Routledge Handbook of Trauma in East Asia 9781032274218, 9781032274232, 9781003292661

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
1 Contesting and Commemorating Trauma in East Asia: An Introduction
Part 1 Japan
2 Surviving a World Destroyed: Existential Trauma in Hibakusha Experience
3 Japanese Progressives, Asia, and Posttraumatic Growth
4 Trauma, Reconciliation, Social Justice and Artistic Commentary: Tomiyama Taeko’s Strategies for Repair through Her Visual Art
5 Unwriting the Wrongs: History, Trauma and Memories of Violence in Germany and Japan
6 The West and the Dissemination of Japanese Historical Revisionism
7 Overcoming Trauma at Chidorigafuchi: Japan’s ‘National Cemetery’ and the Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War
8 Telling Stories of War Trauma: Japan’s Popular Manga
9 Back to the Future: Contested Wartime Trauma in Japanese Popular Culture
10 Shared Complicity in War Crimes in Japanese Detention Camps, 1941–1945
11 Trauma in Japan’s Hope
12 Okinawa: The Trauma of Betrayal
13 Ignoring the History of Foreign Forced Labour at Japan’s ‘Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution’
14 Memories and Displays of Japan’s Early Industrialisation through the Production of Silk: Tomioka Silk Mill, Nomugi Pass and WWII Propaganda
15 Fukushima’s Traumatic Legacies
Part 2 China/Hong Kong
16 Hong Kong as Pillar of Shame: Trauma Foretold, Suppressed and Compounded
17 The Nazi Holocaust in a Chinese Mirror: Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees Museum
18 Memory and Mythmaking: World War II in Chinese Cinema
19 Martyrs, Military Heroes and Massacre Victims: The Complex Memorial Terrain of Lushun, 1894–Present
20 Narrating Trauma: Memories of the Atrocities under the Japanese Occupation of Sanzao Island
21 Trauma, Artificial Intelligence, and Capitalism in Hao Jingfang
Part 3 Taiwan
22 Contested Memory in Taiwan’s Jing-Mei White Terror Park
23 Transitional Justice in Taiwan: Truth and Reconciliation in a Contested State
24 Representing Taiwan’s White Terror in Pop Culture
Part 4 South Korea
25 Contesting Trauma in Court: Korean Historical Claims and Their Radiating Eeffcts
26 Commemorative Witness: ‘Gwangju in 1980’ and Unresolved Transitional Justice in Twenty-First Century South Korea
27 The Politics of Forgetting: Unmaking Memories and Reacting to Memory-Place-Making
28 Cultural Trauma and the Cheju Massacre in Transnational Perspective
29 Commemorating and Contesting Gender-Based Violence in Korea
Part 5 Wider East Asia
30 Putin, Politics and Propagandising Memories of WWII in Russia’s Far East
31 Trauma – Prolonged and Accumulative: The Impact of Singapore Detention without Trial from the 1948 Malayan Emergency
32 East Asia’s Vietnam: Trauma Returns and the Sub-Empire of Memory
33 Wounds to the Soul: A View from Vietnam
Index

Citation preview

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRAUMA IN EAST ASIA

This handbook explores trauma in East Asia from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, assessing how victims, perpetrators and societies have responded to such experiences and to what extent the legacies still resonate today. Mapping the trauma-scape of East Asia from an interdisciplinary perspective, including anthropologists, historians, film and literary critics, scholars of law, media and education, political scientists and sociologists, this book significantly enhances understandings of the region’s traumatic pasts and how those memories have since been suppressed, exhumed, ­represented and disputed. In Asia’s contested memory-scape there is much at stake for perpetrators, their victims and heirs to their respective traumas. The scholarly research in this volume examines the silencing and distortion of traumatic pasts and sustained efforts to interrogate denial and impunity in the search for accountability. Addressing collective traumas from across East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam), this book is a valuable resource for ­students and scholars of Trauma and Memory Studies, Asian Studies and Contemporary Asian History more broadly. Tina Burrett is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Japan. She is the co-editor of Japan in the Heisei Era 1989–2019 (Routledge, 2022) and Press Freedom in Contemporary Asia (Routledge, 2019) and the author of Television and Presidential Power in Putin’s Russia (Routledge, 2011). Jeff Kingston is Professor of History at Temple University, Japan. He is the author and e­ ditor of a dozen books on contemporary Japan and Asia, including Japan’s Quiet Transformation (2004), Contemporary Japan (2011), Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan (2014) and Japan in the Heisei Era 1989–2019 (Routledge, 2022).

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRAUMA IN EAST ASIA

Edited by Tina Burrett and Jeff Kingston

Designed cover image: © Tomiyama Taeko - The Night of the Festival of Galungan ガルンガンの祭りの夜 (1984). First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Tina Burrett and Jeff Kingston; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Tina Burrett and Jeff Kingston to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-27421-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-27423-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-29266-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.

CONTENTS

List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors

ix xi xiii

1 Contesting and Commemorating Trauma in East Asia: An Introduction Tina Burrett

1

PART 1

Japan 9 2 Surviving a World Destroyed: Existential Trauma in Hibakusha Experience 11 M.G. Sheftall 3 Japanese Progressives, Asia, and Posttraumatic Growth Simon Avenell

23

4 Trauma, Reconciliation, Social Justice and Artistic Commentary: Tomiyama Taeko’s Strategies for Repair through Her Visual Art Laura Hein

35

5 Unwriting the Wrongs: History, Trauma and Memories of Violence in Germany and Japan Tessa Morris-Suzuki

49

6 The West and the Dissemination of Japanese Historical Revisionism Karoline Postel-Vinay

v

62

Contents

7 Overcoming Trauma at Chidorigafuchi: Japan’s ‘National Cemetery’ and the Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War Sven Saaler and Collin Rusneac 8 Telling Stories of War Trauma: Japan’s Popular Manga Akiko Hashimoto 9 Back to the Future: Contested Wartime Trauma in Japanese Popular Culture David McNeill

73 88

98

10 Shared Complicity in War Crimes in Japanese Detention Camps, 1941–1945 110 Sandra Wilson 11 Trauma in Japan’s Hope David Leheny

120

12 Okinawa: The Trauma of Betrayal Alexis Dudden and Jeff Kingston

131

13 Ignoring the History of Foreign Forced Labour at Japan’s ‘Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution’ David Palmer

143

14 Memories and Displays of Japan’s Early Industrialisation through the Production of Silk: Tomioka Silk Mill, Nomugi Pass and WWII Propaganda 158 Tets Kimura 15 Fukushima’s Traumatic Legacies Jeff Kingston

169

PART 2

China/Hong Kong

185

16 Hong Kong as Pillar of Shame: Trauma Foretold, Suppressed and Compounded 187 Louisa Lim 17 The Nazi Holocaust in a Chinese Mirror: Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees Museum Edward Vickers vi

199

Contents

18 Memory and Mythmaking: World War II in Chinese Cinema Mike Fu

212

19 Martyrs, Military Heroes and Massacre Victims: The Complex Memorial Terrain of Lushun, 1894–Present Christian A. Hess

224

20 Narrating Trauma: Memories of the Atrocities under the Japanese Occupation of Sanzao Island Peipei Qiu

237

21 Trauma, Artificial Intelligence, and Capitalism in Hao Jingfang Ban Wang

250

PART 3

Taiwan 261 22 Contested Memory in Taiwan’s Jing-Mei White Terror Park Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang 23 Transitional Justice in Taiwan: Truth and Reconciliation in a Contested State Ian Rowen and Jamie Rowen 24 Representing Taiwan’s White Terror in Pop Culture Brian Hioe PART 4

South Korea

263

278

291

301

25 Contesting Trauma in Court: Korean Historical Claims and Their Radiating Effects 303 Celeste L. Arrington 26 Commemorative Witness: ‘Gwangju in 1980’ and Unresolved Transitional Justice in Twenty-First Century South Korea Nan Kim

318

27 The Politics of Forgetting: Unmaking Memories and Reacting to Memory-Place-Making 330 HaeRan Shin and Yerin Jin vii

Contents

28 Cultural Trauma and the Cheju Massacre in Transnational Perspective Kim Seong Nae

344

29 Commemorating and Contesting Gender-Based Violence in Korea Sandra Fahy

356

PART 5

Wider East Asia

367

30 Putin, Politics and Propagandising Memories of WWII in Russia’s Far East Tina Burrett

369

31 Trauma – Prolonged and Accumulative: The Impact of Singapore Detention without Trial from the 1948 Malayan Emergency Ariel Yin Yee Yap

383

32 East Asia’s Vietnam: Trauma Returns and the Sub-Empire of Memory Long T. Bui

395

33 Wounds to the Soul: A View from Vietnam Heonik Kwon

408

Index 417

viii

FIGURES

4.1 Image from Memory of the Sea 1988 38 4.2 Image from Harbin: Requiem for the 20th Century 1995 42 4.3 Image from Harbin: Requiem for the 20th Century 1995 44 7.1 Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery (photo by the authors) 74 7.2 Construction work to expand the underground ossuary of CNC (2013) (photo by Sven Saaler) 78 7.3 ‘15 August Gathering to Commemorate the Victims of War and Plead for Peace’ held in Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery on 15 August 2022. In the centre, wreaths offered by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (photo by Sven Saaler) 79 7.4 Memorial stones in Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, set up in 2010 (photo by Sven Saaler) 81 7.5 Bény-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery, Reviers/Normandy (photo by Sven Saaler) 85 132 12.1 Casualty Exhibit, Okinawan Prefectural Museum. Credit: Jeff Kingston 12.2 Protestors decorate fence adjacent to Henoko construction site. Credit: Jeff Kingston 136 12.3 Cornerstone of Peace, Itoman, Okinawa. Credit: Jeff Kingston 139 171 15.1 Mural in front of Futaba train station. Credit: Jeff Kingston 15.2 Futaba sign revised. Credit: Jeff Kingston 179 15.3 Crushed fire engine in front of Futaba’s pro-nuclear sign. Credit: Jeff Kingston 180 16.1 The Pillar of Shame at Hong Kong University. Credit: Louisa Lim 188 16.2 Chrysanthemums, the flower of mourning in China, laid on the Pillar of Shame as a tribute to June 4 victims. Credit: Louisa Lim 189 16.3 Tent encampments in the centre of Hong Kong, at Admiralty, during the 2014 Umbrella Movement. Credit: Louisa Lim 191 16.4 Two million people protest against proposed extradition legislation, on 16 June 2019. Credit: Louisa Lim 193 16.5 Armed police deployed in Hong Kong on 1 October 2019 dispersing the protests, amid clouds of tear gas. Credit: Louisa Lim 194 225 19.1 Map of Lushun ix

Figures

20.1 Sanzao in a 1938 Detailed Map of Guangdong and Hong Kong. (Courtesy of Geographicus Rare Antique Maps.) 22.1 The remodelled entrance to the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park by Chien Hsueh-yi with the latter-installed Human Rights Memorial at the base of the monoliths (author’s photo) 22.2 A political prisoner’s farewell letter to his wife exhibited by the museum (author’s photo) 22.3 A diorama of a 1950s lockup (author’s photo) 22.4 Jing-Mei compound’s main prison structure: the two-storey Renai Building (author’s photo) 27.1 Asian Culture Centre. A part of the Byeolgwan was demolished while the skeleton is remained (author’s photo) 27.2 Anti-memorial park demonstration on the fifth anniversary of Sewol Ferry disaster (author’s photo)

x

238

268 269 270 271 337 340

TABLES

13.1 Late Tokugawa World Heritage Industrial Sites 13.2 Meiji Era World Heritage Sites (Group 2) 13.3 Mitsui Miike Coal Mine Workforce (Approximate for 1945) 25.1 Some of Litigation’s Productive Effects and the Mechanisms behind Them 27.1 Timeline: May 18 Democratic Uprising and Remembering/Forgetting 27.2 Timeline: Sewol Ferry Disaster and Remembering/Forgetting

xi

145 148 154 308 334 335

CONTRIBUTORS

Celeste L. Arrington (PhD, UC Berkeley)  is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University. Her research interests include law and social change, comparative policy processes and transnational advocacy. Her first book was Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Government Accountability in Japan and South Korea (2016). She has published articles in Comparative Political Studies, Law & Society Review, Journal of East Asian Studies and elsewhere. Her current book analyses the legalistic turn in Korean and Japanese governance regarding tobacco control and disability rights. She co-edited Rights Claiming in South Korea (2021) with Patricia Goedde. Simon Avenell is Professor at the Australian National University, specializing in modern Japanese history, civil society, social movements and transnational history. His work has been published in leading journals, including The Journal of Japanese Studies, Science Technology and Society, Environmental History and Modern Asian Studies. His books include Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (2010), Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement (2017) and Asia and Postwar Japan: Deimperialization, Civic Activism, and National Identity (2022). He is currently editing two volumes: one on postwar Japanese history and the other (with Akihiro Ogawa) on civil society in Japan. Long T. Bui, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global & International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory and Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton. Tina Burrett is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Japan. Her recent publications include ‘Russian State Television Coverage of the 2016 US Presidential Election,’ Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization; ‘Abe Road: Comparing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Leadership of his First and Second Governments,’ Parliamentary Affairs; and ‘Mixed Signals: Democratisation and the Myanmar Media,’ Politics and Governance. She is the co-editor of Press Freedom in Contemporary Asia (2019) and Japan in the Heisei Era (1989-2019).

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Contributors

Alexis Dudden is Professor of history at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches modern Japanese, Korean and international history. Dudden received her BA from Columbia University in 1991 and her PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1998. She has lived and studied for extended periods of time in Japan and South Korea, with awards from Fulbright, ACLS, NEH and SSRC as well as fellowships at Princeton and Harvard. She is the 2015 recipient of the Manhae Peace Prize, and her books include Troubled Apologies among Japan, Korea, and the United States and Japan’s Colonization of Korea. Currently, Dudden’s research centres on Japan’s territorial contests with regional neighbours; she is completing a book project tentatively called The Opening and Closing of Japan, 1850–2020. Sandra Fahy  is the Author of Marching through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea (2015) and Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Rights Abuses on the Record (2019). She is currently working on a book titled States, Lies and Video: A Century of States Using Video to Deny Allegations of Rights Abuses. Mike Fu is a Tokyo-based writer, editor and translator. He is a cofounder of The Shanghai Literary Review. His Chinese-English translation of Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao was published by Bloomsbury and shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Prose. He is adjunct professor of film studies at Temple University, Japan and a PhD candidate in cultural studies at Waseda University. Akiko Hashimoto grew up in Tokyo, London and Hamburg. She received her BSc from the London School of Economics and MA and PhD in Sociology from Yale University. After working at the United Nations University in Tokyo, she taught Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh for twenty-five years and is now Visiting Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Portland State University. She is the author and editor of volumes on cultural sociology and comparative sociology, focused on social constructions of reality in varied cultural settings. Her special interests are cultural trauma, war memory, national identity, culture and power, popular culture and media, family and ageing. Her latest volume is The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory and Identity in Japan (2015) which won the 2016 Scholarly Achievement Award of the North Central Sociological Association. She is also author of The Gift of Generations: Japanese and American Perspectives on Aging and the Social Contract (1996). Laura Hein  is Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History at Northwestern University. She has edited five books on war remembrance and created a website on the art of Tomiyama Taeko, now trilingual in Japanese, Korean and English: https://imaginationwithoutborders.northwestern.edu/. Her most recent book is Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after the Second World War (2018)—a Japanese translation for Jinbun Shoin Press is in press. Christian A. Hess is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History at Sophia University. His research focuses on Japanese colonialism in Northeast China and its legacies after 1945. His current project From Colonial Port to Socialist Metropolis is an urban history of Dalian as it developed from a Japanese colonial centre to a socialist production city in the People’s Republic of China. His recent publications include ‘Sino-Soviet City: Dalian between Socialist Worlds, 1945–1955’ in the Journal of Urban History and ‘Securing the City, Securing the Nation: Militarization and Urban Police Work in Dalian, 1949–1953’ in Toby Lincoln and Xu Tao, eds., The Habitable City in China: Urban History in the Twentieth Century. xiv

Contributors

Brian Hioe is an independent scholar, as well as a freelance journalist and translator. He is one of the founders of New Bloom Magazine, an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific, founded in Taiwan in 2014 in the wake of the Sunflower Movement. Yerin Jin has completed her master’s degree from the Department of Geography at Seoul National University. She has focused on memory place-making and urban informality. Her master’s thesis was titled ‘Production and Reconstruction of the Placeness of Memory: A Case on the Local Politics over Places-of-Memory of the Sewol Ferry Disaster.’ Kim Seong Nae is currently Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Sogang University in Korea. She is a founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Korean Religions ( JKR), the only English-language academic journal dedicated to the study of Korean religions, which was launched in the autumn of 2010 by the Institute for the Study of Religion at Sogang. Her forthcoming book, tentatively entitled ‘Violence and Cultural Memory in Korea,’ draws on contemporary issues of state violence and traumatic memory with the case of the Jeju April 3 (‘4.3’) Incident (1947–1954) on Jeju Island. Her recent publication includes ‘Memory politics and the emergence of a women’s sphere to counter historical violence in Korea,’ in Gender, Transitional Justice and Memorial Arts, edited by Jelke Boesten and Helen Scanlon (Routledge, 2021), and ‘Placing the Dead in the Postmemory of the Cheju Massacre in Korea,’ Journal of Religion, Vol.99, No.1, Jan 2019. Nan Kim  is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divide, which won the 2019 Scott Bills Memorial Prize from the Peace History Society. Her chapter ‘South Korea’s Nuclear-Energy Entanglements: Contested “Long-term Stewardship” and the Ethical Timescales of Ecological Democracy’ is forthcoming in Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments (2022). Her work has also appeared in publications such as The Journal of Asian Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, The Asia-Pacific Journal and The Routledge Handbook on Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia. She is a member of the editorial boards of The Seoul Journal of Korean Studies and Critical Asian Studies. Formerly trained as a cultural anthropologist, she has pursued interdisciplinary research interests in memory and historical consciousness, dissent movements, material culture and public history. Tets Kimura is Research Associate in the Creative Arts at Flinders University, Australia. As a Japanese Studies Fellowship (2021–2022) awarded by the Japan Foundation, he is currently engaged in studying Japanese fashion history. He has published ‘Unique Fashion Not’ (in Fashion Theory), and ‘Creation of Contemporary Taiwanese Fashion’ (in Fashion Practice) with Dr Shih-Ying Lin (Tainan University of Technology, Taiwan), to identify influences of Japanese fashion in Taiwan. His first book Exporting Japanese Aesthetics (2020, co-editor: Jennifer Harris) is an edited collection addressing the international impacts and influences of Japanese culture in modern and contemporary histories. Jeff Kingston is Professor of History at Temple University, Japan. His recent monographs include The Politics of Religion, Nationalism and Identity (2019) and Japan (2019). He edited Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan (2012), Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan (2019) and Press Freedom in Contemporary Japan (2017) and co-edited Press Freedom in Contemporary xv

Contributors

Asia (2020) and Japan’s Foreign Relations with Asia (2018). He also wrote Nationalism in Asia: A History since 1945 (2016) and edited Nationalisms in Asia Reconsidered (2015). His current research focuses on transitional justice and the politics of memory. Heonik Kwon is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and previously taught social anthropology at the London School of Economics. Author of several prize-winning books on the Vietnam War and Cold War social memories, his most recent publication is After the Korean War: An Intimate History (2020). David Leheny  is a Professor in the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University. He is the author of several books, most recently Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline (2018). Louisa Lim is a Senior Lecturer in Audio-Visual Journalism at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia; Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. She is an award-winning journalist who reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC, and she co-hosts the Little Red Podcast. David McNeill is Professor of Communications and English at Sacred Heart University, Tokyo. He was previously a correspondent for The Independent, The Economist and The Chronicle of Higher Education and is the co-author of Strong in the Rain, about the 2011 Tohoku disaster. He is currently writing a Japanese book called Confessions of a Foreign Correspondent. Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor Emerita of Japanese History at the Australian National University. Her current research focuses on the history of the indigenous people of the Okhotsk Sea region, and her most recent publications include Japan’s Living Politics: Grassroots Action and the Crises of Democracy (2020), On the Frontiers of History: Rethinking East Asian Borders (2020) and The Korean War in Asia: A Hidden History (edited, 2018). David Palmer  is Associate in History at the University of Melbourne. He previously taught at Flinders University, Adelaide, and at Harvard University and American University before moving permanently to Australia. His publications include Organizing the Shipyards: Union Strategy in Three Northeast Ports; ‘Foreign forced labour at Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki and Hiroshima Shipyards: Big business, militarized government, and the absence of shipbuilding workers’ rights in World War II Japan,’ in van der Linden and Rodriguez Garcia, On Coerced Labour; ‘Nagasaki’s Districts: Western Contact with Japan through the History of a City’s Space,’ Journal of Urban History; and articles on Miike Coal Mine and Gunkanjima Coal Mine in The Asia Pacific Journal/Japan Focus. Karoline Postel-Vinay  is a FNSP Research Professor at the Center for International Research of Sciences Po, Paris. She holds a PhD in International Relations from Sciences Po and an MA in Japanese studies from the French National Institute of Oriental Civilizations and Languages. She lectures, researches and has published on Japan and East Asia’s international relations, and on non-Western representations of world affairs. Her forthcoming book, edited with Daniel Deudley and John Ikenberry, is titled Talking Worlds: Contested Narratives of Global Order.

