War Memory and East Asian Conflicts, 19301945 (Entangled Memories in the Global South)

This book explores how narratives, exhibitions, media representations, and cultural heritage sites that communicate memories of conflicts in East Asia between 1930 and 1945 spread, interact, and are re-packaged for post-war audiences across national divisions. The contributors examine individual case studies of grassroots engagement with war memory, and collectively demonstrate the necessity of remaining aware of the researcher as participating in another kind of engagement with war memory. Contributions showcase a number of ways of doing research on war memory, alongside case studies from diverse regions of the world. Taken together, they bring a fresh perspective to scholarship on war memory, which has tended to focus on space, text, exhibition, or personal narrative, rather than bringing these elements into dialogue with one another. Acknowledgements Note on the Preparation of the Text Contents Notes on Contributors List of Figures List of Tables 1 Introduction: Engaging with War Memory and the Legacies of East Asian Conflicts, 1930–1945 Engaging with War Memory Transnational Memory and the Global South History of the Project Methodologies of Engagement Theoretical Frameworks Organisation of the Chapters Works Cited Part I Narrating War Memory 2 National Narratives and Individual Agency: Negotiating Power Relations in Kamioka POW Camp Introduction The Kamioka Camp The Kamioka Corpus The Dutch The Americans The British The Japanese Concepts of ‘Skill’ Conclusions Works Cited 3 Beyond the “Hell-Ship” Experience: Former Okinawan POWs Visit Hawai’i After 72 Years Introduction Narratives and Background of the Battle of Okinawa The “Hell-Ship” Experience: Hadaka-Gumi (“Naked-Group”) and the Transfer of POWs to Hawai’i Camp Lives of Okinawan POWs in Hawai’i as a Dominant Narrative Commemoration for the Deceased Twelve Dealing with “Difficult Pasts” Conclusion: Beyond the “Hell-Ship” Experiences Works Cited Part II Localizing War Memory 4 Toward a Borderless Memory of Hiroshima: From Victimhood to Witness Culture in the 75 Years of Peace Declarations Introduction Victimhood and Victim Consciousness Emergence of the Declaration for Peace General Characteristics of the Contents of the Peace Declarations and Working Hypothesis Materials and Methods Data Methods Text Analytics Results General Trends Comparing Trends in the Underlying Semantic Features: Japanese Version vs. English Translation Shifting Sense of Victimhood and Mission in the Mayors’ Declarations Discussion Conclusion Appendix 1: Keywords in Each Mayor’s Peace Declarations in the Japanese and English Versions Works Cited 5 Camouflaged War Heritage: Brecciated War Heritage Sites in Kyoto Theoretical Framework Methodology Researching War Heritage and Tourism in Japan War Memorials of Kyoto Kamigyō Air Raid Memorial Higashiyama Air Raid Memorial Nagaokakyō Peace Memorial Ryōzen Kannon Domestic War Narratives in a Transnational Context References Part III Exhibiting War Memory 6 Encountering Stories: “Ordinary” Voices Reflecting on Japanese Wartime Aggression in Japan in the Early 1990s In Search of the “Ordinary” Voices Local Exhibition on Unit 731 and the Noborito Institute in Kawasaki Organizers’ Report and Visitor Comments Encountering Stories: Analysis of Visitor Comments Shock and Disbelief Between Victimhood and Aggression Placing Aggression, Placing Atomic Bombings (and Other Episodes of Personal Suffering) The Past is not Past Yet Reign of Peace? Making Sense of Japanese Wartime Aggression, Making Sense of Visitor Comments Works Cited 7 Exhibitions and Their Afterlives: Dutch Exhibitions of the Second World War in Indonesia, 1946–2000 Introduction Reinventing the Nation: Exhibition on the War in the Netherlands, 1946–1947 “The Indies Under Japanese Occupation”, 1946–1947: The First Dutch Exhibition on the War in Indonesia From One Story of National Unity to Personal Suffering: 1950–1980 More Cracks in the Collective Narrative of the Japanese Occupation, 1980–2000 Conclusion Works Cited Part IV Visualising War Memory 8 Reimagining Japan: Tintin, Hergé and the Enemy Introduction A Catholic Comic Character Discovers the World Evil Japanese Against a Chinese Background: Political and Diplomatic Turmoil in the 1930s A Neutral Japanese Character: Representation During World War II Transcending Wartime Contradictions in Transnational Merchandise A Japanese Bunker in Asia as a Random Legacy of War Conclusion Works Cited 9 A Sense of a Memory: Prosthetic War Memories Among the Japanese Cinema Audience War and Occupation at the Cinema Engaging with Retrospective Film Cultures Wartime Narratives on Postwar Screens Reimagining Wartime and Its Aftermath Through Cinema Mediating Memory Through the Cinema Works Cited 10 Contextualizing Cow: War Atrocities in Twenty-First-Century Chinese Movies of the Second Sino–Japanese War Lest We Forget Embracing Atrocities Negotiating Atrocities Relativizing Atrocities Beyond Atrocities Conclusion: History, RIP Works Cited Index