are often described, I consider them to be entangled, each pulling forms from the other. However, it is often politically important to mark when distinctions can be made between them.
When personal memories are deployed in the context of marking the anniversary of historical events, they are presented as either the embodied evidence of history or as evidence of history's failures. Survivors return to the sites of their war experience; they place their bodies within the discourse of remembering to either arm history's narratives or to declare them incomplete, incapable of conjuring their experience. They represent a very particular form of embodied memory. History functions much more smoothly in the absence of survivors, and survivors are often dissenting voices to history's narratives, but history making also accords to them a very particular authority as authentic experience.
At the same time, the tension of history and memory problematizes this very question of experience. The original experiences of memory are irretrievable; we cannot ever "know" them except through memory remains. Memories are narratives that are told and retold, reenacted and reimaged. Memory is ontologically fluid and memories constantly subject to rescripting and fantasy. This does not mean that we cannot address issues of authenticity and accuracy in memory, but that we must foreground memory's relationship to desire and its political nature. Indeed, what memories tell us, more than anything, is about the stakes held by individuals and institutions in what the past means.
In this essay, I address the question of personal memory, history, and cultural memory in the context of the anniversary of the Asia-Pacific War by examining a historical event that has spoken its presence through its absent representation: the internment of mainland Japanese Americans in camps during the war. I have chosen to write this as a form of dialogue with the videotape History and Memory by the American videomaker Rea Tajiri. Tajiri's reconstruction of her family's memories of the internment camps speaks in compelling ways about the role of the camera image in the production of history and memory, and remembering in the absence of memory. Through Tajiri's work, I examine what it means in the tangle of history and memory to render the internment visible. (All of the illustrations in this essay are taken from History and Memory.)
The Image As History
In the intersecting arenas of personal memory, cultural memory, and history, in which shared memories and memory objects can move from one realm to another, shifting meaning and context, the camera image-photograph, film, and video/television-plays a very particular role. Images have profound capacities to create, trouble, and interfere with our memories, as individuals and as a nation. Hollywood narrative film images often reenact and subsume documentary images, which can in turn subsume personal memories and images. For instance, for many World War II veterans, Hollywood World War II movies have become their memories, subsuming their personal images into a general script. The relationship of the camera image to memory and history, moreover, is one of contradiction. On one hand, camera images can embody and create memories; on the other hand, they have the capacity, through the power of their presence, to obliterate other, unphotographed memories. As technologies of memory, they actively produce both memory and forgetting.
Forgetting can be produced through the absence of images. Many horrific events of twentieth-century history, such as the Holocaust, were relentlessly and copiously documented in camera images. Yet, other traumatic events, such as the genocide of Cambodians under the Pol Pot regime in the late 1970s and the mass murders in Rwanda in the 1990s, have gone relatively undocumented, producing few photographic images to capture the global public's attention. Yet, forgetting can also be produced through the presence of images. A single-image icon can screen out other images of a historical event. For instance, the iconic image of the mushroom cloud of the atom bomb obliterates the less well-known images of the bomb's destruction.
Hence, memory acquires cultural and historical meaning when it is articulated through the processes of representation. Andreas Huyssen writes: "Rather than leading us to some authentic origin or giving us verifiable access to the real, memory, even and especially in its belatedness, is itself based on representation. The past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory. The fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation is unavoidable. Rather than lamenting or ignoring it, this split should be understood as a powerful stimulant for cultural and artistic creativity." Huyssen suggests that the tension that arises in the cultural mediation of memory is the source of artistic engagement with the past. I would push his point further to argue that it is precisely the instability of memory that provides for its importance in pointing to the meaning of the past. Camera images are a major factor in this traversing of memories among the realms of personal memory, cultural memory, and history.
For Americans, the Asia-Pacific War produced several image icons, most notably the raising by U.S. soldiers of the American flag at Iwo Jima (its iconic status as a photographic image further established by its rendering in the Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, Virginia) and the image of the mushroom cloud from the atomic blast rising over Hiroshima. Other images are generic: men running as boats smoke and sink at Pearl Harbor, American soldiers in the trenches in tropical locations, and Japanese planes crashing into the sea. The sources of these images of history are many, as likely to be the screen images of Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), Guadalcanal Diary (1943), Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), or From Here to Eternity (1953) as documentary footage. These images are components in the national narrative of the war, in which the United States is a triumphant and moral nation; as such, they screen out more disruptive images. Other images, such as the photographs and film footage of Hiroshima immediately after the bomb, were held in government archives until their cultural meanings were considerably muted.