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Contributors

Peipei Qiu is Louise Boyd Dale and Alfred Lichtenstein Chair Professor at Vassar College. She has published scholarly work in English, Japanese and Chinese languages, including Bashô and the Dao: The Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai and Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves. Ian Rowen is Associate Professor in the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages, and Literature at National Taiwan Normal University. Trained as a geographer, his research has focused on geopolitics, tourism, and social movements in East and Southeast Asia. His edited volume of literature, Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror, examines collective trauma and transitional justice and was published by Cambria Press in 2021. His monograph, One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism was published by Cornell University Press in 2023. Jamie Rowen’s research focuses on the use of law to redress mass atrocity and aid vulnerable groups. She is the founding director of University of Massachusetts Center for Justice, Law, and Societies and a research affiliate with the university’s Center of Excellence for Specialty Courts. Dr Rowen’s current projects examine the citizen-state relations between Colombia and Colombian migrants in the USA, the confluence of domestic immigration and international criminal law within the Department of Homeland Security, data and decision-making in progressive prosecution, as well as the purpose and practice of Veterans Treatment Courts. Her work on Veterans Treatment Courts is supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Dr Rowen’s first book, Searching for Truth in the Transitional Justice Movement (2017), focuses on the emergence of transitional justice as an idea in international and domestic scholarship, policy making and advocacy. Her second book, Thank You for Your Service: Veterans Treatment Courts in Practice, is under contract with Stanford University Press. Collin Rusneac is a PhD candidate in the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University, Germany. His fields of research include history and memory studies in a global context. His current work focuses on Japanese cemeteries for the war dead built domestically and overseas. Sven Saaler is Professor of Modern Japanese History at Sophia University in Tokyo. After earning a PhD in Japanese Studies and History from Bonn University, he held positions at Marburg University, the German Institute for Japanese Studies and The University of Tokyo. He is the author of Politics, Memory and Public Opinion (2005) and Men in Metal (2020) as well as the co-author/co-editor of Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History (2007), The Power of Memory in Modern Japan (2008), Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History (2011) and the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History (2018). M. G. (Mordecai George) Sheftall  is a Professor of modern Japanese cultural history and communication at Shizuoka University. His research focuses on the modern evolution of Japanese national identity, with particular emphasis on the Japanese experience in WWII and the lingering effects of that conflict on both collective and individual Japanese consciousness. He is the author of Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (2005), based on interviews with survivors of Japan’s wartime kamikaze programme.

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Contributors

HaeRan Shin is a Professor in the Department of Geography at Seoul National University. She has focused on political geography and migrant studies. She has examined the politics of urban development cases, including places of memory, culture-led urban regeneration, new towns, eco-cities and risk perception. She has also worked on the issues of transnational migrants and refugees, the dynamics of mobilities, and the territoriality of their networks and ethnic enclaves. She has published a number of articles and books, including The Cultural Politics of Urban Development in South Korea (Routledge, 2020). She taught at University College London before teaching in South Korea since September 2013. Edward Vickers  is Professor of Comparative Education at Kyushu University, Japan, where he also holds the UNESCO Chair in Education for Peace, Social Justice and Global Citizenship. He is the author or editor of numerous books on the history and politics of education in contemporary East Asia, including (with Zeng Xiaodong) Education and Society in Post-Mao China (2017); (with Krishna Kumar) Constructing Modern Asian Citizenship (2015); (with Alisa Jones) History Education and National Identity in East Asia (2005); and the ­sole-authored monograph In Search of an Identity: The Politics of History as a School Subject in Hong Kong, 1960s–2002 (2003). He also researches the politics of heritage across East Asia and is the co-editor (with Mark Frost and Daniel Schumacher) of Remembering Asia’s World War Two (2019). He is Director of Kyushu University’s interdisciplinary Taiwan Studies Program, President of the Comparative Education Society of Asia and co-editor of The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture. Ban Wang  is the William Haas Endowed Chair Professor in Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He was the Yangtze River Chair Professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai. His major publications include The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (1997), Illuminations from the Past (Stanford 2004), History and Memory (in Chinese 2004) and Narrative Perspective and Irony in Chinese and American Fiction (2002). He edited Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution (2010), Chinese Visions of World Order (2017) and Debating Socialist Legacy in China (co-edited 2014). Sandra Wilson  is Professor of History at Murdoch University. She is the author of The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, 1931–33 (2002) and is the co-author (with Robert Cribb, Beatrice Trefalt and Dean Aszkielowicz) of Japanese War Criminals: the Politics of Justice after the Second World War (2017). Her recent articles include ‘Why were there no War Crimes Trials for the Korean War?’ ( Journal of Global History, July 2021). Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang is Associate Professor of East Asian History in Department of History, University of Missouri-Columbia. He specializes in trauma, refugee and memory studies in modern Taiwan, China and Hong Kong. Dominic has published article-length works in China Perspectives, Taiwan shi yanjiu (Taiwan Historical Research), Journal of Chinese Overseas and Journal of Chinese History. His book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan won the Memory Studies Association First Book Award in 2020, and in 2021, was selected as a finalist for the International Book Award in the category of History: General.

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Contributors

Ariel Yin Yee Yap is a Doctoral Research and Teaching Associate at Monash University, Australia. Her research sits within the sociology of punishment, as she analyses policing and the assemblage of punitive practices that comprise sites of confinement to provide a better understanding of domestic and international models for dealing with crime. Ariel’s recent publications include Capital punishment in Singapore; United Nations, and the Rule of Law Sustainability: Case Studies on Singapore and the Solomon Islands. She continues to work on prison linkage projects in Victoria, Australia. She is also currently working on an interdisciplinary project with Singapore, Australian and UK academics, as they edit a series on Social Justice and Violence in Singapore entitled Violence Concealed, Injustice Obscured.

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1 CONTESTING AND COMMEMORATING TRAUMA IN EAST ASIA An Introduction Tina Burrett

This is not a book for the fainthearted. The chapters within deal with collective historical trauma in East Asia: with memories of war, repression, exploitation, disaster, torture, ­m assacres and gender-based violence. Memories of collective trauma evolve over time and are refracted through the prism of shifting contemporary concerns and political contexts that also influence the rites and sites of commemoration. Trauma studies gained momentum after WWII and the Holocaust in an extensive and sustained effort to make sense of the genocidal horrors perpetrated and experienced. There has been a Eurocentric bias, but the field has expanded to examine other collective traumas around the world. This volume builds on those efforts in East Asia where the mapping of the trauma-scape remains incomplete. The study of trauma is about what is remembered, un-remembered, buried, exhumed, denied and detailed. Here we focus on collective traumas that have left lingering scars on nations, communities, the marginalized and both victims and perpetrators. What has happened can be unhappened or substantially reinterpreted, deliberately or unconsciously. Many people may prefer to move on, but others seek to delve deeper and raise awareness about tragic shared pasts. Across East Asia, however, efforts at transitional justice have stalled because transgressors continued to exercise political and military power that enables the sidelining and/or rewriting of history (see N. Kim Chapter 26, Rowen and Rowen Chapter 23, Shin and Jin Chapter 27, Yang Chapter 22 and Yap Chapter 31). In Asia’s contested memory-scape there is much at stake for perpetrators, their victims and the heirs to their respective traumas. To better map the trauma-scape of East Asia, this book provides an interdisciplinary range of chapters that enhance our understanding of the region’s traumatic pasts and how those memories have been suppressed, exhumed, represented and contested over the ensuing decades. It brings together a blend of country-focused case studies, comparative analysis and transnational themes focusing on East Asia as a geographic and cultural area (covering China, Japan, the Korean Peninsula, Russia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam). Although the book does not impose uniform theoretical or conceptual definitions across its interdisciplinary chapters, the section that follows offers a brief introduction to theorizing DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-1

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on trauma for those new to the field. Inevitably, this overview is selective but offers avenues for further reading. This chapter further introduces readers to some of the most significant and enduring trauma narratives in East Asia and their implications for peace and reconciliation both within and between states across the region.

Theorizing Trauma The word trauma derives from the ancient Greek meaning ‘wound’ (Leys 2000). In contemporary psychology, trauma is understood as a wound inflicted not on the body but on the mind (Eyerman 2013, 42). Trauma stems from an emotional shock so powerful that it unhinges ‘the mind’s experience of time, self and the world’ (Caruth 1996, 3). During the Enlightenment, early-modern theories conceptualized ‘traumas’ as ‘naturally occurring events that shatter the individual or collective actor’s sense of well-being’ (Alexander 2012, 8). The shattering force—the trauma—was thought to emerge from the event itself. The experience of being traumatized is thus immediate and unreflexive. Trauma is a rational response to sudden change. The trauma-triggering event is perceived clearly by actors and their responses are lucid and linear. In the nineteenth century, psychoanalysts went beyond Enlightenment theorizing, seeing trauma as located not in the original violent event but in the reliving of that event when it returned to haunt the survivor later on. Trauma exists as memory, or as Maurice Blanchot puts it: ‘The disaster always takes place after having taken place’ (quoted in Eyerman 2013, 41). The abruptness and shock of a traumatic experience means it cannot be processed and understood in the moment. Buried in the unconscious, trauma is experienced irrationally in the behaviour and nightmares of survivors (Caruth 1995, 2–4). Contemporary notions of trauma therefore focus on two aspects: the recurrent, unwanted intrusion of memory and the subjectivity of those memories. Early trauma research tended to focus on the impact of cataclysmic events on individual behaviour and identity. The wars, genocides and other mass sufferings of the twentieth ­century, however, turned attention to collective trauma—a shared emotional response to a ­similarly experienced incident (Eyerman 2020, 688). Like individual trauma, a collective crisis is a shock to established relationships, perceptions, routines and identity. Trauma at the collective level disrupts the foundations of communal life, challenging core social institutions and values (Kirmayer et al. 2007, 10). Furthermore, individual and collective traumas may also reinforce each other, intensifying the sense of shock and loss (Eyerman 2013, 43). In war, for example, the damage to individual identity is compounded by the suffering of the wider community that tears the social fabric of collective identity. In recent decades, research on the effects of collective trauma has underpinned public discourse on assigning responsibility and demands for symbolic and material reparations (Alexander 2004, 7). Investigations, commemorations and cultural representations became important mechanisms for collectively exhuming memories, expressing emotions and shaping narratives. The memorializing across generations of selective past traumas, while other ordeals are allowed to fade, has led scholars to think in terms of cultural trauma. Compared to individual and collective trauma, cultural trauma is more abstract and socially mediated (Eyerman 2011). Cultural traumas begin with a devastating event that is believed to undermine or overwhelm one, several or all essential ingredients of a culture, demanding a retelling of the myths and beliefs that anchor collective identity (Smelser 2004, 38). Defining the phenomena, Jeffrey Alexander writes:

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Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subject to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their groups consciousness, ­m arking their memories forever and changing their future identities in fundamental and ­irrevocable ways. (2012, 1) In discussing the differences between psychological and cultural trauma, Neil Smelser (2004) notes that the essential difference is that ‘cultural traumas are made not born’ (38). The ‘horrendous event’ becomes an important memory in collective consciousness, not because it is naturally ineffaceable but because it generates a discourse that normalizes it in collective life over time. In the process, the event is made culturally significant, remembered as a damaging collective experience and incorporated into collective identity. To qualify as cultural trauma, the memory must be associated with strong negative emotions, usually disgust, shame or guilt (Smelser 2004, 36). A good example is the significance of the ‘century of humiliation’ to Chinese national identity (see Vickers, Chapter 17). Wars, massacres, atrocities, invasions and other traumas become significant reference points for subsequent generations, not because of the violent nature of the events in themselves, but because people choose to make them significant to who they are and what it means to be a member of their society. Some events, therefore, become more important to collective identity because they are made more consequential (Hashimoto 2016, 30). But others like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sear their way into the collective memory where nightmares reside (see Sheftall Chapter 2). Cultural traumas, therefore, are not things but processes of meaning-making and ­attribution—a contentious contest in which various individuals and groups struggle to define a past event and to manage and control its remembering. There are thus two sides to a cultural trauma: an emotional experience and a later interpretative reaction (Eyerman 2013, 43). Although the traumatic incident may not be directly experienced, through cultural identification with the actual victims, the trauma becomes a common symbolic memory for all members of the collectivity. Through this process, trauma can be suffered by members of a community who were not present to directly experience the original disaster. Strong identification with the people/place involved is enough to evoke an emotional response and feelings of ‘it could have been me’ and/or ‘it happened to one of us’ (Eyerman 2020, 684). The outrage felt by contemporary Korean feminists over the sexual slavery experienced by the comfort women—their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generation—is a good example of this identification across time (see Fahy Chapter 29). The cultural trauma process thus involves constructing narratives that designate and reinforce strong emotional bonds of identification with the actual victims, which in turn help to define the boundaries of the present-day collective (Eyerman 2020, 681). However, cultural trauma does not always result from the experience of collective pain. Rather it appears only when this pain enters the collectivity’s sense of its own identity as a fundamental threat (Alexander 2012, 7). Whether or not this penetration occurs is a matter of cultural and political work. A community of suffering that extends beyond direct victims must be imagined into being (Alexander and Butler Breese 2011, xii). This process relies on carrier groups who Alexander describes as the ‘agents’ of trauma. These agents seek to convey their interpretation of the traumatic event to the wider group through speeches, rituals, marches, meetings, plays, movies and storytelling of all kinds. Alexander explains:

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Carrier groups have both ideal and material interests; they are situated in particular places in the social structure; and they have particular discursive talents for articulating their claims—for “meaning making”—in the public sphere. (2012, 8) All social actors who seek publicly to attribute meaning to a traumatic incident can be considered a ‘carrier’ (Woods 2019). As the main mechanisms directing the flow of information in modern societies, the mass media play a leading role in designating a trauma and determining who is responsible. Who controls the media, therefore, significantly influences public understanding of a traumatic event (Eyerman 2020, 682). This power to define the past leads authoritarian governments across East Asia to clampdown on media freedom to preserve their power in the present (see Lim Chapter 16 and Burrett Chapter 30). But a range of other actors—academics, writers, filmmakers, musicians, political activists and increasing individuals via social media—can also contribute to articulating the meaning and maintaining the memory of an incident, in many cases challenging official narratives (see Wang Chapter 21, Hein Chapter 4, McNeill Chapter 9, Hioe Chapter 24 , S. Kim Chapter 28 and Fu Chapter 18). Which groups come to the fore determines the long-term meaning and emotional impact of an event—including how it is memorialized and for how long (Eyerman 2020, 701). Carrier groups may be elites, but they may also be denigrated and marginalized classes (Alexander 2012, 8). In Russia, for example, state authorities have co-opted memories of WWII in service of their foreign policy objectives and to legitimize Putin’s creeping authoritarianism (see Burrett Chapter 30). China’s government under President Xi Jinping follows a similar top-down strategy of defining war memories for its own political purposes (see Hess Chapter 19). While in contrast, in Japan, it is local activists who keep alive memories of the trauma inflicted by the 2011 Fukushima disaster, opposing government and nuclear industry attempts to downplay the incident (see Kingston Chapter 15). In Vietnam, ghosts of the war dead are remembered at the village level in spiritual rituals infused with local folklore, while the government prefers to look forward not backwards in constructing national identity, focusing attention on the nation’s postwar progress (see Kwon Chapter 33 and Long Chapter 32). In Okinawa, locals contest efforts to marginalize their trauma, leveraging the American military presence and betrayals by the central government to ensure the trauma of wartime legacies remains relevant to contemporary islanders (see Dudden and Kingston Chapter 12). Meaning-making after a trauma is a contentious, discursive process. Depending on the specific circumstances, intellectuals, artists, social movements and politicians might make different claims about collective identity, the nature of the trauma and what caused it, and the identity of the victims and perpetrators. The clash between Japanese conservatives and progressives over how to remember the nation’s early-twentieth-century legacy of colonialism and war is a case in point (see Avenell Chapter 3, Leheny Chapter 11 and Hashimoto Chapter 8). Conflicting accounts of past trauma draw protagonists and antagonists into accusatory narratives, projecting these to audiences within their own communities and to third parties beyond (Alexander and Butler Breese 2011, xii). The comfort women issue, for example, continues to sour relations between South Korea and Japan and has also drawn Western scholars into this contentious debate (see Morris-Suzuki Chapter 5 and PostelVinay Chapter 6). Which narrative wins out is not just a matter of performative power but also of wealth and political influence (Alexander and Butler Breese 2011, xiii). Narratives of

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c­ ultural trauma, therefore, are shaped by existing societal cleavages and asymmetries, as well as potentially giving rise to new ones.

Trauma Narratives in East Asia Memories of past trauma are essential to national identities and interstate relations in today’s East Asia. Narratives about national suffering are fashioned by governments across the region to legitimize their rule. Inevitably, both within and between states, shared historical experiences are subject to varying and often conflicting interpretations. East Asian nations are simultaneously bound together and separated by distinct historical accounts and perceptions of the same events, in particular the twentieth-century legacies of war, totalitarianism and colonial rule (Shin 2011, 410). As outlined above, these distinct histories are deeply embedded in public consciousness and are transmitted to successive generations via education, ­popular culture and the mass media (Duus 2011, 101). In all states, powerful national narratives dominate the formation of trauma memories. But these narratives are never static, evolving with the shifting needs of national identity formation and international relations, as well as in response to changing internal and global contexts (Sneider 2014, 48). As South Korea and Taiwan emerged from authoritarianism in the 1980s, accounts of historical injustices were no longer monopolized by their governments, while in Japan, competing narratives about wartime brutality and other traumas have long coexisted (Shin 2014, 158). Civil society groups and transnational nongovernment organizations (NGOs) have become increasingly involved in issues of historical injustice (see Qiu Chapter 20, Rowen and Rowen Chapter 23, Shin and Jin Chapter 27 and N. Kim Chapter 28). Growing global attention to human rights has created new narratives around old problems. At the same time, new digital technologies have diversified discourse around history issues, allowing civil society actors to challenge state-orientated narratives even in non-democratic states. The emergence of strong domestic and transnational civil society actors has increased government sensitivity and attention to the presentation of historical issues across the region. Not coincidently, from the 1980s, governments redoubled their interest in museums, history textbooks and other sites commemorating and defining traumatic memories (Berger 2014). The end of the Cold War also influenced memory politics in East Asia. In its first decades in power, China’s communist leadership focused historical narratives on its civil war struggle against the former nationalist government that had fled to Taiwan. The purpose was to legitimize communism as the new anchor of national identity. But as Beijing turned away from communism in the 1980s, embracing a state-led capitalism that rapidly increased economic inequality, the needs of China’s leaders changed. China’s communist-led victory over Japan in WWII became the new narrative underpinning national unity (Alexander and Gao 2012; Sneider 2014). Marking this change in memory policy, from the mid-1980s, Beijing began constructing new museums that downplayed Maoist narratives of class struggle in favour of depicting China as the victim of humiliation and brutality at the hands of foreign powers (see Hess Chapter 19). Researchers are also exhuming some of China’s overlooked or forgotten traumas, featuring transnational efforts regarding local wartime histories that draw on interviews and first-hand accounts (see Qiu Chapter 20 and Vickers Chapter 17). The end of the Cold War unleashed economic forces compelling greater engagement and integration between East Asian powers. Ironically, increased interaction between Japan, China and South Korea enflamed memory politics as a regional interstate issue. Prior to the 1980s, both communist China and authoritarian South Korea were too preoccupied

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with their own internal struggles to focus on issues of wartime memory (Sneider 2014, 49). Democratization brought fresh efforts in South Korea to discuss the impact of Japanese colonial rule. Parallel discussions in China, South Korea and Japan about the same wartime and colonial-era issues became intertwined, with both positive and negative consequences. Growing interaction between Japanese and Korean NGOs, for example, led to ­collaborative efforts to address the comfort women issue (Shin 2014, 170). At the same time, the decision by Chinese, Japanese and Korean leaders to promote nationalistic historical narratives to enhance their legitimacy in the face of the uncertainties unleashed by globalization embroiled all three nations in divisive memory wars. East Asian states engage in tit-for-tat actions that exacerbate historical disputes with their neighbours. The director of China’s Nanjing Memorial, for example, claims his museum was constructed in response to the dispute that erupted with Japan in 1982 over the decision to remove language describing WWII as an act of aggression from Japanese textbooks (Sneider 2014, 54). Japan’s Yasukuni Shine and adjacent Yushukan war museum have come to embody the frictions over wartime memory in East Asia (see Saaler and Rusneac Chapter 7). The opening of a new, expanded and unabashedly revisionist museum in 2002 triggered serious tensions with China and Korea (Sneider 2014, 66). Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s visits to the shrine—that enshrines the souls of convicted war criminals along with Japan’s other war dead—led to widespread condemnation by Japan’s neighbours and derailed relations with China. Similar ­condemnation greeted Prime Minister Abe Shinzo when he visited Yasukuni in 2013 (Kingston 2017). The existence of distinct and often contradictory national historical memories is an obstacle to peaceful and cooperative relations between East Asian states. Disputes over war responsibilities, territory and colonialism limit progress towards the kind of reconciliation achieved in postwar Europe. Collaboration during Japan’s rampage in Asia (1931–1945) remains a contentious issue, one that subverts prevailing tropes about perpetrators and victims, and blurs the boundaries of guilt and innocence (see Wilson Chapter 10). Although political leaders, activists and artists have sought to achieve reconciliation through various means—litigation, joint history writing, exchanges and apologies—interstate divisions over responsibility for past wrongs hinder the development of transnational organizations that might play a role in resolving differences (see S. Kim Chapter 28 and Arrington Chapter 25). Anti-Japanese sentiments remain strong in China and North and South Korea, even among generations with no direct experience of colonialism or war (Shin 2014). Wounds from the past are not fully healed and remain highly contentious diplomatic issues in the present. For example, UNESCO World Heritage designation has become hotly contested as Japan seeks to gain international endorsement for its glorifying narrative of modernization that sparks a clash of regional nationalisms (see Palmer Chapter 13 and Kimura Chapter 14). Furthermore, tensions over historical disputes fuel aggression that could once again trigger conflict. In 2010, for example, a Chinese fishing trawler rammed two Japanese coast guard ships in the waters around the disputed Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu for China)—territories claimed by both states as well as by Taiwan (Kim 2021). In the same vein, Russian military aircraft continually buzz Japanese airspace near the disputed Southern Kuril Islands (known as the Northern Territories in Japan) (Dawson and Spegele 2013). Disputes over history in East Asia are leading to increasing and very real costs in the present.

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The chapters contained in this volume seek to illuminate how historical memories of past traumas have evolved in different countries and communities across East Asia. In examining the existence of contested memories, it is hoped citizens and governments alike will develop a more self-critical approach to past traumas and a greater understanding of the positions taken by others. Such an effort is an important first step in forging historical reconciliation both within and between countries in the region.

Acknowledgement The author would like to thank Molly Sweeny for her help in researching this chapter.

Works Cited Alexander, J. C. (2004). ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’ in J. C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds.) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. London: University of California Press: 1–30. ——— (2012). Trauma: A Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Alexander, J. C. and E. Butler Breese. (2011). ‘Introduction: On Social Suffering and Its Cultural Construction’ in R. Eyerman, E. Butler Breese and J. C. Alexander (eds.) Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers: xi–xxxv. Alexander, J. C. and R. Gao. (2012). ‘Mass Murder and Trauma: Nanjing and the Silence of Maoism’ in J. C. Alexander (ed.) Trauma: A Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press: 118–135. Berger, T. (2014). ‘Different Strokes: Historical Realism and the Politics of History in Europe and Asia’ in D. Chicot, G. Shin and D. Sneider (eds.) Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies. Seattle, WA: University of Washington: 79–104. Caruth, C. (1995). Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. ——— (1996). Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Dawson, C. and B. Spegele. (2013). ‘Japan Claims Russia Breached Its Airspace’. The Wall Street Journal, 8 February, A14. Duus, P. (2011). ‘War Stories’ in G. Shin and D. Sneider (eds.) History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia. Abingdon: Routledge: 101–114. Eyerman, R. (2011). The Cultural Sociology of Political Assassination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ——— (2013). ‘Social Theory and Trauma’. Acta Sociologica 56 (1): 41–53. ——— (2020). ‘Cultural Trauma and the Transmission of Traumatic Experience’. Social Research: An International Quarterly 87 (3): 679–705. Hashimoto, A. (2016). ‘The Cultural Trauma of a Fallen Nation: Japan, 1945’ in R. Eyerman, E. Butler Breese and J. C. Alexander (eds.) Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering. Abingdon: Routledge: 27–51. Kim, S. K. (2021). ‘The Senkaku Islands Dispute Between Japan and China: A Note on Recent Trends’. Ocean Development & International Law 52 (3): 260–273. Kingston, J. (2017). ‘The Politics of Yasukuni Shrine and war memory’ in S. Saaler and C. Szpilman (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History. London: Routledge: 440–454. Kirmayer, L. R. Lemeison and M. Barad. (2007). Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leys, R. (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shin, G. (2011). ‘History Textbooks, Divided Memories, and Reconciliation’ in G. Shin and D. Sneider (eds.) History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories. Abingdon: Routledge: 3–20. ——— (2014). ‘Historical Reconciliation in Northeast Asia: Past Efforts, Future Steps, and the U.S. Role’ in D. Chicot, G. Shin and D. Sneider (eds.) Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies. Seattle, WA: University of Washington: 157–185.

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PART 1

Japan

2 SURVIVING A WORLD DESTROYED Existential Trauma in Hibakusha Experience M.G. Sheftall1 In The Social Construction of Reality (1966), sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann posit that existentially grounded, meaningful human life in both the individual and social realms relies on belief systems the authors call ‘symbolic universes’. These are discursively mediated frameworks that allow us to make sense of the world and our own place in it. When functioning as intended (and evolved), belief systems provide their human constituents with evolutionarily advantageous psychological equanimity (Becker et al. 1973). In the wake of the psychosocial tsunami of the Second World War, the vulnerability of belief systems to epistemic disruption by real-world events became a topic of considerable academic interest (Festinger 1957; Rokeach 1961). The most influential vein of this research to date posits that the negative (often violent) affect we tend to display when our belief ­systems are challenged/threatened is essentially a product of the existential anxiety to which we are prone as sentient creatures instinctively averse to uncertainty and painfully aware of our mortality (Becker 1973; Lerner 1980). This basic hypothesis has received firm empirical validation from experimental research by social psychologists working in Terror Management Theory since the 1980s (Greenberg et al. 1986). Of particular relevance for this chapter, belief system disruption is now regarded by many researchers as the etiological root of both grief (cf. Neimeyer 2001) and trauma (cf. JanoffBulman 1993; Solomon et al. 2015). Grief and/or trauma may be experienced by an individual after: victimization in a violent crime, the sudden loss of a loved one, a personal financial calamity, the breakup of a family, self-esteem collapse from a steep drop in social status, or even the defeat of a favourite sports team (Cialdini et al. 1976). Groups/communities can also experience belief system disruption-prompted trauma when unforeseen calamities confront us with the reality that ours is a world in which justice does not always win in the end and where loathsome fates all too often befall innocent people with mercilessly swift suddenness. Such events would include massive natural disasters, the outbreak of deadly new diseases, economic depressions, or wars—especially when these already traumatic events end in a culturally humiliating defeat (cf. Dower 1999; Foster 1986; Mosse 1990; Schivelbusch 2003 [2001]). When functioning normally, our belief systems are readily capable of evolutionary defensive adaptations—much like a human body’s immune system or like viruses mutating to evade the same—in the face of the usual background static hum of cognitive dissonance DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-3

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from the ‘real’ world that constantly complicates the functioning of our meaning-making frameworks. When there is sufficient time and resources for the operant ‘immune responses’ to be brought to bear, a belief system can repel, attenuate, or absorb the impact of disruptive intrusions and continue to function. The psychological phenomenon of confirmation bias is one common example of such a defensive measure, as is the culturally construed concept of immortality (Becker 1973; Solomon et al. 2015). However, when the scale (‘traumatic mass’) of an epistemic challenge is multiplied by its suddenness/unprecedentedness (‘traumatic velocity’) to result in sufficiently disruptive force, these natural belief system defences can be breached—even if only temporarily—and the humans who normally depend upon the affected belief system for their psychosocial equanimity will experience this disruption traumatically. The past hundred years of human experience have been a virtual parade of such calamities, paramount among these certainly being the two ‘world’ wars of the twentieth century. Although the first of these witnessed slaughter on an unprecedented scale, this destruction was dwarfed a mere twenty years later by the carnage and savagery of the second. The traumatic nature of the Second World War was immeasurably compounded by a new force vector in the realm of modern warfare—the deliberate targeting of civilian populations. Examples of this new category of industrialized homicide of non-combatants would include the near extinction of European Jewry engineered in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust, millions of civilians killed in punitive campaigns waged in China by Japanese forces from 1937 to 1945, and millions killed during the Allied strategic bombing campaign against German and Japanese cities. Yet while the ‘traumatic mass’ of the above-mentioned calamities borders on the ­incalculable—generating force waves of negative affect still rippling across generations for hundreds of millions of Asians and Europeans—their ‘traumatic velocity’ was relatively slow.2 They either took years to unfold, like the Holocaust, or manifested themselves in forms of destruction already known to—and thus anticipated by—their victims, as in the case of conventional strategic bombing. These events—while unquestionably horrific— afforded at least some opportunities on the part of the victimized to mobilize psychological defences against the operant symbolic universe disruptions. The flexibility and utility of such belief defence ‘on the fly’—when time allowed—was well demonstrated, for example, by the overall failure of strategic bombing to cause anticipated levels of panic, despair, and trauma that airwar planners expected would compel the surrender of targeted communities (Crane 1993). When the leaders of targeted communities were successful at narratively framing the grim reality of being bombed as a venue for ‘valiant resistance’ on the part of the ‘home front’, the intended psychosocial panic effect could be neatly reversed, not only preserving but in some cases even bolstering the faith of targeted populations in their respective belief systems (e.g., London during the ‘Blitz’ of 1940–1941). Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, must be considered outliers in the sad category of twentieth century mass traumas. The virtually instantaneous obliteration of these mid-sized Japanese cities by American atomic bombs in August 1945 is the very epitome of what we are referring to as ‘traumatic velocity’, and they afforded their respective populations no chance of mounting any psychological defence. The trauma generated by these calamities was such that it continues to affect survivors nearly eighty years after the events, and remains a scar on the collective psyche of Japanese society and culture to this day, when most Japanese have long forgotten a conventional incendiary raid on Tokyo that, although of much lower ‘traumatic velocity’, killed more people in a single night than the initial casualty totals of either of the atomic bombed cities (see Lifton 1968; Ōta et al. 2014). 12

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Since 2016, the author has conducted at-length interviews with nearly fifty Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors—known in Japanese as hibakusha—with an average age now over ninety years. As the ‘main body’ of this chapter, the author will highlight episodes from the experiences of four Hiroshima hibakusha—three Japanese and a Taiwanese, ranging in age from twelve to eighteen years at the time of the bombings—centred on the events of 6 August 1945 and the aspects of belief system disruption they posed and, to an extent, continue to pose for these survivors of unfathomable trauma.

Ōiwa Kōhei (b. 1932) Ōiwa Kōhei was a first-year Hiroshima Prefectural Junior High School student mobilized for menial war labour. Due to mild illness on the morning of 6 August, he stayed home from air defence firebreak-clearing duties with classmates in downtown Hiroshima. Two-thirds of those classmates were killed instantly on the day of the bombing. The majority of the remainder died over ensuing days, weeks, and months from a combination of burn and impact injuries and acute radiation sickness. Only 18 of the original 150 boys in this class year were still alive when they returned to school for second-year studies in April 1946. The school was 800 metres from Ground Zero—well within the bomb’s zone of total destruction (ZTD) in Central Hiroshima. Ōiwa-san’s home was 1.7 kilometres east of Ground Zero. Ōiwa Kōhei woke up with an upset stomach on the morning of 6 August 1945. Just this once, his mother decided to indulge him and let him stay home. On this day—of all days— he would not be joining his junior high classmates under the hot sun, clearing air defence firebreak lanes around government administration facilities near his school in downtown Hiroshima. At the strike of 8:15 AM, Kōhei was lying on a futon in his living room, gazing out at the garden on the south side of his house, when everything suddenly turned a blinding white. In the few seconds of silence that followed, he had just enough time to begin pondering the possibility that the sun had somehow fallen out of the sky and into his front yard when something lifted him up and threw him across the room. Kōhei did not hear any explosion, because by the time its sound arrived some five or so seconds behind the flash, he was already tumbling through the air and crashing into the living room wall, hearing only the roar of cracking wood beams and ceramic roof tiles, shattering glass, and the screams of his family members and neighbours. The 70-metre-tall Hijiyama Hill—the dominant terrain feature in Kōhei’s Hiroshima neighbourhood of Danbara—had shielded his house and most of his immediate neighbourhood from the more horizontally oriented destruction of Little Boy’s thermal rays, initial burst of gamma and neutron radiation, and direct line-of-sight shockwave. But it had offered no protection against the momentary supersonic displacement by that same shockwave of a roughly kilometre-wide dome of air over the centre of the city. The nearly instantaneous movement of this tremendous volume of atmosphere created a clap of concussion that momentarily sucked the oxygen out of the lungs of everyone in or near Hiroshima’s zone of total destruction (ZTD).3 In the Ōiwa house, this vortex of ferociously accelerated air blew in every window from various directions, propelling glass shards and splinters at shrapnel velocities and stripping the roof of most of its heavy roof tiles. Miraculously, no one in the family had been seriously injured by this storm of ballistic building materials, although Kōhei received a cut on one of his shins that would give him considerable trouble in coming days and weeks due to a residual radiation exposure-compromised immune system. In the blink of an eye, a quiet, leafy residential neighbourhood in a city seemingly forgotten by the American incendiary bombers that had been burning down the rest of Japan 13

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that summer had been transformed into a literal hell on earth. Although overwhelmed by the suddenness and savagery of this transformation, thirteen-year-old Kōhei experienced this with a slowly spreading emotional detachment and numbness that gradually extinguished his earlier fear and bewilderment. The first evacuees from the now fiercely burning central business district began cresting Hijiyama and coming down into Danbara about an hour after the explosion. The initial trickle of these shattered, scorched people soon became a stream, then a flood of victims moving in staggering, stumbling, blind-leading-the-blind lines. No doubt sensing relief upon arriving in the only part of the city that was not ablaze from end to end, these walking wounded would sit, lie, or fall to the ground, then never get up again. Some died quickly. Others lay there, lingering, moaning, begging for water or pleading for someone to kill them to end their suffering before they, too, inevitably nodded off dead. Soon, the street in front of the Ōiwa’s house was so deep in bodies there was barely any room to walk without stepping on one. Adding to the horror, the smell of burned human flesh was becoming more overpowering and stomach-wrenching by the moment. Some hours later, in the early afternoon, the lead patrols of Army first responders began entering Danbara from the south. These soldiers were likely from the Akatsuki Command (Army Maritime Command headquartered in Ujina waterfront district of Hiroshima that experienced only minor damage from the explosion) who had worked their way up the east bank of the Kyōbashi River to establish an aid station on the southern foot of Hijiyama Hill.4 In order to accomplish this mission, these troops first had to clear the roadways so that the Akatsuki trucks and other relief traffic could make it through to bring in supplies and carry away the wounded. While the roadways in the Hijiyama-shielded Danbara did not pose the same challenges as most parts of the central business district did in terms of knee-deep piles of structural wreckage and burning debris, they were nevertheless covered with broken human beings, and no vehicular aid was going to be able to reach the neighbourhood until these ‘obstructions’ were cleared. As with the situation everywhere else in the city at this point, there was not yet a standard operating procedure in place for the unprecedented scale of the corpse retrieval, clearance, and disposal task at hand. For the time being, the soldiers had to come up with a system on the fly. To begin clearing the roadways here in Danbara, they first had to distinguish the quick from the dead: the former were either walked or carried away to the aid station now up and running in a large air raid shelter on the slopes of Hijiyama, or to larger Army medical facilities at Ujina or on various islands in Hiroshima Bay (NHK 1977:77). Until someone came up with a better idea for what to do with them, the dead were stacked up against the outer concrete block walls of the homes—including the Ōiwa’s—that faced the neighbourhood’s streets. But there were too many bodies and not enough soldiers to make any kind of headway at more than an unacceptably slow pace. To speed things up, the Akatsuki men began enlisting civilian bystanders to assist in the work. From the front gate of his house, Kōhei watched the grim goings-on in the street with what he remembers as a strange sense of detachment, akin to an ‘out-of-body’ experience. He was so numb with shock and overwhelmed by the horrors and tragedies he had already witnessed that day that he had yet to begin registering physical pain from the deep and still bleeding laceration on his right shin he had suffered that morning. Then he made eye contact with one of the Akatsuki soldiers. ‘Hey you’, the soldier called out to Kōhei. ‘You’re a junior high school student, right? Come over here and help us out’.

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Kōhei was scheduled to matriculate to the Hiroshima campus of the Imperial Military Academy Prep School (which, unbeknownst to him, was now a pile of smouldering ruins) the following month, so, being the good military man-to-be that he was, he unhesitatingly did as he was told. Stepping out into the street, he proceeded to help the soldier stack bodies. The twosome quickly worked out a routine by which the larger, stronger soldier would lift the bodies up from under the armpits, while Kōhei provided stability and a little lifting power to the other end of the operation by picking up the corpses by their ankles. Over the next two hours, they stacked dozens of bodies against the walls facing the street, slowly clearing space on the roadway. More times than Kōhei could count, the burned flesh of the corpses’ ankles sloughed off in his hands the moment he picked them up. Several times when this occurred, he found himself holding onto bare bones. Starting from a normal psychological state, a thirteen-year-old boy finding himself suddenly thrust into such circumstances and ordered to perform such a task would have been forgiven for fainting on the spot—or at least constantly bending over to retch. However, Kōhei’s psychic numbing and depersonalization at this point was so profound that he was able to perform the work without stopping, even as his own blood puddled around his feet from the shin wound. But while his mind could shut down its normal range of emotional responses to distance itself from the trauma threat of his present circumstances, temporarily suspending its capacity for horror and empathy, his intellectual capacity continued to function, taking in and processing the environmental information his senses were feeding it.5 If there is a hell, he recalls thinking to himself at the time, then certainly this is it.