Absent Images of Memory
Yet, there are also events of World War II that did not produce image icons. The forced internment of mainland Japanese American citizens after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 is an event for which history provides images primarily through their absence. Indeed, the government attempted through censorship to control the representation of the internment: it produced propaganda films depicting the camps as a benevolent exercise in civil obedience. The federal government prohibited cameras in the camps, thus attempting to prevent any significant production of counterimages. This limited cultural representation of the camps was compounded by the protracted silence of many of the former internees.
In many ways, the historical narrative of the internment remains relatively intact. Despite the payment of reparations, despite the semblance of a national atonement, the internment continues to be narrativized as a regrettable step that appeared necessary in its time-not as bad as what other countries did. Even though the term "concentration camps" was used by government officials and Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, the image of prison camps where people were peaceably assembled screens out the image of prison camps where people became ill and died and where resisters were shot. The historical claim of the internment as benevolent remains fixed through its alliance with the claim of the use of the atomic bomb as inevitable, an act that was appropriate in its time. To question one of these narratives would be to question them all, hence they remain fundamentally unexamined.
As a historical event marked by silences and strategic forgetting, the internment of Japanese Americans produces memory in several ways: in its survivors, in the artifacts in which they imbue their memories, and in its "absent presence." Objects of memory haunt the remembering of the internment. It was an event for which the creation and destruction of memory objects were very particular. Although Japanese families in the American territory of Hawai'i were not interned en masse because of their importance to the local war economy, they were harassed and detained. Many destroyed their memory objects-0photographs, letters, Japanese books and clothing-in an attempt to obliterate their ethnic status through destroying its evidence. On the mainland, Japanese Americans were able to take very few possessions with them to the internment camps. At the exhibition America's Concentration Camps, shown at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in 1995, maps, letters, and photographs were used to conjure the experience of the camps. There, amid the vitrines, sat a group of trunks and suitcases that were neatly packed and left at the Panama Hotel in Seattle but had never been claimed after the war-objects that had become, for many reasons, irretrievable.
The story that Rea Tajiri tells in History and Memory is marked by meanings found in objects of memory and the presence and absence of camera images. Tajiri is compelled by the gaps in her mother's memory, by her own sense of incompleteness, and by the absent presence of the camps in national memory to counter the historical images of her parents' families' internment. While her father served in the 442nd Regiment, their house was literally moved away, never to be seen again. She re-creates an image of her mother filling a canteen at a faucet in the desert, an image she has always carried, for which she wants to find a story. She states:
There are things which have happened in the world while there were cameras watching, things we have images for. There are other things which have happened while there were no cameras watching, which we restage in front of cameras to have images of. There are things which have happened for which the only images that exist are in the minds of observers, present at the time, while there are things which have happened for which there have been no observers, except the spirits of the dead.
What are the traces of events for which there have been no camera images? Tajiri imagines the spirit of her grandfather watching an argument between her parents about the "unexplained nightmares that their daughter has been having on the twentieth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor." He is the witness of the absent image, one that she then re-creates.
Counterimages and Absent Presence
Despite government attempts to control all representations of the camps, counterimages were nevertheless produced. Artwork produced by camp internees such as Estelle Ishigo, Henry Sugimoto, George Matsusaburo Hibi, and Chiura Obata, among others, has been widely exhibited, and photographers such as Ansel Adams, and Toyo Miyatake photographed Manzanar. The photographs taken by photographers hired by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), which included well-known photographer Dorothea Lange, were, like the famous Farm Security Administration photographs of the Depression era, government-sponsored images that transcended their original intent. These are moving images of internees being evacuated, of children wearing large identification tags and staring in disbelief at the camera, of families assembled in cramped quarters. Yet, these images are, for the most part, absent from the litany of World War II images that constitute its iconic history.
That the internment produced no singular-image icons cannot be attributed simply to the prohibition of cameras and the government's desire to render the event a kind of invisibility. The more relevant question is why photographs by Adams, Lange, Miyatake, and others are absent from the image-history canon of the war. It could be argued that the internment produced an image both too disruptive and too domestic to conform to the war's narratives. These were not aggressive enemies who were easily demonized; they were profoundly ordinary, too close for comfort to an image of hard-working Americans. These were people who responded for the most part without resistance, who turned the desert into gardens. They also served in the army in terms that can be read as a determination to both prove national loyalty and counter racist stereotypes. As T. Fujitani writes, the military feats of the Nisei soldiers were subsumed into narratives of American nationalism. This did not allow for their relatives to be easily demonized in simple terms.