Tsuchiya Keiji (b. 1928) and Zhen Su Bing (b. 1927) Tsuchiya Keiji and Zhen Su Bing were newly minted Army corporals assigned to the Army Maritime Command (a.k.a. ‘Akatsuki’ Command) in Hiroshima. Neither had experienced combat or Allied bombing attacks to this point. On the morning of the explosion, they were engaged in suicide attack (kamikaze) motorboat training on Etajima Island in Hiroshima Bay, 13 kilometres south of Ground Zero. Several hours after the explosion, they were sent along with other Akatsuki Command personnel into the city to engage in rescue and recovery operations. From 8 August until they returned to Etajima on 13 August to resume their regular tactical training, their primary duty was corpse retrieval and cremation. After weathering the worst of the conflagration that had consumed the city during the first twenty-four hours after the bombing, Corporals Tsuchiya and Zhen and their respective Akatsuki units finally managed to work their way up the east bank of the Motoyasu River deep into the ZTD in Hiroshima’s central business district, searching for survivors in the rubble. From 8 August, they received orders to shift this primary mission objective to begin disposing of the tens of thousands of now rapidly decomposing corpses strewn across the stricken city (Hiroshima City 1971a, 1971b: 161). For the duration of this final and longest phase of their unit’s mission, Zhen’s squad was assigned to burn pit duties at field crematories on Jisenji-no-hana, on the pointed northern tip of Nakajima island.6 Tsuchiya and his squad mates rotated back and forth between burn pit work at these crematories and retrieving bodies, one at a time, from the thousands of corpses floating in this stretch of the Motoyasu. Although Akatsuki boat crews had been out on the water engaged in such work since the first afternoon after the bombing, their capacity was insufficient for the task at hand. When the decision was reached on 8 August to commence mass round-the-clock cremation operations across the city as a hygiene emergency countermeasure, rescue crews like Tsuchiya’s squad were directed to help take up the

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slack, working the water’s edge on foot and snaring floating bodies with the same poles and ­g rappling hooks they had previously been using to help survivors. In Tsuchiya recollection, this job was as physically arduous as it was grisly. While performing it, he spent most of his time waist-deep—and occasionally chest- or even neck-deep—in the Motoyasu, out among the bobbing corpses. Almost all of the bodies were scorched redbrown and naked, with their facial features so thoroughly destroyed that it was impossible to tell at a glance whether they belonged to adults or children, males or females. The inability to make such distinctions had no direct bearing on the performance of Tsuchiya’s mission parameters of grabbing the corpses with his pole and hauling them to shore, and may have even been beneficial in the sense that the more mechanically and unfeelingly he could do this—that is, the more he could approach the bodies as things and not as former human beings—the more efficiently (and less traumatically) his work would proceed. Still, no matter how determined he was to remain emotionally inured to the ­formerly living humanity of the bodies, it was impossible not to occasionally wonder about—and experience stabs of empathy for—the human beings these waterlogged, tattered brown lumps had been when they jumped into the city’s rivers and drowned to escape the agony of their burns and the terror of the flames. Once the bodies were towed to shore, Tsuchiya and his squad mates hoisted them up onto the stone wall embankments that lined both sides of the river. Here, thousands of these bodies were arranged in rows for stretcher-bearers to ferry to the burn pits. These quays also became viewing galleries for family members who had come into the ZTD looking for loved ones missing since 6 August. As this stretch of the Motoyasu had been teeming with junior high school students clearing firebreaks to protect the Prefectural Office on the morning of the explosion, many of these desperate family members were parents trying to identify these now missing children by facial features, personal items, or official civil defence identification tags sewn on whatever scraps of clothing there may have still been left on their bodies. Throughout the day, this sombre scene’s ambient sounds of lapping river water, swarming blowflies, and crackling pyre flames would be pierced by the sudden wail of a mother or the cracking yelp of a father who had just found their child in the corpse heaps. Seventy-odd years later, Tsuchiya says he still hears these screams in his ears every night when he goes to bed. In a typical Hiroshima field crematory, such as the Ōte-machi and Jisenji-no-hana sites worked by Tsuchiya and Zhen, a routine was established by which unclaimed bodies from the quays would be stretchered in, then lined up again, one last time, by the burn pit. When standard issue canvas stretchers were not available for carrying the corpses, rubble-scrounged sheets of corrugated metal and the like would be used as palettes for the purpose. When nothing like this was available, the soldiers would strip down to their waists and fireman-carry the corpses to the burn pit, the idea being that it would be easier to rinse the inevitable reeking effluvia resulting from this work off of one’s bare skin than out of one’s uniform tunic.7 While the soldiers at this pay grade had some idea of the hygiene risk posed by this work, none had any idea at all about the residual radiation to which they were being exposed in their handling of these irradiated corpses virtually non-stop from 8 to 13 August. Nearly all would eventually succumb to some degree of radiation sickness over coming days and weeks, and many would develop various types of cancer from this exposure later in life, generally beginning in late middle age. In typical burn pit operating procedure, corpses would be given a final going-over by clerks (alternately military, police, or civilian civil servants) for any means of identification, usually through the standard civil defence I.D. tags on clothing, but occasionally through wallet contents, schoolbag items, etc. When such information was found, it was recorded 16

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on manifest sheets by the clerks. Unidentifiable bodies—which were in the vast majority— were logged and bodycounted as John/Jane Does. After the ID’ing process, the corpses—as many per batch as possible—would be placed on top of a wooden pyre framework with a Jenga-like structure of interlocked scrap wood either salvaged from the river or brought in by Akatsuki trucks or boats.8 Then the pyre would be thoroughly doused with diesel oil and set alight. From our privileged postwar objective vantage point—and inhabiting a vastly different symbolic universe as we do in the twenty-first century—we could be forgiven for assuming that Corporals Tsuchiya and Zhen might have preferred to stay on in Hiroshima on body disposal duty rather than going back to Etajima Island to resume training for their upcoming suicide attack missions. But that was not the case. They had been glad to get out of Hiroshima and back to the ‘normalcy’ of their base life and their training. They were in no hurry to die, but at least the deaths they were expecting were ones they had already been mentally preparing themselves for and, of probably greater importance, ones that fit fairly seamlessly and effortlessly into the pro Mikado mori symbolic universe any Japanese born since the 1890s or so had been steeped in from birth. In a ‘better the devil you know’ sense, resuming their suicide attack boat training on Etajima Island may have constituted a return to a more meaningful and stable world—in other words, a return to the familiar—for these boy-soldiers, compared to the surreal hell they had just left behind in Hiroshima. It would seem that as long as they were in uniform and in the company of a large number of similarly clothed and experienced age cohort peers, all facing the same fate when the Allied invasion would commence, they were able to subsume the unimaginably grisly and horrific trauma they had just experienced through the immersion in duty and exertions their pre-Hiroshima symbolic universe prescribed as a meaningful mode of existence for young men in 1945 Japan. But when those uniforms came off and those duties ended, being exchanged for civilian mufti later that fall and plenty of ‘down time’ for solitary introspection, the memories and images of those six days of hell in Hiroshima were there waiting for them, like bullies at a school gate. Over the next eight decades, Tsuchiya and Zhen were able to rebuild meaningful lives for themselves by integrating themselves into the new meaning-making frameworks available to them in postwar Japan (and postwar Taiwan, for Zhen). They were never able to subdue their trauma completely, but they did eventually learn to live with it.

Tominaga Chieko (b. 1932—d. 2021) Tominaga Chieko was a second-year prefectural girls’ school student mobilized for war labour. Similar to Ōiwa Kōhei’s circumstances, she stayed home from air defence firebreak-clearing duties with classmates in downtown Hiroshima on 6 August due to upset stomach and fever. All but one of her classmates on the firebreak worksite were wiped out. Her home was 3.4 kilometres south of Ground Zero.9 In her pre-bomb life, the privileged and high-spirited Tominaga Chieko inhabited a stable world in which each day was a reassuring (if rather tiresome and spartan) repetition of the day before it. Of course, it being wartime, all of this control and stability suffered the occasional temporary wobble, when nudged by yet another air raid warning (which never came to anything for Hiroshima), or when someone’s older brother or uncle or father came home from overseas in a small white cotton-wrapped box. But these things, in and of themselves, were not enough to turn Chieko’s symbolic universe on its ear. Despite all the daily chanting and bamboo spear drills at school, the war had still seemed to her something of an abstraction—something happening to other people, far away. Even at night, when Chieko 17

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could hear American bombs falling on Kure or some other nearby city, as far as she was ­concerned, they might as well have been falling on the far side of the moon. In Chieko’s lifeworld, everything was under control, because responsible adults—smart, important men like her elite Mitsubishi executive father—were in charge, and they would protect everyone from any real danger. Sirens would warn of an impending air raid. The Emperor’s forces were not retreating but they were drawing the enemy closer to the Home Islands for a final decisive battle, where the Divine Wind of Japan’s valiant kamikaze pilots—who were virtual media rock stars of the era—would eventually save the nation and deliver final victory. And even with her war- and world-weary mother frequently muttering under her breath that these were all lies and dangerous pipe dreams, the prevailing assumption in the Tominaga household—at least for Mrs Tominaga and her daughters—was that when the war came to its inevitable end, they would all still be standing and life would go on as usual. But all of the comforting certainties of Chieko’s stable world had begun to unravel the moment she saw the mushroom cloud over downtown Hiroshima from the front yard of her house. For the next twelve hours, while she and her family members wandered around south Hiroshima looking for a place to ride out the fires beginning to sweep the city, each scene of horror she encountered was a new assault against her once firmly held belief that the world made sense and the grownups in charge knew what they were doing. The first full day of Tomonaga Chieko’s post-bombing life began in the comfort of her own futon (her Ujina neighbourhood had escaped the conflagration that had destroyed most of the rest of the city), when she woke up realizing that nothing was ever going to be the same again. At this point, she was not aware that five other girls had also been absent from her homeroom work team on the firebreak clearing site. Therefore, for all she knew, she was the only surviving member of her class—saved from the obliteration that had befallen her classmates because she had had an upset stomach and a low-grade fever on the morning of the bombing, and her mother had insisted she stay home that day. By the prevailing mores of her wartime Japanese lifeworld, the mere fact of Chieko’s survival under these circumstances—when her classmates had died performing their patriotic duty—was disgraceful. Rather than feeling joy and relief at her miraculous survival, Chieko instead considered herself cast under a pall of shame, and assumed that at least as long as she lived in Hiroshima, she would have to go about her daily life with that personal legacy tattooed across her forehead. Whether she understood this intuitively or not, the choices she would make on this first morning of her new life would in large part determine how she would live with this unwanted but now indelible identity, not only as a survivor but as one who had weathered the catastrophe unscarred, uninjured, and unbereaved in a city where such individuals were few and far between after 6 August. From now on, she would meet people in the city who would despise her at first acquaintance for the fact of that immaculate survival alone—and even more so once they learned about the freak luck of its circumstances. If she was going to continue living in Hiroshima, she would have to learn how to face these people—to look them in the eye. As the first step towards such a self-image recovery, she determined that she had to go back to school this morning. She would do this not only out of the altruistic, decent impulse to see what she could do to help, but just as importantly, to be seen doing so. She would show up for duty, appropriately humbled by what everyone would no doubt consider her undeserved (and malingering suspicion-tainted) luck, but—critically—not ashamed of it.

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When Chieko arrived at school, the first thing she noticed was that the main classroom building—a two-storey wooden structure—had been buckled by the blast force of the previous day’s explosion. Inside the building, the least damaged classrooms had been converted into aid stations. These were staffed by the school faculty and students—who had received a modicum of combat first aid training as part of their late wartime curriculum—and also by a cadre of soldiers, some of whom appeared to be trained medics. In the classrooms, the floors were covered virtually wall to wall with victims—in turn moaning, motionless, or screaming—laid out on blankets or portable tatami mats. Narrow lanes had been left between their rows—just enough for the orderlies to make their rounds, and also to provide space for the large numbers of family members who were now filling the rooms to overflowing. Chieko continued moving along the corridor, peering into classrooms until she saw familiar faces; some of her teachers clustered around a small group of prone bodies, whose diminutive size—but no other observable features—indicated that they were girls from the school. Some of these girls had been ferried to the campus by Akatsuki trucks that had picked them up where they had collapsed along Rijō Street, but a handful of them had somehow walked all the way back here from the firebreak worksite under their own power.10 What little was physically left of these girls, as Chieko recalled over seventy decades later, could hardly be called human. Their faces were essentially useless for identification; they had been so badly burned that they could only be distinguished by their speech, which was raspy and barely audible. Many of the girls had been looking up at the sky and cheering when they heard the American planes go into their post-bomb drop power turns, mistaking instrumentation parachutes dropped by the one of the planes for bailing out crew members. As a result, even their tongues and the insides of their mouths had been flash-burned by the fireball. Their eyes—for the girls who still had any—were barely perceptible slits in swollen, rust-brown faces pebbled with burn blisters and mangled by ballistic blast effect debris. Chieko could not work up the nerve to try to talk to any of them. Increasingly sensitive to what she interpreted as stabbing accusatory glances from the mothers in the first aid ward, she seized the first opportunity that presented itself for her to make as graceful an exit from the school grounds as possible. For the duration of the crisis aftermath over the next few weeks, she would continue returning to the school aid stations everyday to help—and, again, to be seen doing so— but she could never quite shake the ‘impostor syndrome’ feeling that would inevitably come over her when she did. In one form or another, with varying phases of intensity, she would fight this feeling for the rest of her life. As sociologist Ito Takeshi has observed, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki visited indiscriminate, instantaneous, and near total destruction upon every facet of the psychosocial, institutional, and cultural lifeworlds of these cities (1985:57–58). The victims who survived the initial physical trauma of these events subsequently found themselves at least temporarily bereft of functioning belief systems, inhabiting a physical environment completely immersed in death and destruction and overshadowed by an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, existential bewilderment, and debilitating despair that psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, in his classic hibakusha study Death in Life, refers to as ‘disintegration and dissociation’ (1968). This effect was only exacerbated nine (or six, in the case of Nagasaki) days later, when Emperor Hirohito’s surrender broadcast deprived the survivors of the potential belief system ‘lifeboat’ of accommodating the trauma and loss they had just experienced in narratives of noble sacrifice for Japan’s war cause. When Lifton returned to Hiroshima decades after his early 1960s hibakusha field work, he reports having been struck by a ‘new tone’ among the survivors he revisited

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expressing their determination to move beyond what they called “victim c­ onsciousness”. By that they meant breaking out of the identity of the victim and asserting their more inclusive humanity. This seemed to be an important step for many in reconstituting their existence after undergoing the most extreme form of trauma. (Lifton 1968; preface to 1991 edition, xi) Like Lifton’s ‘recovering’ former subjects in the 1980s, the hibakusha I met in the 2010s and 2020s—who are now in their nineties—seem to have dealt with their fear, anger, sense of helplessness, and despair by narratively re-framing their victimhood in some way that is not nihilistic or otherwise self-harming. Most deal with their ongoing trauma, in part, by accommodating it into meaning-making narratives, such as hibakusha rights activism, and by sharing their memories and testimony as part of peace education efforts. But as with the experience of frontline combat survivors, none have escaped psychologically unscathed or without emotional scars. For all, the struggle is ongoing, with their old inner trauma demons never vanquished but just intermittently dormant. These demons can return to descend on them like a shroud of blackout cloth, without a moment’s notice, bringing back terrifying memories or re-stoking never-ending fears over bomb-related health problems. Even stimulus as seemingly innocuous as the sound of an overflying aeroplane, or the smell of carbonized animal protein—hair from the open door of a beauty salon, for example, or smoke from fire-roasted meat at a street festival vendor’s stall—can summon a visit from this PTSD demon, with accompanying panic attack symptoms such as nausea, vertigo, and insomnia (Ōta et al. 2014).

But the hibakusha Carry On As the last of the hibakusha with yet accessible narrative memories of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki now approach the end of their lives, it is imperative that the rest of us not allow their experiences to fade away with the tides of time. This is imperative not only from the standpoint of the historical record but also in the self-interest of our own continued survival as a species; as almost every hibakusha interviewed has remarked to the author, their experiences must be preserved for and passed down to future generations, to remind us—lest we forget—that everyone living since August 1945 has done so in a world in which an entire city—any city—can be erased from the face of the earth in the blink of an eye. The hibakusha want their memories preserved not only as reminders of a terrifying past but also as prayers for a better future—prayers that we never allow something like Hiroshima and Nagasaki to happen again, and that the human race will hopefully see a day when weapons like the infernal bombs that destroyed those two cities no longer exist.

Notes 1 This research was made possible in part by JSPS grant #18K00908 ‘Hibakusha Lives and Collective Memory Communities in the 21st Century’. The author would also like to thank all of the hibakusha informants without whose generous cooperation this research would not be possible. The author is also grateful to Penguin Random House for permission to use narrative passages in this chapter from the manuscript for his upcoming volume on Hiroshima hibakusha, tentatively titled Embers: The Last Survivors of Hiroshima (scheduled for 2024 publication). 2 The term ‘traumatic velocity’—which is original to this study—is not implied as being a measure of chronological development or physical movement, but rather of the unexpected/­ unprecedented/‘out of the blue’ quality of a trauma-generating event from the perspective of those

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Surviving a World Destroyed who experience it. ‘Traumatic velocity’, in this sense, is close to the military concept of ‘shock effect’. It is the central force vector mediating the traumatic effectiveness of acts of terrorism, whose perpetrators otherwise tend to lack the physical means to mobilize ‘traumatic mass’ against their targets. 3 This was roughly 3-kilometre-wide circular area of the city, centred on Ground Zero, that was completely obliterated by the initial blast effects of the bomb. The subsequent conflagration that swept over the city after the explosion destroyed a far larger area. 4 The most detailed record of the Akatsuki Command’s rescue and recovery activities in the city can be found in Volume 1 of Hiroshima Genbaku Sensaishi (Hiroshima City 1971a, 1971b: 1/217–293). The only comprehensive history of the unit to date is Horikawa, K. (2020). Akatsuki no Ujina: Rikugun Senpaku Shireikantachi no Hiroshima (‘Akatsuki’s Ujina: The Hiroshima of the Commanders of the Army Maritime Transport Command’). Tokyo: Kodansha. 5 See the concept of ‘psychic closing-off’ as discussed by Lifton (1968) Death in Life. 31–34. Lifton also refers to this phenomenon as ‘psychic numbing’, Death in Life 31 (Lifton uses as an example an Army NCO assigned to mass cremations, who said ‘if we had been sentimental we couldn’t have done the work…We had no emotions…Because of the succession of experiences I had been through, I was temporarily without feeling…’. 6 This is the site of present-day Hiroshima Peace Park. 7 While most of the soldiers performing rescue/recovery work in the city were wearing reasonably protective clothing such as long trousers, combat boots, and heavy twill long-sleeved tunics, Tsuchiya’s company had been in the middle of—and thus dressed for—morning calisthenics when the order to go into the city had come down through the chain of command on 6 August. As a result, he and his companymates spent their week in the Hiroshima ZTD wearing T-shirts, short pants, and canvas zukku athletic sneakers. 8 Virtually all of the wood and other organic material in the ZTD had been incinerated by the thermal flash and firestorm. 9 Tominaga—under her married surname of Seki—wrote two monographs about her Hiroshima experiences: Seki, C. (2015). Hiroshima no Shōnen Shōjo-tachi: Genbaku, Yasukuni, Chōsen Hantō Shusshinsha (‘The boys and girls of Hiroshima: The bomb, Yasukuni Shrine, Koreans’). Tokyo: Sairyūsha. Seki, C. (1985). Hiroshima Dai-Ni Kenjo Ni-nen Nishi-gumi: Genbaku de Shinda Kyūyūtachi (‘Second Hiroshima Prefectural Girls School, Second-year West Class: My classmates who died from the atomic bomb’). Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. 10 Rijō Street was—and still is—the main north-south traffic artery for Hiroshima’s streetcar system, connecting Hiroshima Station with the Ujina waterfront district fronting Hiroshima Bay.

Works Cited Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday. Cialdini, R. B., Borden, R. J., Thorne, A., Walker, M. R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L. R. (1976). ‘Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34: 366–375. Crane, C. C. (1993). Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Dower, J. (1999). Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W. Norton. Festinger, L. (1957). Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Foster, G. M. (1986). Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865 to 1913. New York: Oxford University Press. Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). ‘The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory’, in Baumeister, R. F. (ed.), Public Self and Private Self. New York: Springer-Verlag: 189–212. Hiroshima City (1971a). Hiroshima Genbaku Sensaishi, Vol.1. Hiroshima: Hiroshima City Hall. Hiroshima City (1971b). Hiroshima Genbaku Sensaishi, Vol.3. Hiroshima: Hiroshima City Hall. Horikawa, K. (2020). Akatsuki no Ujina: Rikugun Senpaku Shireikantachi no Hiroshima (‘Akatsuki’s Ujina: The Hiroshima of the Commanders of the Army Maritime Transport Command’). Tokyo: Kodansha.

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M.G. Sheftall Ito, S. (1985). Hiroshima/Nagasaki kara sekai to mirai e (‘From Hiroshima/Nagasaki to the world and into the future’). Tokyo: Keisōshobo. Janoff-Bulman. (1993). Fundamental Assumptions. New York: The Free Press. Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) (1977). Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. Lifton, R. J. (1991 [1968]). Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mosse, G. L. (1990). Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). ‘The language of loss: Grief therapy as a process of meaning reconstruction’, in Neimeyer, R. A. (ed.), Meaning Reconstruction & the Experience of Loss. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association: 261–292. Ōta, H., Yoshimine, E., & Mine, M. (2014). Genbakuya no torauma: Hibakusha chōsa saikenshō: Kokoro no kizu wo mitsumete. (‘Trauma of the atom-bombed space: A reconsideration of hibakusha surveys; examining ‘scars of the heart’’). Nagasaki: Nagasaki Shimbunsha. Rokeach, M. (1961). The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations in the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems. New York: Basic Books. Schivelbusch, W. (2003 [2001]). The Culture of Defeat (translated by Jefferson Chase). New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Company. Seki, C. (1985). Hiroshima Dai-Ni Kenjo Ni-nen Nishi-gumi: Genbaku de Shinda Kyūyūtachi (‘Second Hiroshima Prefectural Girls School, Second-year West Class: My classmates who died from the atomic bomb’). Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. Seki, C. (2015). Hiroshima no Shōnen Shōjo-tachi: Genbaku, Yasukuni, Chōsen Hantō Shusshinsha (‘The boys and girls of Hiroshima: The bomb, Yasukuni Shrine, Koreans’). Tokyo: Sairyūsha. Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. New York: Random House.

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3 JAPANESE PROGRESSIVES, ASIA, AND POSTTRAUMATIC GROWTH Simon Avenell

Discussions of modern Japanese history and trauma have rightly focused on the roadblocks to genuine acceptance of responsibility for the transgressions of empire and militarism, for the worrying prevalence of historical denialism and the concurrent appeal of victim ­narratives, and for the seeming inability of Japan to reach reconciliation with its former ­v ictims throughout Asia. Japan, it seems, has been stuck in a perpetual state of denial, having never truly come to terms with its history of perpetration towards Asia and, hence, unable to understand the trauma of its victims and the steps needed for healing. As one critic d­ efinitively ­concludes, in Japan—like China, Rwanda, Cambodia, Guatemala, and elsewhere—so-called ‘carrier groups’ have not been able to construct ‘sufficiently persuasive narratives’ about the relevance of ‘distant sufferings’ and ‘trauma claims’ by former victims. As a result, the perpetrators of these collective sufferings have not been compelled to accept moral responsibility, and the lessons of these social traumas have been neither memorialized nor ritualized. New definitions of moral responsibility have not been generated. Social solidarities have not been extended. (Alexander 2004, 27) This depiction of a Japan that has not come to terms with the traumas and suffering it caused in the past is persuasive, particularly when we consider the litany of unresolved historical issues such as military sexual violence and prostitution, colonial rule in East Asia and the Pacific, wartime human experimentation, and atrocities at Nanjing and elsewhere. It is apparent also in the syndrome of a Japan seemingly stuck in an unending postwar era—a kind of limbo induced by the inability to genuinely recognize past transgressions. Indeed, all of this is self-evident and demands sensitive attention if Japan is to ever fashion a redemptive collective memory with its neighbours. However, while accepting the debilitating consequences of this post-imperial and postwar syndrome, it is important to also recognize how the nexus of history and trauma in Japan after 1945 has not only been about stagnation and repudiation. As I argue in this chapter there has been another postwar history of trauma with far more positive and hopeful outcomes. Using the idea of posttraumatic growth, I want to propose that the history of DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-4

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left-progressive thought and activism in postwar Japan has had constructive outcomes, most certainly for the individuals constituting this group but also for the broader development of civil society in the country and the evolution of Japan’s connections with Asia. I want to challenge definitive conclusions like the one quoted above which tend to present the image of a monolithic ‘Japan’ or ‘Japanese’ unaccepting of moral responsibility, unable to construct the solidarities needed for social transformation, and incapable of growing in the wake of perpetration. In broad strokes such depictions are certainly valid, but the problem as I see it is that broad strokes can also inflict their own forms of violence on genuine, fine-grained understanding. To build my case about this posttraumatic growth in Japan after 1945 I will first need to clarify some conceptual terrain followed thereafter by a brief recounting of the postwar intellectual and activist history that led to growth. As should become obvious, my contribution in this chapter differs somewhat from the other treatments of trauma in this volume because I am dealing with trauma experienced by members of the perpetrator group and not the victimized group, as is usually the case in examinations of the phenomenon (Blackie et al. 2016). In the highly politicized context of historical memory, such a perspective no doubt appears counterintuitive if not intentionally provocative. But if we consider trauma on an individual level, it becomes obvious that the notion of perpetrator trauma is hardly atypical. Consider, for example, the countless cases of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) experienced by combatants sent to fight wars of aggression by their perpetrator states. On one level such individuals are certainly victims of the states that facilitate their acts of violence, but on another level their acts—their choices and their omissions—on the battlefield are also causal factors in their trauma. I am suggesting, then, that the same phenomenon may be observable for collectivities: just as individual aggressors can grow in a positive direction through trauma—through bravely facing their deplorable acts—so too might perpetrator societies. The key is having intermediaries who inject their individual recognition of moral injury into political praxis and institutions.

The Conceptual Terrain Before diving into the historical specifics of this narrative I need to clarify a number of ­conceptual issues: first, what do I mean by the trauma of Japanese progressives and second, what was the nature of their posttraumatic growth? With respect to trauma, a number of points are relevant. First, without claiming any expertise in the discipline, it is obvious that psychologists are not in complete agreement as to what exactly constitutes ‘trauma’, with some noting the necessity for PTSD and others adopting a less rigid approach. In the context of postwar Japanese intellectuals and activists, the most appropriate definition of trauma is that advanced by Tedeschi and colleagues (2018, 4) who identify ‘circumstances that significantly challenge or invalidate important components of the individual’s assumptive world…. From this perspective, to be considered traumatic events do not necessarily have to be life-threatening or narrowly defined as a cause for PTSD symptoms’. The critical point is that the event or the experience must challenge ‘the basic assumptions about one’s future and how to move toward that future, and therefore produce massive anxiety and s­ ychic pain that is difficult to manage’ (Tedeschi and Calhoun 1988, 2). Important too is that the trauma I am discussing among Japanese progressives was ­collective in nature—it was experienced by individuals to be sure, but it was a shared experience and a shared awakening to that trauma. The scholar of political thought Maruyama Masao’s notion of a ‘community of contrition’ among leftists in the early days of defeat speaks powerfully 24

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to this shared experience (Maruyama 1996, 254). Sociologists have ­conceptualized this ­phenomenon under the rubric of ‘cultural trauma’ which seems particularly germane in the case of Japan and Japanese progressives specifically. In cultural trauma, ‘members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways’ (Alexander 2004, 1). This definition is obviously focused on the trauma experienced by victims, but I believe the same process is evident for perpetrators as well. Indeed, as Alexander (2004, 1) notes, ‘it is by constructing cultural traumas that social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilizations not only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering but “take on board” some significant responsibility for it’. Such responsibility work is critical in understanding trauma in the case of Japanese progressives and connects directly to the final conceptual aspect of trauma I wish to emphasize: namely, its constructed nature. Here again I borrow from Alexander (2004, 10) who notes that trauma is not the result of a group experiencing pain. It is the result of this acute discomfort entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity. Collective actors “decide” to represent social pain as a fundamental threat to their sense of who they are, where they came from, and where they want to go. Grasping this notion of trauma being actively constructed by collectivities is absolutely vital if we are to understand the process of posttraumatic growth among Japanese progressives I am describing here. Given this definition of trauma, the next conceptual element—and indeed the core of the argument I am making herein—is posttraumatic growth. As I show in the historical discussion below, Japanese progressives needed to proceed through a number of often tortuous awakenings before reaching the point of growth out of their trauma. Among these, perhaps most important of all was their awakening to the ‘moral injury’ they had caused—or at least been complicit in or failed to actively resist—as perpetrators against Japan’s colonial and wartime victims. The moral injury was external in terms of what the Japanese had done to others, but it was also internal in the sense of mentalities that had been debilitated by unconscious prejudices and racisms. To borrow from Blackie and colleagues (2016, 410), the moral injury progressives’ experience emerged in the ‘harmful aftermath’ that occurred when their earlier ‘action (or inaction) violate[d]…deeply held beliefs about morality’. Progressives experienced a cognitive dissonance between what they thought they had been—that is, ethical and moral advocates of human rights—and the reality of what they were—complicit actors in the transgressions of the past and individuals with worldviews and mentalities deeply compromised by age-old prejudices towards Asia. Becoming aware of this discrepancy was critical in opening a pathway to posttraumatic growth. Through self-disclosure of their earlier complicity progressives were able to develop ‘new flexible, adaptive beliefs’ (Blackie et al. 2016, 411). Moreover, dissatisfied with personal redemption alone, they developed a strong sense that their trauma ‘must be converted into a community asset, not just a personal asset or catastrophe’ (Bloom 1998, 3). Thus, born from the trauma of their cognitive dissonance was a vision of a new society. The trauma, as I argue here, had ‘an important impact on the social fabric, creating an enduring need to revisit, heal, and learn from [this] experience’ (Tedeschi et al. 2018, 181–182). Just as with the initial trauma, posttraumatic growth emerged out of a ‘significant ­challenge’ to Japanese progressives’ ‘assumptive world’—the cognitive dissonance between 25

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who they thought they were and what they actually were (Tedeschi et al. 2018, 6). As I show below, the growth was by no means immediate and, to an extent, that growing continues to the present as an unfinished project. It took years to recognize and construct the trauma and longer to turn it in a positive direction. Critically too, as scholars of PTG emphasize, the process for progressives was not simply one of resilience, of returning to a ‘baseline’, or even ‘recovery’. It was about moving beyond what they had been before the trauma—in other words, it was about transformation and involved ‘positive changes’ in their ‘cognitive and emotional’ lives that had implications in the realm of political praxis (Tedeschi et al. 2018, 5). Indeed, as I argue, progressives’ PTG had societal ramifications because intellectuals and activists took it upon themselves to try and exert influence beyond their narrow cohort groups, reaching out to others within Japan and transnationally throughout Asia. So, the posttraumatic growth was not only within progressives’ mentalities and within their own relational spheres. Thanks to their public self-disclosures and activism, we arguably also witness societal growth in Japan through the building of new norms, the strengthening of bonds, and the provision of new opportunities (Tedeschi et al. 2018, 180). Progressives proactively built new lines of communication and collaboration with their counterparts throughout Asia and they introduced new norms of social activism back into Japan that contributed to the evolution of civil society. Thanks to their proactive response to trauma as complicit perpetrators, ideas about ‘political participation and engagement’ and ‘awareness of human rights violations’ in Japan (e.g., among minority communities) and in the world (e.g., economic exploitation in developing nations) were reinforced and strengthened (Rimé et al. 2010, 1035). In short, trauma fashioned growth and not disorder.

From Trauma to Posttraumatic Growth: The Historical Process I have delineated the process from trauma to posttraumatic growth in great depth elsewhere, so here I limit myself to three critical stages on this evolutionary path (Avenell 2022). In the broadest of terms, we can understand the process as one of gradual deimperialization: that is, the process by which the colonizer and invader recognizes their transgression and takes proactive steps towards reconciliation and positive transformation (Chen 2010). Japanese progressives not only needed to face so-called war responsibility (sensoˉ sekinin)—important though this was—but they also had to examine the societal, political, and intellectual foundations that led Japan down the path of expansionism and militarism, and this examination necessarily led them to an investigation of the intellectual foundations of modern Japan and their own worldviews which were troublingly stained by inherited prejudice. Stage one in the early years after defeat involved a forgetting (not uncommon after trauma) followed soon thereafter by a reorientation to Asia in the 1950s among progressives, although this Asian reawakening lacked any cognitive dissonance. Stage two marked progressives’ recognition of their moral injury or what some at the time called their ‘ethnic responsibility’ (minzokuteki sekinin), especially towards minorities in Japan but also in the context of Japan’s involvement in the Vietnam War through its security alliance with the USA. Stage three represented the phase of posttraumatic growth. This was the breakthrough moment when progressives catapulted their trauma into political praxis in a range of civic activism and advocacy. In the 1970s this process unfolded in a series of transnational movements with fellow Asians, while in the 1980s and beyond it found form in a new generation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) active in Asia and deeply motivated by their sense of responsibility to make amends for the past—what some called their ‘postwar responsibility’ (sengo sekinin). Even more remarkably, some progressive intellectuals even began to advocate 26

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for Japanese participation in the construction of an Asian community—a notion long taboo under the weighty historical shadow of the wartime Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.

Stage One: Forgetting Asia, Remembering Asia The period immediately after defeat was one replete with trauma for progressives and indeed the Japanese people more generally as they dealt with the reality of absolute defeat, agonizing death, destruction and starvation, foreign occupation, and the burden of war responsibility. Interestingly, the trauma I am exploring in this chapter—namely, perpetrator trauma—was hardly in the consciousness of progressives as they attempted to pick up the ruined pieces of their lives and tried to comprehend the national tragedy. To be sure, sincere and thorough explorations of war responsibility proliferated among progressives as they searched for the causes of the destruction and death enveloping their world. But for a number of reasons the question of responsibility towards Asia and the associated trauma that would induce remained concealed beneath other more compelling issues. Some observers even posit a kind of ‘amnesia’—intentional perhaps—among progressives towards Asia and Japan’s transgressions in the region (Kang 2005, 77). True or not, there is no doubt that few if any progressives directly addressed such issues, and their discussions of war responsibility adopted a decidedly domestic focus in the early postwar. Two factors seem to have been important in the receding of Asia from Japanese consciousness so quickly, totally, and dramatically after a prolonged period of the region being at the very centre of that consciousness. In the first instance, the American-led occupation of the country precipitated nothing short of a ‘de-Asianization’ of Japan. The colonies in Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere simply disappeared almost overnight without any noticeable backlash from former colonial subjects, thanks to the controlling hand of the Americans. At home, Yoshida Shigeru and other conservative politicians who emerged from the war unscathed cooperated with the Americans in facilitating the repatriation of hundreds and thousands of Koreans and Taiwanese left stranded after defeat. Not all of these colonial subjects would be able to return to their homelands of course, but the outflow at this time and again in the late 1950s (to North Korea) along with policies geared towards assimilation of those minorities who remained only served to amplify the process of de-Asianization. The evolving sense of victimization among ordinary Japanese—that is, a sense of having been victimized by their government and by the Allied forces—only contributed to the almost complete lack of attention to responsibility towards Asia. The other factor had to do with progressives’ own internalized prejudices towards Asia, and indeed, this was the very root of the trauma they would later have to face and attempt to overcome. Surveying the destruction of defeat—both material and psychological—many progressives began to search for defects and deformities within Japanese society, polity, and the mentality of the people. They wanted to know what it was about Japan and the Japanese that had led the country to the folly of such a destructive and—in hindsight—obviously unwinnable conflict with the so-called civilized West. In this context, ‘Asia’ emerged as a particularly useful explanatory characteristic for intellectuals of all ideological persuasions. Marxists like the historian Ishimoda Shō (1946, 36–40), for example, searched for the roots of Japan’s demise in stunted political development. Unlike Western countries where liberalism had replaced earlier feudalism, Ishimoda and other Marxists argued, in Japan such ‘Asiatic’ aspects of the political system were never completely eradicated—not even in the momentous transformations of the mid-nineteenth century. Similarly, progressive liberals wedded to linear narratives of modernization emphasized the Asiatic characteristics of the 27

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Japanese psyche and social organization. Intellectuals like the legal sociologist Kawashima Takeyoshi (1947, 6–19) identified Asiatic elements in the hierarchical and patriarchal organization of the Japanese family, while Weberian advocates like the economic historian Ōtsuka Hisao (1964, 94–95) pointed to the persistence of Asiatic mentalities that prevented the Japanese from evolving into ‘modern human types’ like people of the civilized West. In all of these perspectives, ‘Asia’ became a signifier for everything backwards and uncivilized. This was a perspective progressive intellectuals inherited from the prewar years, and at this early postwar moment it was perceived as a problem only in the sense of Japan’s Asiaticness being an obstacle to national reconstruction. With colonial empire swept under the carpet, there was no perception of a need to reconcile the country’s responsibility to Asia on the one hand, with the denunciation of its ‘Asiaticness’ on the other. Historically, of course, we can see in this discourse on Asiatic backwardness and stagnation how the roots of the coming trauma went back much further than the war and hence would require nothing short of total psychological deimperialization. Progressive attitudes towards Asia began to shift from around the late 1940s and even more so during the 1950s. It is important to realize, however, that positive images of Asia among progressives beginning to emerge at this time were not underwritten by any obvious recognition of a long-standing Asia problem in need of attention. On the contrary, the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, followed by the Korean War and, towards the middle of the decade, the AsianAfrican Conference—also known as the Bandung Conference—of 1955, resonated with many Japanese progressives whose emergent leftist nationalism was forming around a narrative of America’s quasi-colonization of their country. In this narrative of subordination and ­v ictimization, progressives were able to conceptualize Japan under American dominion as a kindred spirit of the former colonized nations of Asia and Africa that were now asserting their global political vision in the non-aligned movement (Avenell 2022, 58). Japanese progressives looked to India’s Nehru and Indonesia’s Sukarno as fellow warriors in the shared struggle against Western—now primarily American—imperialism throughout the world. Staggered by such developments, progressive intellectuals now began to revise their earlier condemnations of so-called Asiatic backwardness, with scholars such as Maruyama Masao (1995, 289–290) and Ishimoda Shō (1950, 400–405) who had earlier vilified so-called Chinese stagnation now revising their positions and lionizing the grand Chinese ­experiment. That there was still a past to be reconciled with Asia was barely audible at this time, but the ­reconceptualization of Asia from everything backwards to the very epitome of global ­liberation among progressives opened the doorway to an encounter with this unaddressed trauma.