Ironically, while the government and the media attempted at the time to depict the Japanese as sinister and untrustworthy, it also went to great lengths to distinguish other Asians and Asian Americans, such as the Chinese, in positive terms. This allowed for the generic notion of Asian American to be troubled. At the same time, government propaganda films aimed to show how well the Japanese were being treated and depicted the camps as a kind of summer camp, with craft classes and group activities. This image of hyperdomesticity served to feminize the camps and emasculate the Japanese men in them, which may account in part for the hypermasculine discourse of the Nisei soldiers. The government films served to erase the elements of political activity and resistance that existed in the camps. Hence, the government's production of images of its "benevolent" treatment of the Nisei and Issei in these films was in part contingent on its producing images of them as model and obedient citizens. The home movies taken from cameras smuggled into the camps are in contrast to the evenly lit, clean images of government propaganda films. Yet, in their jerky movements and recordings of moments of shyness, daily routines, and snow-covered landscapes, they show not resistance and barbed wire but a profound ordinariness, an unexpected everydayness. Indeed, their primary focus appears to be snow, as many internees were from the West Coast and had never seen it before.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction / T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama 1
1. Memory Fragments, Memory Images
Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment / Marita Sturken 33
The Malleable and the Contested: The Nanjing Massacre in Postwar China and Japan / Daqing Yang 50
Memories of War and Okinawa / Ishihara Masaie 87
Images of Islanders in Pacific War Photographs / Lamont Lindstrom 107
Imagery and War in Japan: 1995 / Morio Watanabe 129
2. Politics and Poetics of Liberation
Deliberating “Liberation Day”: Identity, History, Memory, and War in Guam / Vicente M. Diaz 155
Imperial Army Betrayed / Chen Yingzhen 181
Korean “Imperial Soldiers”: Remembering Colonialism and Crimes against Allied POWs / Utsumi Aiko 199
Memory Suppression and Memory Production: The Japanese Occupation of Singapore / Diana Wong 218
Go For Broke, the Movie, Japanese American Soldiers in U.S. National, Military, and Racial Discourses / T. Fujitani 239
Moving History: The Pearl Harbor Film(s) / Geoffrey M. White 267
3. Atonement, Healing, and Unexpected Alliances
“Trapped in History” on the Way to Utopia: East Asia’s “Great War” Fifty Years Later / Arif Dirlik 299
For Transformative Knowledge and Postnationalist Public Spheres: The Smithsonian Enola Gay Controversy / Lisa Yoneyama 323
“Frantic to Join . . . the Japanese Army”: Black Soldiers and Civilians Confront the Asia Pacific War / George Lipsitz 347
Colonialism and Atom Bombs: About Survivors of Hiroshima Living in Korea / Toyonaga Keisaburo 378
The Politics of War Memories toward Healing / Chungmoo Choi 395
Bibliography 411
Filmography 435
Index 437
Contributors 461
What People are Saying About This
Perilous Memories is a major statement in current discussions concerned with assessing the problematic relationship of history and memory. The authors gathered in this volume edited by T. Fujitani, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama forcefully rescue the memories of other wars and genocides in the arena of Asia-Pacific to remind us of the dangerous but necessary task of the present to actualize the past in order to remember the forgotten yet unforgettable. With this volume we have an incomparable guide to what Walter Benjamin once described as the ‘copernican turn to remembrance.’(-—Harry Harootunian, New York University)
Unsettling official national accounts with memories of war from Okinawa, Guam, and Taiwan, of the Nanjing massacre, occupied Singapore, and the Hiroshima bombing -PERILOUS MEMORIES provokes a haunting dialectic between familiar history and endangered memories.(-—Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego)
This excellent interdisciplinary collection of essays gives diverse and heterogeneous voice to many ordinary people who suffered in the Asian wars that began in 1931—wars that, for many of these same people, never really ended. At every turn, Perilous Memories counterpoints the extraordinary elites who have dominated historical memory with the recuperated experience of their victims. This book is a major contribution to what the authors call ‘critical war remembering.(-—Bruce Cumings, author of Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century)