Stage Two: Awakening to the Trauma of Ethnic Responsibility A shocking incident in 1958 served as the initial spark in progressives’ recognition of their trauma as perpetrators. In April and August of that year, two women were brutally raped and murdered in Tokyo, the second of whom, a sixteen-year-old female, was discovered lifeless on the roof of the Komatsugawa High School in Tokyo’s Edogawa ward. A month later police arrested Lee Jin-wu, a resident Korean who used the name Kaneko Shizuo. Lee, a would-be writer who boldly sent a novel describing the August murder to the Yomiuri Shimbun as he evaded arrest, was studying for his high school diploma at night at Komatsugawa High School while working during the day. After his arrest Lee refused to attribute his heinous crimes to any sort of pent-up frustration due to the discrimination and racism he had experienced 28

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growing up in Japan as a member of an ethnic minority. The courts also dismissed the appeals of Lee’s legal team to ethnic discrimination as an extenuating circumstance, and, after an unsuccessful appeal, he was executed for his crimes (Avenell 2022, 81–89). As scholars have noted, Lee’s story is an important fable about the sorry situation of many ethnic minorities in Japan and the consequences of their ongoing ‘disrecognition’ (Lie 2008, 92–93), but here I want to focus on the ways it stimulated a significant—indeed trauma inducing—cognitive dissonance among influential progressives. Almost as soon as Lee was arrested a group of high-profile Japanese intellectuals and literati including Ōoka Shōhei, Kinoshita Junji, and Yoshikawa Eiji mobilized in support of the youth (Avenell 2022, 82). The group provided logistical support during Lee’s trial, submitted statements to the court in his support, and even visited the victims’ families—none of which Lee appears to have requested or even desired. For these progressives however, Lee exposed the hypocrisy of the Asian nationalism which many had confidently advocated in response to Bandung, the nonaligned movement, and the rise of communist China. Through Lee they witnessed not only the desolate underbelly of a Japan on the cusp of affluence and high-speed growth but also an unnerving exposé of their internalized duplicity. Here, indeed, was the cognitive dissonance between what progressives believed they were and the truth of who they actually were. As they advocated for mercy towards Lee in the public sphere and before the court, they also began to exhume a moral injury within themselves. Suzuki Michihiko, a scholar of French literature at Hitotsubashi University, noted how Lee’s crimes represented a direct challenge to the Japanese people because they exposed the earlier and ongoing crimes of the Japanese people towards ethnic minorities from nations formerly colonized by Japan (Suzuki 2007, 96). As Suzuki asked his readers in an influential essay in 1966, ‘How are we to deal with this disdain?’ (Suzuki 2007, 96). The Philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke (1976, 136) would later pick up on this line of thought, characterizing the crimes of Lee and other resident Koreans as ‘counter-crimes’ that had been almost inevitable given the ‘original crimes’ of Japan and the Japanese against subjugated peoples throughout Asia in the past. For these intellectuals, all of this amounted to an ethnic responsibility (minzokuteki sekinin) of historic proportions. Such responsibility they felt was far more insidious than even war responsibility because it involved victimized others largely ignored until this time. While war responsibility could be comfortably contained within the conceptual boundaries of the nation and narratives of victimization, recognition of ethnic responsibility quite literally shattered these progressives’ identification as progressives. It was this cognitive dissonance between the assumed and the real that produced their trauma. The Komatsugawa Incident was merely the first in a series of events beginning around the late 1950s that induced a sense of perpetrator trauma among Japanese progressives. The negotiations leading to the signing of the treaty of normalization between Japan and South Korea in 1965 were another important stimulus, thanks to the protestations of Korean students who, like Lee Jin-wu, encouraged Japanese progressives to face the reality of a Japan—to which they belonged—forging a ‘settlement’ with the South Korean dictator, Park Chunghee, in the absence of any genuine resolution of past transgressions. The fact that Japanese negotiators involved in the normalization dialogues repeatedly made inflammatory public comments about Japanese colonialism having lifted Korea out of its backwardness only ­further encouraged progressives to face their complicity (Komatsu 1965, 14). The 1965 escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam War—the year the Japan-South Korea normalization treaty was signed—offered progressives yet another provocation on their journey towards perpetrator’s trauma. Early on, Japanese opponents of the war in Indochina were motivated by their lingering victim consciousness (Oda 1974, 108). When 29

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they saw the victims of American bombing in North Vietnam on their television screens, they were transported back to their own horrifying experiences during the Allied bombing raids on Japanese cities at the end of Second World War. Just like themselves, the Vietnamese were now being victimized by the Americans and hence they could sympathize with them. But thanks to the interventions of leading activists like the novelist Oda Makoto, this sense of victimization was soon complicated by a disconcerting awakening to their perpetration in Vietnam. As Oda explained in an influential 1966 speech, while the images of the ‘brutal acts’ of America in Vietnam transported him back to his harrowing experience as a victim in the air raids on Osaka City in 1945, these images also reminded him that ‘the hands responsible for those brutal acts’ in Vietnam were his ‘very own’. As he concluded, ‘in reality, we are complicit in the Vietnam War. We must recognize our position as perpetrators’ (Oda 1974, 108). By perpetration Oda was referring to Japan’s complicity in the war through its security alliance with the USA. American bombers were using military bases in Japan as staging grounds for their attacks on North Vietnam while Japanese companies were reaping profits from American military special procurements. In all of these ways, Japan and the Japanese were complicit in perpetration against Vietnam, a fellow Asian nation. This growing awareness of Japanese perpetration in Vietnam in the 1960s, enflamed by contemporaneous conservative and American attempts to whitewash modern Japanese history as a largely successful story, forced progressive intellectuals to reconsider the longer history of Japanese perpetration in Asia. Throughout the 1960s, leading intellectuals like Ienaga Saburō, in works such as The Pacific War (Taiheiyō Sensō) of 1968, began to systematically and graphically document the transgressions committed during Japan’s eras of colonial empire and militarism. Through graphic descriptions of the Japanese army’s massacre at Nanjing in 1937 and the bacteriological warfare research carried out by Japanese scientists of the infamous Unit 731 on Chinese victims in Harbin, Ienaga left no ambiguity as to who the aggressors were and, moreover, the responsibility of Japanese in the present to recognize this history and proactively work towards reconciliation and healing. Such developments beginning with the Komatsugawa murders of 1958, the Japan-South Korea normalization dialogues, the Vietnam War, and the new exploration of Japanese colonialism and militarism meant that, by the end of the 1960s, no thoughtful progressive could avoid facing the trauma of complicity in the transgressions of the past and the present. In turn, this broad awakening to trauma opened the way for growth.

Stage Three: Posttraumatic Growth in Civic Activism As I noted earlier, the experience of trauma was not only shared among Japanese progressives in the sense of them all undergoing the same cognitive dissonance through their awakening to moral injury and perpetration. The experience was also shared in the sense that it connected to collective action on the part of progressives which, I argue, produced significant posttraumatic growth—evident, for example, in the evolution of civil society in the country thereafter. Three manifestations of this collective action are particularly illustrative of the kind of posttraumatic growth I see developing in these decades. Growing out of anti-Vietnam War mobilizations, student activism, antipollution ­protest, and the women’s movement, the 1970s witnessed a flurry of transnational movements between Japanese civic groups and activists throughout Asia (Avenell 2022, 207–244). Environmental activists, for example, who had focused largely on the eradication of pollution within Japan during the 1960s, began to forge transnational solidarities with groups in South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines to oppose the expansion of pollutive Japanese 30

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industries into their countries in the wake of more stringent environmental regulations being passed in Japan. Importantly, Japanese environmental activists involved in these movements drew direct connections between what Japan had done in Asia in the past and the actions of Japanese corporations in Asia in the present. When the company Toyama Chemical planned to relocate a pollutive factor to the Ulsan region of South Korea in the early 1970s, Japanese activists were quick to point out the nefarious historical linkages between Japanese and South Korean leaders and big business and, hence, the moral responsibility for ethical Japanese to oppose a repeat of Japan’s sullied history in the country (Avenell 2017). Japanese Women’s groups reacted similarly when they learned of Japanese sex tours—so-called Kisaeng tourism—by hoards of Japanese men to South Korea around the same time. Activists like the journalist Matsui Yayori and the artist Tomiyama Taeko (see Hein in this volume) promptly mobilized with women’s groups in Japan and South Korea to denounce the practice (Kīsen kankō ni hantai suru onna-tachi no kai 1974). Through their opposition the Japanese activists drew connections between Japanese sex tourism in the present and military sexual slavery in the past—the so-called ‘comfort women’. Like environmental activists they also turned the critical spotlight on themselves as the wives and partners of Japanese men travelling to South Korea on such tours. They also turned their attention to their mothers and grandmothers who had maintained the home front while their sons and husbands wrought havoc throughout Asia, or the many women who had accompanied their husbands as settlers in lands colonized by Japan. In this way, these women activists drew a direct link between the past and the present and, moreover, expressed recognition of their complicity and responsibility for the sins of past generations and their own (Onna-tachi no genzai o tō kai 1980). In short, for both environmental and women activists the trauma and moral injury of perpetration connected to proactive action in the present. In a similar way, a new generation of Asia-focused NGOs established in the 1970s and beyond developed their activist agenda on the basis of making amends for the moral injury caused by Japan in the past. But, more importantly, I argue that they also evidence significant posttraumatic growth in the innovative ways they reimagined Japan’s relationship with Asia. Groups such as the Japan Volunteer Center ( JVC), Shapla Neer, and the PHD Association worked diligently to reframe the relationship as one of mutual benefit and learning (Avenell 2022, 288–297). While postwar civic groups had certainly made sincere efforts on behalf of fellow Asians, for groups like JVC earlier generations of activists had not been able to fully overcome the notion of an ‘advanced’ Japan saving a ‘helpless’ (read ‘backward’) Asia. Now, however, the time had come to discard this mentality inherited from deeply rooted historical prejudices towards Asia. Instead of imagining the situation as one of Japanese NGOs travelling to the region to help poor Asians, JVC and other groups called on Japanese to recognize the ways Asia could become a teacher for them. As much as Japanese activists were helping Asians by providing medical services, agricultural knowhow, or technical training, Japanese were also learning important things about the excesses of their so-called modern lifestyles and the impacts of Japanese capitalism on the lives and environments of people beyond the country’s shores. The specialist on Southeast Asia Tsurumi Yoshiyuki made a similar argument at the time, calling on the Japanese people to recognize the merits of the ‘flexible cultures’ of Southeast Asia instead of constantly lionizing and aspiring to rigid cultures like the West or China (Tsurumi 1999b, 250). Flexible cultures, argued Tsurumi, liberated people from grand ideologies and allowed people to ‘live peacefully’ without the need for ‘revolutions’ (Tsurumi 1999a, 271). Such involvement and recognition of Asia, these activists argued, made it possible for Japanese to first critique and then hopefully reimagine their own society (Nakano 2000, 188–189). 31

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Needless to say, the idea of Asia as Japan’s equal overturned a key foundation of the ­ odern Japanese mentality based on the notion of ‘leaving Asia and joining the West’ m (Datsu-A nyū-Ō) first articulated by the prominent Meiji intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi in 1885 at the dawn of Japan’s industrial modernization. And, to take this argument about posttraumatic growth one step further, it is important to recognize that NGOs such as JVC and Shapla Neer were at the forefront of moves to strengthen the financial and regulatory infrastructure to support civil society in Japan in the 1990s. Such NGOs were viewed by political actors of all ideological persuasions as exemplars of the kind of civil society Japan needed to develop. Hence, we can see here how trauma as perpetrators resulted in growth within civic activism and subsequently civil society. Finally, it is also necessary to mention the rise of progressive discourses on Asian community and regionalism beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Led by intellectuals like Kang Sang-jung, Wada Haruki, and Morishima Michio, in these years progressives—emboldened by the rise of the Asian tigers (South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore) and later China—began to advocate for the construction of a new Asian community based on mutual understanding and deepening of economic ties (Kang 2001, Morishima 2001, Wada 2003). Kang, Wada, and others were careful to premise their regionalist visions on the necessity for Japan to genuinely settle its historical issues with its former Asian victims, but by this time they felt confident enough to imagine a Japan capable of being part of the regionalist discourse in East Asia (Wada 2003). Although subsequent tensions with the rise of China prevented the realization of these regionalist visions, they tell us important things about posttraumatic growth among Japanese progressives. The trauma of perpetration was barely discernible for most progressives until the 1960s and it did not translate into activism until the 1970s. But by the 1990s and early twentieth century it was possible for some progressives—including members of Japanese ethnic minorities—to begin reimagining the country as part of an Asian community. Again, I suggest that this phenomenon evidences significant growth in the wake of progressives’ traumatic awakening to their complicity in Japan’s transgressions against Asia in the past. No longer did they envision Japan as the leader of Asia, but instead as an equal and contrite participant in moves for peace and prosperity in the region. Such sentiment undergirded the activities of Japanese NGOs and civic groups as they forged ties with their Asian counterparts in the coming years.

Conclusion As I have outlined in broad strokes above, it is my contention that throughout Japan’s postwar era generations, left-progressive intellectuals and activists became more and more attentive—albeit slowly—to Japan’s history of perpetration in Asia through the country’s colonial empire building and militarism. These individuals and groups also came to recognize the deeply held prejudices the Japanese harboured towards their regional neighbours—prejudices dating back to the very dawn of Japan’s plunge into Western-style modernization. The trauma took the form of a realization by progressives that they too were implicated not only as Japanese citizens but also as intellectuals and activists whose so-called progressive worldviews and mentalities were built on the very same prejudices and discrimination towards Asia that they claimed to oppose. Realization and acceptance of this cognitive dissonance took time to take root in their mentalities, but it ultimately opened the way to growth. Subsequent generations of activists and intellectuals came to realize and accept their moral culpability and responsibility, traumatic though this was. Even more importantly, 32

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self-disclosure and direct action in social movements induced broader societal changes while not necessarily dislodging master narratives based on outright denial and/or passive ­forgetting. Knowledge about Japan’s tarnished past in Asia infused social activism, especially from the 1970s, while new transnational solidarities across Asia helped to enrich the sphere of civic activism. Furthermore, as time passed, Japanese NGOs involved in initiatives and movements in Asia became exemplars in civil society at home, shaping its domestic evolution, particularly in the 1990s and beyond. In short, what I have attempted to show in this chapter is how the trauma of recognizing their complicity in perpetration towards Asia changed the worldviews and mentalities of many intellectuals and social activists which in turn had implications for the evolution of civil society in Japan. Here, indeed, we witness the flowering of posttraumatic growth in Japan and, by consequence, a remarkably different— might we say ‘hopeful’—vision of trauma and history in the Japanese context.

Works Cited Alexander, J.C. (2004) ‘Toward a theory of cultural trauma’, in J.C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N.J. Smelser, and P. Sztompka (eds.) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1–30. Avenell, S. (2017) Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Avenell, S. (2022) Asia and Japan’s Postwar: Deimperialization, Civic Activism, and National Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Blackie, L.E.R, Roepke, A.M., Hitchcott, N., and Joseph, S. (2016) ‘Can people experience posttraumatic growth after committing violent acts?’, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 22(4): 409–412. Bloom, S. (1998) ‘By the crowd they have been broken, by the crowd they shall be healed: the social transformation of trauma’, in R. Tedeschi, C. Park, and L. Calhoun (eds.) Post-traumatic Growth: Theory and Research on Change in the Aftermath of Crises. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1–39. Online. Available HTTP:< https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242223747_By_The_ Crowd_They_Have_Been_Broken_By_the_Crowd_They_Shall_Be_Healed_The_Social_ Transformation_of_Trauma> (accessed 9 March 2022). Chen K. (2010) Asia as Method: Toward: Deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ienaga, S. (1968) Taiheiyō Sensō. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Ishimoda, S. (1949) ‘Chūsei Seiritsu Shi no Nisan no Mondai’, in Rekishigaku Kenkyūkai (ed.) Nihon shakai no shiteki kyūmei. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 33–71. ——— (1950) Chūseiteki sekai no keisei. Tokyo: Itō Shoten. Kang, S. (2001) Tōhoku Ajia no kyōdō no ie o mezashite. Tokyo: Heibonsha. ——— (2005) ‘The imaginary geography of a nation and denationalized narrative’, in R. F Calichman (ed.) Contemporary Japanese Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 71–83. Kawashima, T. (1947) ‘Nihon hōkensei no Ajiateki seishitsu’, Chūō Kōron, 62(5): 6–19. Kīsen kankō ni hantai suru onna-tachi no kai. (1974) Shiryō sei shinryaku o kokuhatsu-suru: kīsen kankō. Tokyo: Kīsen kankō ni hantai suru onna-tachi no kai. Komatsu, S. (1965) ‘Watashi no taiken ni okeru Chōsen mondai’, Tenbō, 83(1965): 14–33. Lie, J. (2008) Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity. Berkeley: ­University of California Press. Maruyama, M. (1995) Maruyama Masao Shū 5. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ——— (1996) ‘Kindai Nihon no chishikijin’, in H. Matsuzawa and M. Uete (eds.) Maruyama Masao shū, vol. 10. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 223–268. Morishima, M. (2001) Collaborative development in Northeast Asia. New York: Palgrave. Nakano, E. (2000) ‘Shimin o dō tsunagaruka’, in Nihon Kokusai Borantia Sentā (ed.) NGO no jidai: Heiwa—kyōsei—jiritsu. Tokyo: Mekon, 186–192. Oda, M. (1974) ‘Heiwa e no gutaiteki teigen: Nichibei shimin kaigi de no bōtō enzetsu’, in Betonamu ni Heiwa o! Shimin Rengō (ed.) Shiryō “Beheiren” undō, vol. 1. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 104–118.

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Simon Avenell Onna-tachi no genzai o tō kai. (1980) Jūgoshi nōto. Tokyo: Onna-tachi no genzai o tō kai. Ōtsuka H. (1964) ‘Kindaiteki ningen ruikei no sōshutsu: Seijiteki shutai no Minshūteki kiban no mondai’, in R. Hidaka (ed.) Gendai Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 34: Kindaishugi. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 93–98. Rimé, B., Dario, P., Nekane, B., and Martinze, F. (2010) ‘Social sharing of emotion, post-traumatic growth, and emotional climate’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 40: 1029–1045. Suzuki, M. (2007) Ekkyō no toki: 1960-nendai. Tokyo: Shūeisha. Tedeschi, R. G., and Calhoun, L. G. (1988) ‘Perceived benefits in coping with physical handicaps’, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Atlanta. Tedeschi, R.G., Shakespeare-Finch J., Taku, K., and Calhoun, L.G. (2018) Posttraumatic Growth: Theory, Research, and Applications. New York and London: Routledge. Tsurumi, S. (1976) Tsurumi Shunsuke Chosakushū, vol. 5: Jiron, Essei. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Tsurumi, Y. (1999a) ‘Mangurōbu no numachi de: Tōnan Ajia tōsho bunkaron e no sasoi’, in K. Hanasaki (ed.) Tsurumi Yoshiyuki chosakushū, vol. 7: Mangurōbu. Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1–275. ——— (1999b) ‘Ajia o shiru tame ni’, in H. Nakamura (ed.) Tsurumi Yoshiyuki chosakushū, vol. 4: Shūdatsu no kōzu, Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 245–265. Wada, H. (2003) Tōhoku Ajia kyōdō no ie: Shin chiikishugi Sengen. Tokyo: Heibonsha.

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4 TRAUMA, RECONCILIATION, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND ARTISTIC COMMENTARY Tomiyama Taeko’s Strategies for Repair through Her Visual Art Laura Hein

Today, there is increasing interest in expanding efforts at healing collective trauma by ­combining them with actions aimed at reconciliation and righting social injustice. This chapter explores the implications of merging these goals with reference to the young women pressed into sexual service to the Japanese military during the Second World War and to the visual art of Tomiyama Taeko, particularly Memories of the Sea (1988) and Harbin: Requiem for the Twentieth Century (1995). (To view these and other images discussed in these pages, please see (Hein 2010, also Tomiyama, (2021)). It begins with an exploration of the relationship between reconciliation and recovery from trauma and then moves to the problems of structural violence and justice. How far do these goals align and in what ways? How do we take into account the fact that trauma is not the sole preserve of the injured party? Tomiyama provides some useful directions for answering these questions.

I Initially, the goals of repair of trauma and promoting reconciliation require acknowledging the harm done to individuals and also overcoming ongoing indifference on the part of the community at large. Both also mean taking seriously the perspectives of the injured parties and their desires in order to compensate for their earlier experience of powerlessness and indignities endured. More fundamentally, both assume that emotional well-being is necessarily part of any definition of success. Emotional engagement and the promise of an ongoing, better relationship are also what separate an act of reconciliation from a mercenary transaction. Yet how to proceed in ways that simultaneously repair trauma and enact reconciliation is not an entirely straightforward proposition because the goals may clash. A ‘trauma-informed approach’ to a victim might involve respecting their wishes to never see or engage with the perpetrator again. If so, because reconciliation is, by definition, a reciprocal process, cutting DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-5

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off all contact, despite being healing for the harmed party, will thwart reconciliation, even though in the long run reconciliation might reduce the effects of trauma on the victim and certainly increase the possibility of greater emotional growth on the part of the perpetrator. Moreover, since trauma is an individual experience, the exact same act may be healing for one victim but retraumatizing for another. Thus, there can never be a universally ‘correct’ response to historical injustice if the primary goal is to heal traumatic damage, although treating people with sincere respect is surely the best place to start.

Defining Trauma Mental health specialists define trauma as the result of an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. (SAMHSA 2014, 33) While the original ‘event’ is always about a power differential because trauma results from a sense of intense powerlessness, people respond in a variety of ways to such circumstances, which do not lead to trauma for everyone. Equally important to producing trauma are the ways that individuals ‘experience,’ that is, assign meaning to the event, a process that continues to evolve as they explain the difficult past to themselves later in light of ongoing psychological or external changes. This continued reassessment is fundamentally a meaning-making activity, not merely carrying a fixed memory forward in time. The effects include both individuals’ feelings about that set of meanings, which often include humiliation, guilt, shame, betrayal and a sense of being silenced, and their behaviours based on those feelings (SAMHSA 2014). All traumatized people—by definition—have negative well-being. Traumatized behaviours, such as depression or hyper-vigilance, are also by definition ones that misread current circumstances as painfully similar to the past, a point to which I will return. This explains why the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), where this definition was developed, is concerned with trauma in the first place. Finding ways to help survivors of trauma not just understand but also change their behaviour is the central task for therapists. While the SAMHSA project is fully committed to providing care that is compassionate and non-judgemental, for people focused on reconciliation this frank acknowledgement that survivors are overreacting to current circumstances may seem like ‘blaming the victim,’ even though accepting the traumatized person’s worldview and actions can stand in the way of providing effective therapy. Where reconciliation and repair converge to the greatest degree is in the area of ‘experience,’ or in the construction of a new narrative that helps make the past less traumatic by reasserting the individual’s sense of discursive control over their world. As recent work in psychology posits, not just our memories but our entire sense of self is composed of the ever-evolving story we create out of our lived experiences, that is, a ‘narrative identity.’ The capacity to create a narrative identity first develops in adolescence and then builds slowly over time as people tell stories about their experiences to and with others. Over developmental time, selves create stories, which in turn create selves…. 36

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Through repeated interactions with others, stories about personal experiences are ­processed, edited, reinterpreted, retold, and subjected to a range of social and discursive ­influences, as the story-teller gradually develops a broader and more integrative narrative identity. (McAdams and McLean 2013, 235) Typically, therapy that starts with this insight involves a two-stage process of ‘work with clients to re-story their lives’ (McAdams and McLean 2013, 235). The first stage is thinking through the experience and developing a coherent narrative, which encourages ­personal growth and maturity. The second, articulating and committing oneself to a positive resolution of the event, is the step most closely associated with happiness and well-being. This is where real repair takes place. Notably, peoples’ narrative identities change as they become better ‘able to manage paradox and contradiction in personal stories’ by middle age (McAdams and McLean 2013, 235). By contrast, ‘intergenerational trauma’ is the result of transmitting the experience and effects of trauma in ways that also damage younger generations, such as conveying intense anxiety whenever they leave the house, perhaps reinforced by new traumatic events. Either way, this is a profoundly social experience, not just an internal one.

Tomiyama, Trauma and Narrative Identity Narrative identity regarding the twentieth century past is where Tomiyama has been a ­trailblazer, deploying creative strategies that went far to reimagine the ‘military comfort women’ in ways that made them legible as having undergone terrible experiences while also retaining their individual core identities. The first problem she faced, much more acutely in the late-1980s than today, was that a fundamental source of trauma for the young women was the inadequacy of the language at their disposal. It is hard to convey in 2022 how quickly all talk of personal sexuality in public settings triggered a cascade of stigma and shame. If c­ oming to terms with an experience requires a way to narrate the event to oneself, let alone to others, then finding the words to do so was the first—enormous—hurdle. Even decades later, survivors kept silent. They had many reasons for doing so but—as they regularly reported—a major one was simply that language itself so often felt inadequate (Stetz and Oh 2001). As Rebecca Copeland has argued, all women in patriarchal societies face this challenge. ‘Language, the very act of speaking publicly—of enunciating a self—has in many societies been consigned to the masculine realm.’ Tomiyama, working in a visual rather than a verbal media, keenly felt this problem, when she, as with other female artists, ‘found that the tools at their disposal—the modes of expression, the material, the critical apparatus they must contend with in order to produce their art—are often uncomfortably marked and defined by the dominant culture.’ Her solution was ‘an act of imagination that goes beyond the ‘normal’ human world, precisely because the normal world is male’ (Copeland 2010, 52). Tomiyama transcended the human world in two large paintings, her most famous works, both of which are set below the waves. At the Bottom of the Pacific depicts the sunken Japanese military transports now resting on the ocean floor, together with the remains of the drowned soldiers and young women who travelled between Japan’s many far-flung battlefields, while The Night of the Festival of Galungan reimagines them at a Balinese celebration, or an imagined after life. As Copeland explains, Tomiyama’s strategy is to deploy familiar iconography in unfamiliar ways that engage the viewer in a fresh dialogue. Viewers must look hard at her complicated 37

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Figure 4.1  Image from Memory of the Sea 1988 Tomiyama Taeko’s paintings and associated slide/DVD works created a narrative of the afterlives of the ‘­military ­ emory of the comfort women’ that reframed their experience in powerfully sympathetic ways. Image #68 from M Sea slides/DVD, 1988. Used with permission from the estate of Tomiyama Taeko.

canvases to absorb their meanings rather than imposing a simple narrative. This act develops a form of association that is narrative building, although the narrative being constructed is not necessarily logical or heading towards an obvious end-point. Thus, the Japanese war flags, bugles and insignia that litter the ocean floor and appear at the festival speak simultaneously of valour, loss and menace (Figure 4.1). As Copeland also argues, Tomiyama’s representations of the naked and broken bodies of the drowned young women resist the ordering and organization that make it easier for the viewer to look in ways that reproduce their powerlessness. She accomplishes that by painting them as vibrant and beautiful alongside the tarnished imperial regalia and vulnerable skeletons of Japanese soldiers. Unusually for visual representations of such sombre topics, these canvases are also jewel-bright and very pretty, ornamented with trinkets and pleasing shapes, although on closer inspection, some are also disturbing. This too is an act of ­reconciliation––an offering of beauty to young girls who enjoyed few such small pleasures in their previous lives. Finally, Tomiyama provided an intertextual narrative structure around her paintings, where she restored a sense of individuality to her protagonists. She did so in a multimedia work created with music composer Takahashi Yūji, which told of a young Korean woman who enlisted a shaman’s help to find her drowned sister. As Tomiyama explained, The history of the ‘military comfort women’ had long been perceived as a social taboo to be hidden in the darkness of Japan’s colonial past. To take up the issue in the world of 38

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visual art, I used the image of the ‘Spirit Miko’ or shaman. She would hear the Korean women’s deep grievances. (Tomiyama 2000) Importantly, the shaman needs no earthly language to do so. Tomiyama was reminding her viewers that the dead women had enjoyed relationships not determined by their sexuality, and also that they left behind others who mourned their loss.

Narrating the ‘Injured’ Community We can think of Tomiyama’s act of imagination as bearing witness despite the fact that she was not engaging directly with survivors. When she created this artistic series, neither survivors nor families had then publicly identified their lost relatives as victims of this kind of forced labour. Today, mental health professionals argue that repairing trauma requires acknowledging the injured community’s understanding of their collective experience, but they had not yet formed a coherent community or a collective narrative about themselves. Paul Farmer, who had a long and distinguished career bridging the worlds of anthropological analysis and hands-on healthcare to poor and stigmatized populations, has defined bearing witness as making an emotional/behavioural commitment to fully elicit from the sufferer the nature of the harm as it is experienced, that is, the trauma. Witnessing trauma ‘requires compassion and solidarity,’ or taking a stance ‘on behalf of others, for their sake (even if those others are dead and forgotten)’ (Farmer 2003, 25–28). This is also the step that actually connects imaginative witnesses (as opposed to eyewitnesses) such as Tomiyama to the past. Tomiyama created a narrative that was empathetic, open-ended and capable of handling complex emotions, creating space rather than filling it up. The components of that narrative were thus available to all the survivors of the wartime military brothel system—men and women alike—to think through the relationship between that past and their evolving individual identities. Bearing witness—because it shapes narrative identity—is a powerful and consequential experience for everyone involved. Since the early 1990s, as the history of these women has become better known, it has also become extraordinarily compelling to many others, in stark contrast to the first half-century after their liberation. I doubt anyone anticipated the extent to which so many people, especially young Asian, Japanese and Asian-diaspora women, would be deeply moved by their life stories of survival and resilience. Nor do their numbers show any sign of abating. As my colleagues and students tell me regularly, direct engagement with the life stories of the survivors feels powerfully significant to them because it in some profound way resonates with their own narrative identities, just as was the case with Tomiyama. They hope that the contact will help them be stronger and more resilient in the face of their own challenges, even though few expect those challenges to be quite so dire. Although their engagement feels incredibly direct and powerful, this is an act of imagination, not of direct experience. In this sense, the connection is exactly like the concept of lieux de mémoire established by Pierre Nora, who acknowledged the emotional intensity of standing in a real physical place and thinking something like ‘a battle that changed the course of history happened right here’ or perhaps ‘my great-grandmother said goodbye to everything she knew and stepped on the new path that led to my existence right here.’ Nora argues that the search for a personally meaningful past is a near-universal aspect of modern i­ ndividuality, and one that feels connected to larger institutional structures in identity-­inscribing ways that are personal and individuating. ‘Those who have long been marginalized in traditional 39

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history are not the only ones haunted by the need to recover their buried pasts,’ he notes. ‘Following the example of ethnic groups and social minorities, every established group, intellectual or not, learned or not, has felt the need to go in search of its own origins and identity.’ Nonetheless, ‘contrary to historical objects, however, lieux de mémoire have no referent in reality; or, rather, they are their own referent: pure, exclusively self-referential signs’ (Nora 1989, 15, 23). This imaginative connection, be it people or places, despite having ‘no referent in reality,’ does nevertheless have a central role to play in both healing and reconciliation. Experiencing the capacity to inspire genuine admiration itself changes narrative identity for everyone involved. As McAdams and McLean put it, ‘attentive listening helps to promote the development of narrative identity’ (McAdams and McLean 2013, 236). Some of this is due to the emotional satisfaction that comes from being treated as worth listening to. The effect is even stronger when survivors hear from their listeners that ‘this experience changed my life.’ The audiences for these stories—the social aspect of this experience—are central to the narrative content of ongoing meaning-making for the protagonists too. As every journalist and oral historian knows, interviewees adjust their answers to match what the interviewer seems to be focused on. It is also worth noting that neither reconciliation nor recovery even requires an i­nitial stance of total sincerity because, as the psychologists tell us, simply enacting a narrative changes attitudes. The act of respectful listening itself deepens emotional connections, drawing in participants whose initial stance is ambivalent (see discussion in Schulman 2016, 25–26). Other actions besides attentive listening matter too. The shift in norms that has allowed open discussion of sexual assault has also diminished the stigma surrounding currently trafficked women and children, and it is certainly rewarding to the survivors to know that publicizing their horrendous past helps young people evade or recover from something similar today. It also certainly mattered that the transnational support movement and several national governments now provide funds for the livelihood of the remaining survivors, given that most of them were until recently impoverished. Engagement with these life stories does sometimes transform the lives of imaginative witnesses too. It did so for Tomiyama. Engagement with the history of forced sexual labour became an opportunity to work through her own emotional pain about the less harsh but still extremely fraught sense of being silenced described above by Copeland. Tomiyama had felt unable to express herself artistically as a woman, a frustration so painful to her that she stopped painting for a quarter-century. Narrating the after-lives of the trafficked women helped her find her own clear and authoritative feminist voice, an achievement that jet-powered two decades of unprecedentedly creative and prolific artworks, suggesting that this experience did lead to overcoming her trauma, regardless of the effect on the survivors. While the events they lived through were very different, thinking of them as the common result of patriarchal oppression was empowering for her. In other words, Tomiyama came to understand the wartime brothel system as ‘structural violence’ that in less intense ways had also blighted her life.

II Structural Violence and a Community of Participation So how does introducing the concept of structural violence affect these issues? Farmer (like many others) argues that we can only understand individual lives if we also recognize that 40

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they are embedded in larger systems of structural violence that make some people far more vulnerable than others to harm in systematic ways (Farmer 2003, 8–9). The more fully people understand the role of structural violence, the more far-reaching is the foundation for reconciliation and a genuinely shared future. By contrast, the connections to trauma are somewhat indirect; recognizing that trauma is caused by larger structural forces eases the burden on traumatized individuals by circulating a new narrative that rejects (and explains!) stigma and can block feelings of shame. Moreover, one can only change the systems that perpetuate structural violence if one recognizes these patterns, so doing so is a step towards preventing future suffering, which is not just comforting but empowering to trauma survivors, as noted above. Nonetheless, people tend to collapse the distance between the past and the present to make structural violence more visible, not always helpfully, especially given that recovery from trauma requires that sufferers recognize when they are not still in a place of danger and so do not overreact. Perhaps the most difficult issue is that focusing on structure changes the role of most imaginative witnesses from sympathetic observers to that of relative beneficiaries in the same system, subtly shifting the relationship to the traumatized individual from shared oppression to shared participation in ways that are difficult to articulate and hard for everyone to ­m anage. Tomiyama, who was the exact contemporary of these young women, whose plight had been invisible to her until the 1980s, soon began thinking about precisely this problem. Like the soldiers who used the brothels and like other civilians, she knew of these women’s existence but had not reflected on who had been responsible for the harshness of their lives. This was her first direct engagement with Japan’s history of colonialism, including her personal childhood experiences of living in the empire. As she explained, In the 1988 exhibition…held at London University and sponsored by the Catholic Research Institute for International Relations, I was able to introduce this work on the military comfort women for the first time. That was where I first showed the slide work, A Memory of the Sea. I felt I was able to present this work as a Japanese working on Korean issues and to show the relationship between the ruling colonizer and the colonized. (Tomiyama 2007) In other words, Tomiyama was beginning to think more systematically about the moral responsibility implied by benefiting from structural violence, in addition to the responsibility of bearing witness to the harm done by it or thinking in terms of sharing in a common structure of oppression. She carried those concerns much farther in her next two series, Harbin: Requiem for the 20th Century and Fox Story, where she portrayed the Japanese as ‘shifty-eyed foxes’ who were masters at self-deception. In the slide-show portion of Harbin, she explicitly connected the colonial past to the postwar era in words superimposed on an image of a devastated Manchurian landscape and a Shinto torii gate: ‘In 1945 the war ended. Where did the fox go next?’ Tomiyama’s foxes symbolized the extent to which people embedded in systems of structural violence are often both victims and perpetrators. The soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army who did so much damage in Asia also lie at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in her paintings. Moreover, even afterward, the foxes cloud our retrospective understanding, a point Tomiyama underlined in an interview with Rebecca Jennison in December 2000 (Figure 4.2): As I see it, the foxes and their tricks have helped those in power to deceive people. First, they say they want to fight a war, then they say they like peace. They give arsenic to 41

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Figure 4.2  Image from Harbin: Requiem for the 20th Century 1995 Tomiyama’s foxes are malicious figures who encourage individuals to deceive themselves about the harm they perpetrate. During the Second World War, the foxes celebrated Japanese exceptionalism and military valour and demanded cruel sacrifices in the pursuit of conquest in Asia. After the war, they continued to encourage people to ignore the traumatic burdens they had imposed on others. Image #48 from Harbin: Requiem for the 20th Century, slideshow, 1995. Used with permission from the estate of Tomiyama Taeko.

the people saying they should die rather than live under the rule of the enemy; then they shake hands with [Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas] MacArthur and go on doing their tricks. ( Jennison 2001, 108) Tomiyama is thus aligning herself with the other participants in the Japanese colonial and military system despite her strong emotional sense of connection to the young Asian women. She is highlighting the intense ‘spiritual mobilization’ of the war years. Like all militaries, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were ‘total institutions’ that changed individuals’ identity narratives in fundamental ways. The civilian population was similarly intensively mobilized with the promise of a collective identity without internal contradiction, ambivalence or alienation, where the individual can be fully satisfied by subordination to the nation-empire. The banners the foxes wave in her Harbin and Fox Story paintings celebrate the madness of proudly sending soldiers off to kill and die for the fantasy of domination over Asia. The siren song of the foxes led everyone astray.

Narrative Identities That Foster Reconciliation A central implication of Tomiyama’s point is that recognizing the harm done to these young women does not preclude empathy for Japan’s former soldiers and for the 42

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imaginative witnesses who feel more commonality with them than to Asian forced labourers. Many of those witnesses are their children and grandchildren. Tension between loyalty to these men and recognition that they fully participated in a structurally violent system is g­ enuinely difficult to manage, as Tomiyama is acknowledging, precisely because incorporating contradiction into personal narratives requires emotional maturity as well as recovery from any traumatic damage. Even some of the activists who most stridently reject the idea that these young women were forced into sexual labour at all, let alone by the Japanese armed forces, clearly are struggling with this fact. As one of Tomomi Yamaguchi’s ­interviewees explained, ‘My great-grandfather went to the war as an Imperial Army member. Even if they are not family, they—the same Japanese p­ eople— were fighting hard for their lives’ (Yamaguchi 2018, 205). For individuals like this one, acknowledging the harm done to young women feels like a betrayal of their own clan because their identity ­n arrative ­c annot handle contradiction, paradox or even everyday levels of complexity. There is now a well-organized right-wing backlash movement in Japan to discredit the survivors of the military brothel system, with strong support within the Japanese government based on exactly this strident oversimplification. Much of its rhetoric—although often highly emotional—is calculated and tactical, following a carefully constructed script designed to discredit the survivors as mercenary liars. The insistence that the young women were well-paid sex workers is particularly distasteful for the—fact-free—arguments that they independently chose the experience, and that their detractors are now welcome to scorn them for resenting their treatment (Resources on ‘Contracting Sex’ 2022). Both the complete lack of empathy for the survivors and the profound misogyny and racism being celebrated are repellent. As Tomomi Yamaguchi explains, this topic was weaponized by anti-Korean, anti-­ Chinese and pro-militarization groups in order to paint the Japanese supporters of the women survivors today as disloyal to their country. These groups insist, along with Tomiyama’s foxes, that national belonging requires complete identification with the state, past and present, and they back up their rhetorical assaults with physical and cyber violence. The national government now spends considerable resources harassing private citizens of other countries who commemorate the experience of the women forced to labour in military brothels, which it considers ‘anti-Japanese’ (Yamaguchi 2018, 2020). Insisting on such identification with the state is presented as an emotion but it is a power play. The point is to make it as difficult as possible for other Japanese people to reflect critically on the wartime and colonial past or to build a future based on reconciliation with other Asians. Nonetheless, although it is tempting to simply denounce the people who express commonality with Japan’s soldiers in this context, particularly given the stance of the Japanese government and the viciousness of their self-appointed champions, doing so only substantiates their insistence that it is impossible to both acknowledge the structural violence done to these women and still see the individual men who enacted that violence as full human beings. The people who feel a connection to the soldiers are engaged in precisely the same kind of identification that is so satisfying to the imaginative witnesses for the women survivors. They too have constructed a narrative identity that resonates with that of their chosen protagonists, and they too may have been profoundly emotionally affected by direct or imaginative engagement with those now elderly or deceased men. Reconciliation requires finding a way to honour that emotional bond while also taking responsibility for the harm done. 43

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Reconciliation versus Identification with Traumatized Individuals Sarah Schulman, a long-time political activist, creative writer and social analyst, unpacks this problem in the context of contemporary American politics in Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. Schulman highlights the point that the duty of repair includes not accepting the perspective of traumatized people when doing so gets in the way of reconciliation. She notes that traumatized people overreact in ways that look from the outside very much like the complete contempt for other people that was at the heart of their own victimization. Treating normal conflict—or even anxiety about the mere fact of difference—as abuse leads damaged people to wildly overreact and to reject any understanding of other peoples’ points of view. She warns against ‘a heightened rhetoric of threat that confuses doing nothing, normative conflict, and resistance with actual abuse, [and] has produced a wide practice of overstating harm’ (Schulman 2016, 21). Schulman makes this point while still stressing the distinction created by a history of structural violence: For the Supremacist, this refusal comes from a sense of entitlement; that they have an inherent ‘right’ not to question themselves. Conversely, the unrecovered traumatized person’s refusal is rooted in a panic that their fragile self cannot bear interrogation; that whatever is keeping them together is not flexible. (Schulman 2016, 145)

Figure 4.3  Image from Harbin: Requiem for the 20th Century 1995 As time went on, Tomiyama expanded her analysis to emphasize the ways that overly simple identity n ­ arratives— enthusiastically peddled by the ‘shifty-eyed foxes’—victimize everyone involved. Image #32 from Harbin: Requiem for the 20th Century, slideshow, 1995. Used with permission from the estate of Tomiyama Taeko.

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Schulman’s two main examples of ‘supremacist’ overreactors are domestic abusers, who typically see normal disagreements with their partners as threatening, and police who kill unarmed African Americans out of fear. They too display hyper-vigilance, overreaction to external stimuli, disassociation with reality and social self-destructiveness, the same behaviours that traumatized people often express. Schulman is focusing on actual victims and perpetrators but the phenomenon of confusing conflict with abuse crosses the victim/ perpetrator lines drawn by imaginative witnesses to historical structural violence too. As human beings, our feelings—and identity narratives—are not always reliable guides to the outer world. This universal human tendency to misread reality when our emotions are heightened is why we can only improve our cognition by regularly realigning it with reality, rather than sympathetic support. In Tomiyama’s idiom, that means recognizing that anyone can be misled by foxes (Figure 4.3). Schulman’s point is even more significant if we acknowledge that trauma tells us nothing about the moral quality of the person traumatized—and big wars traumatize vast numbers of individuals. Given the brutality of officers towards enlisted men, the ‘normal’ rigors and dangers of warfare, and the experience of defeat, the war was a traumatizing event for a very large number of Japanese soldiers, a fact that is not erased by their vicious treatment of Asians under their control. It seems to me that our understanding of historical structural violence needs to accommodate the fact that everyone involved may be hampered by a panic that their fragile self cannot bear interrogation.

The Role of Punishment Another impediment to finding a less damaged and polarized joint narrative of any aspect of the Second World War is that all discussion today is layered on top of the postwar history of punishment for other wartime acts. Theoretically, punishment is not very closely tied to healing from trauma. The most commonly expressed connection is that the traumatized individual may finally feel safe because the perpetrator can no longer cause direct harm, or because the expectation of punishment will deter future perpetrators. ‘Victim-centred justice’ offers the harmed party an active role in determining guilt and punishment, perhaps by reading an impact statement in court or by having one’s recommendation for a harsher or more lenient sentence be considered by the judge. This activity can be healing if it feels to the traumatized individual like regaining control over one’s own narrative identity. Yet the therapeutic effect has far less to do with the act of punishment itself than with the invitation to participate in meting it out. Moreover, surely sometimes such action feels therapeutic for individuals and surely sometimes it does not. Punishment functions as reconciliation with the larger group by inviting the victim to participate in the community by casting out the direct perpetrator—the victim’s gain is the perpetrator’s loss––in direct contrast to thinking of reconciliation as bringing everyone together for a better joint future. Yet conceptually, this framing makes a lot more sense when the perpetrator’s act was egregious than when it was a standard expression of structural violence. In her study of early postwar efforts to identify and punish Axis war criminals, Franziska Seraphim shows very clearly that it was not just very hard but impossible to accomplish reconciliation through efforts to punish war criminals because singling them out always highlighted some kind of unfairness. The historical record shows that these ‘unfairnesses’ manifested in a very broad range of ways, some hard to anticipate. One source of tension was the fact that neither the emotional recovery of victims nor reconciliation were the central goals of these early postwar efforts. Yet many of the actual problems encountered 45

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in pursuing justice against war criminals would have stood in the way of reconciliation even if those objectives had been paramount. Another problem was simply that it was not easy to gather evidence that distinguished ­soldiers whose behaviour was genuinely worse from other prisoners of war. A second was controlling private acts of revenge by Allied soldiers or local civilians, particularly since it was important to the Allied leaders to offer both humane conditions and the protections of law to their prisoners, in contrast to the infamous Japanese POW camps. A third was that Allied sentiment about justice was not uniform: in contrast to the international body of experts convened in London to work out a unified plan for war-crimes prosecutions, the American public favoured ‘making sure no guilty person escaped’ over ‘convicting no innocent person.’ Fourth, although the goal was to treat war criminals everywhere the same way, many of the American and European individuals charged with prosecuting war crimes operated on the racist assumptions that had been so prevalent in the war years. One way these crude distinctions manifested themselves was in far less concern for the ‘mental rehabilitation’ of the Japanese than the German population. Finally, in the Asian territories where Japan had ruled, the postwar politics of decolonization (and recolonization) meant that ‘hunting down collaborators with the Japanese among indigenous populations assumed priority over securing Japanese war criminals.’ The issues varied by political territory but the most salient one was often ethnic identity, such as Chinese Nationalist prosecution of legally Japanese but ethnically Taiwanese individuals for war crimes. Since the issues related to collaboration had enormous purchase in these postwar societies, that concern tended to swamp other aspects of social justice (Seraphim 2020, 14). In other words, transitional justice frequently did not promote either reconciliation or healing because it was so often arbitrary, chaotic, tied to obvious political agendas, or in some other way unfair. As in all real-life cases, the new postwar political systems were also characterized by structural violence, profoundly affecting the ways that people experienced efforts to establish social justice within them. Schulman argues that focusing on punishment intensifies the sense that this is a new cycle of victim versus perpetrator, although now the formerly oppressed people have achieved some measure of legitimacy. As she puts it, Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state. In both cases, the lack of recognition that the past is not the present leads to the newly acquired power to punish rather than to the self-transformation necessary to resolve conflict and produce justice. (Schulman 2016, 18)

Moving beyond Victims and Perpetrators Schulman’s preferred solution is to manage conflict before it escalates into major ­tragedy through dialogue and interactive problem-solving, i.e. not overstating harm and not insisting on forms of punishment that prevent dialogue, such as shunning or ‘cancelling.’ Otherwise, there is an ever-escalating cycle of threat and counter-threat, experienced as traumatic new abuse, which is understood through the duelling narratives of past experience, further ­simplifying the story of the relationships between the parties as unified and one-­d imensional. Overcoming this tendency requires moving from thinking in terms of conflict as occurring between ‘perpetrator vs. victim to the more accurate recognition of 46

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the parties as the conflicted, each with legitimate concerns and legitimate rights that must be considered in order to produce just resolution’ (Schulman 2016, 22). Schulman’s concern is in part rooted in the problem that focusing on punishment awards enforcement to the police and the state, even though the police are the originators of much of the structural violence against vulnerable people. She also argues that there are far too many profoundly complicating details for outcomes to seem fair, just as Seraphim found in the early postwar efforts to identify and punish war criminals. Tomiyama thinks much like Schulman when she includes the experience of perpetrators in the same frame as that of the victims in her depictions of their watery grave and even more in the hallucinatory world created by the malicious foxes. She is encompassing ‘the effect’ of the original trauma not just on all the participants but also on herself and on the viewers of her art without asserting any sense of moral superiority. Over time, her central topic became much more explicitly the world of compromised/conflicted people—not just ‘Japanese shifty-eyed foxes’ but increasingly expanding to all of us who are mortal human beings, very much including herself. Her 2007–2009 series, Hiruko and the Puppeteers, continued to expand this theme by making no distinction at all between victims and perpetrators. It features an eclectic mix of Asian and Japanese historical and folk figures, together with various kinds of Asian puppets, cats engaged in cosplay, be-medalled Japanese aristocrats, European colonial admirals, Chinese opera stars, the queen of Manchukuo, several catfish goblins, Mao Zedong, Lu Xun’s fictional protagonist Ah Q, a rooster and the Taiwanese goddess Mazu. This extraordinary cast of characters all attend a theatre performance under the sea, ‘Splendid Banquet for the Empire,’ in hopes that a better future is possible in their new location. Nor is Tomiyama very interested in punishment. Her last major series, on the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011, Revelation from the Sea, features four Buddhist guardian gods, balanced on a dismantled mobile phone, surveying the damage done by humans who failed to heed their warnings. Her message is two-fold: we are the authors of our own torment and if there is to be further punishment, it can be left in much more capable hands.

Works Cited Copeland, R. (2010) ‘Art beyond Language: Japanese Women Artist and the Feminist Imagination,’ in L. Hein and R. Jennison, (eds.) Imagination without Borders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility, Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 51–68. Available as a permanent e-book at https://www.fulcrum.org/epubs/6969z273f?locale=en#/6/22 [nav_10]!/4/2/2/2[page_51]/1:0 Farmer, P. (2003). Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hein, L. (2010, revised 2020). ‘Imagination without Borders.’ Online. Available HTTP: Jennison, R. (2001). ‘Tomiyama Taeko: An Artist’s Life and Work,’ Critical Asian Studies, 33.1: 100–119. McAdams, D. P. and K. C. McLean. (2013). ‘Narrative Identity,’ Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22.3: 233–238. Nora, P. (1989). ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,’ Representation, 26: 7–24. Resources on ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’ in the International Review of Law and Economics. Online. Available HTTP: (Accessed 25 May 2022). Schulman, S. (2016). Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Seraphim, F. (2020). ‘Spaces of Punishment’ in V. E. Dittrich, K. von Lingen, P. Osten and J. Maraiova, (eds.) The Tokyo Tribunal: Perspectives on Law, History and Memory, Brussels: Torkel Obsahl Academic EPublisher, 369–397.

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Laura Hein Stetz, M. and B. B. C. Oh, (eds.) (2001). Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Tomiyama, T. (2000). Narrative and Memory, Pamphlet in The Fox Story, Multimedia Presentation: Slides and Art by Tomiyama Taeko, Music by Takahashi Yūji, Tokyo: Hidane Kōbō. Tomiyama, T. (2007) ‘The Quest for Art throughout My Life,’ unpublished English typescript for July 25, 2007 lecture, translated by R. Jennison. Tomiyama, T. (2021) Official Website. Online. Available HTTP: (Accessed 25 May 2022). Yamaguchi, T. (2018) ‘Revisionism, Ultranationalism, Sexism: Relations between the Far Right and the Establishment Over the ‘Comfort Woman’ Issue,’ Social Science Japan Journal, 21.2: 193–212. Yamaguchi, T. (2020) ‘The ‘History Wars’ and the ‘Comfort Woman’ Issue: Revisionism and the Right-wing in Contemporary Japan and the U.S.’, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 18.3. Article ID 5381.

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5 UNWRITING THE WRONGS History, Trauma and Memories of Violence in Germany and Japan Tessa Morris-Suzuki

History on Trial In January 2000, one of the world’s most famous examples of ‘history on trial’ opened in London’s Royal Courts of Justice. The case was a libel suit brought by British historian David Irving against Penguin Books and US historian Deborah Lipstadt. Irving claimed that his reputation had been damaged by statements in Lipstadt’s 1993 work Denying the Holocaust, published in Britain by Penguin. Lipstadt had described Irving as ‘one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial’ and accused him of deliberately manipulating historical data to support his denialist conclusions (Lipstadt 1993, 198). Irving, on the contrary, presented himself as a defender of truth being unjustly hounded by ‘the traditional enemies of free speech’ for holding controversial historical views (Trial Transcripts Day 1, 81 and passim). Irving is not an academic historian but spent many years conducting research in the German archives and won considerable acclaim for his study of the Second World War allied bombing of Dresden, published in 1963 (Irving 1963). Initially, he did not deny the reality of the Holocaust, though he went to extreme lengths to argue that Hitler was unaware of the extermination of the Jews (Irving 1977). This changed, though, from the second half of the 1980s, when Irving embarked on a crusade (in his own words) to ‘put an end to the blood lie of the Holocaust’ (quoted in Lipstadt 1993, 196). The Lipstadt-Irving trial attracted particular attention because it brought together two worlds – the world of the law courts and the world of history research. In both worlds, truth and evidence are at the heart of enquiry, but their rules for establishing truth diverge in ­significant ways. In this chapter, I do not seek to analyse the nature of the trial itself, but rather to take it as a starting point for examining two apparently very different historical controversies. The first is the controversy surrounding Irving’s Holocaust denialism; the second is the more recent debate which has erupted around publications denying or downplaying the reality of widely recognized traumatic events in Japanese history – particularly the forced recruitment of women to Japanese wartime military brothels and the history of ­d iscrimination against ethnic Koreans and members of the Hisabetsu Buraku minority in Japan.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-6

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The historical topics being discussed here are very far removed from one another. Though all involve prejudice, discrimination and violence, there is absolutely no comparison in scale of horror between (on the one hand) the Holocaust and (on the other) the Japanese military’s so-called ‘comfort women’ system or acts of discrimination against ethnic minorities in Japan. But an examination of these cases suggests that there is a strong commonality between techniques of historical denial used by groups in various parts of the world. The LipstadtIrving trial shed crucial light on these techniques, on the way in which they can be used to subvert scholarly research, and on their potential to reinforce and re-create historical trauma for victims of past violence.

The Denialist Playbook 1: Oral and Written Testimony and the Lipstadt-Irving Trial Although debates about the reality of the Holocaust had surfaced from time to time throughout the postwar years, it was during the 1970s that an upsurge of Holocaust denialism emerged in the United States, Germany and elsewhere. A key event in this process was the establishment in 1979 of a California-based organization called the Institute for Historical Review. Despite the sober-sounding name of the organization and its newsletter – The Journal of Historical Review – the Institute consisted of a miscellaneous group of right-wing activists whose overriding goal was to deny the reality of the Holocaust. As Lipstadt argued, the aim of the Institute was to ‘move [Holocaust] denial from the lunatic fringe of racial and anti-Semitic extremism to the realm of academic respectability’ (Lipstadt 1993, 156). Irving became publicly involved with the Institute in 1983, and went on to speak at a number of its events in the 1980s and 1990s. All historical events, including the Holocaust, should be open to debate and r­ e-examination. But the Institute for Historical Review and the activists who gathered around it developed a quite distinctive technique of history writing, which I shall refer to here as ‘the denialist playbook’. The defining feature of the denialist playbook is not the act of denial itself – in some circumstances it may be quite reasonable for historians to argue that certain events did not take place, or that certain existing narratives are incorrect. What I mean by ‘the denialist playbook’ is a specific set of rhetorical techniques designed to obscure crucial parts of history and to produce a predetermined picture of the past. One value of the Lipstadt-Irving trial is that it provided a careful forensic examination of these techniques. A central element of Irving’s denialism, as demonstrated by statements made during the 2000 trial, is the downplaying or rejection of the oral testimony of victims, and an insistence on official documents as the basis of historical knowledge. Irving’s claim that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust and his later arguments that the Holocaust itself was a fabrication focused on the absence of official documents specifically showing that Hitler ordered the mass killing of millions of Jews and on the rejection of the credibility of victim testimony about the Holocaust. Irving and others associated with the Institute for Historical Review treated the testimony of survivors with scepticism and often with offensive distain, repeatedly questioning the testimony of survivors on the grounds that they believed them to have invented their stories for financial gain. Irving notoriously once ‘joked’ to a sympathetic audience that he planned to ‘form an association of Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars – or the ASSHOLs’ (Trial Transcripts Day 29, 32‒33). As abundant historical research and debate have shown, human memories are fallible, and oral testimony needs to be examined with sensitivity and care. This is particularly true of survivors’ memories of traumatic suffering. Trauma can cause disruptions or blocking 50

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of memory, or simply make it impossible for victims to put their experiences into words. Human motivations are complex, and people may explain those motivations differently at different times in their lives. Some people conceal or alter parts of their personal story out of a sense of shame, or for other reasons. All these complexities need to be taken into account in assessing oral statements about the past (Thompson 2000; Violi 2017). But seizing on trivial discrepancies of detail in otherwise credible victim testimony, and using these (without substantiation) to dismiss victims as frauds and liars is both irresponsible and cruel, and it risks greatly compounding the weight of trauma borne by the already traumatized. Careful historiography, meanwhile, reminds us that official documents should be ­subjected to as close scrutiny as oral testimony. Written documents, like oral testimony, are the product of human authors, and people are as likely to conceal or alter facts in writing as they are in speech (Thompson 2000). The difference between a written document and oral testimony is not that the former is reliable and the latter unreliable. It is that the former is more likely than the latter to have been produced by someone in a position of power and authority. The Holocaust denialists’ rejection of survivor testimony in favour of a focus on documents (particularly German official documents) became a tool for privileging the voices of the perpetrators over those of the victims.

The Denialist Playbook 2: The Use and Misuse of Historical Source Material The second tool in the Holocaust denialist playbook is the tactic of ignoring, rather than engaging with, existing scholarly research on the Holocaust. During the trial, David Irving presented this approach as a virtue. By conducting his own archival research without reading others’ works, he argued, he had been able to avoid contamination by the ­prevailing ­prejudices which (in his view) dominated contemporary history writing on the Second World War (Trial Transcripts Day 1, 31). But, as historian Richard Evans (a leading defence witness in the Lipstadt-Irving trial) pointed out, this also allowed Irving to place himself apart from ongoing historical debates about the history of the war, and to evade important but inconvenient issues raised in those debates. Most importantly, Evans argued that Irving’s historiography (like that of other Holocaust denialists) was based on systematic misuse of source materials. In his written statement to the trial, Evans summarized Irving’s techniques (shared with other leading Holocaust denialists such as Robert Faurisson) as including: skewing and manipulation of documents, intentional suppression of evidence, conscious falsification of statistics, reliance on sources known to be unreliable if they fit the argument in hand, unjustified dismissal of reliable sources if they do not, false attribution of conclusions to books and sources which in fact say the opposite…, and deliberate misconstrual or even invention of the historical record. (Evans 2000, General Conclusions) The examination of Irving’s writings showed that Irving repeatedly bent the content of his sources to fit his predetermined conclusion. To give just one example, he sought to argue that, while Goebbels had helped to incite the 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht, Hitler had attempted to stop the attacks on Jewish property. But scrutiny of Irving’s writings on this topic showed that he had claimed facts for which he provided no supporting references; quoted minor details from source material while ignoring clear evidence from the same sources that Hitler had approved of the pogrom; uncritically cited 51

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unreliable sources where they suited his conclusions and subtly adjusted the wording of ­passages translated from the German to downplay Hitler’s support for the violence (Evans 2000, Section 4.3 C). As Evans emphasized, the problem was not simply the very large number of ­m isrepresentations and inaccuracies in Irving’s work, but also the fact that all of these flaws pointed to a particular ideological conclusion: the exculpation of Hitler and denial of the Holocaust. This, Evans argued, was what identified Irving’s approach as deliberately ­m isleading, rather than as simply being careless. Mere negligence, Evans observed: is random in its effect, i.e. if you are simply a sloppy or bad historian, the mistakes you make will be all over the place. They will not actually support any particular point of view… On the other hand, if all the mistakes are in the same direction in the support of a particular thesis, then I do not think that is mere negligence. I think that is a deliberate manipulation and deception. (Trial Transcripts Day 18, 155–156) The Lipstadt-Irving trial, indeed, brought into focus these crucial questions: ‘what are the boundaries of legitimate disagreement among historians?… How far do historians’ ­interpretations depend on a selective reading of the evidence, and where does selectivity end and bias begin?’ Though differences of opinion are an essential part of scholarship, Evans emphasized that ‘argument between historians is limited by what the evidence allows them to say’. Irving’s systematically manipulative approach to evidence and sources, the defence team argued, showed that his claim to be a scrupulous historian was ‘completely bogus’ (Evans 2000, Section “Evading the Inconvenient, Skewing the Documents”). The trial judge in the 2000 case, Justice Charles Gray, dismissed Irving’s libel claim on the grounds that the key points in Lipstadt’s criticism of Irving’s work were true. Irving sought leave to appeal the judgement, but this was denied.

Rehabilitating the Co-prosperity Sphere – Historical Lobby Groups in Contemporary Japan The questions posed by Evans during the Lipstadt-Irving trial have powerful resonance for more recent controversies in Japanese history. What are the boundaries of proper historical debate? At what point does legitimate selection of sources become manipulation and ‘bogus history’? In the Japanese context, from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, a small minority of writers published works which aimed to justify and acclaim Japan’s actions during the AsiaPacific War (for example, Hayashi 1964; Tanaka 1987). A significant shift occurred, though, in the 1990s, with the emergence of a new wave of popular debate around key events of the war. Demands for apologies and compensation from surviving victims of the Japanese empire’s wartime and colonial violence were met by an upsurge of historical activism from right-wing groups, which sought to deny or minimize the violence of imperial Japanese expansion. One aspect of this new historical activism was the emergence of a range of Japanese groups which (like the US Institute of Historical Review) adopted benignly academic-sounding titles: the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact (Shijitsu o Sekai ni Hasshin suru Kai), the Historical Awareness Research Committee (Rekishi Ninshiki Mondai Kenkyūkai), the Global Alliance for Historical Truth (Rekishi no Shinjitsu o Motomeru Rekishi Rengōkai), etc. There is abundant scope for debating the events of the Asia-Pacific War and 52

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for robustly re-examining black-and-white narratives which uniformly vilify one side in the war, but these organizations are not forums for such debate. They are lobby groups focused on ­denying the reality of specific accounts of wartime or colonial violence. Participants in these groups include journalists, political activists and businesspeople as well as historians and others. Their opinions are disseminated through the Internet and in print, and often appear in the pages of the right-wing Sankei newspaper and its English online journal Japan Forward. As Deborah Lipstadt pointed out in her critique of Holocaust denialism, the membership of the Institute for Historical Review overlapped with the membership of a number of other far-right US lobby groups, including the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby (Lipstadt 1993, 158). In Japan, the various right-wing historical lobby groups not only have closely intermeshed membership, but many also have membership connections to other far-right organizations, ranging from the powerful Nippon Kaigi ( Japan Conference – Japan’s largest right-wing lobby group) to fringe parties like the Japan National Party (Nihon Kokumintō) (on Nippon Kaigi, see Tawara 2017). A core theme in the activism of these groups is denial of the forced recruitment of the ‘comfort women’. The history of the ‘comfort women’ is complex, but extensive research in many countries shows that very large numbers of young women – perhaps as many as 200,000 – from countries including Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, Malaya and the Philippines were trafficked to work in Japanese military brothels during the war. The methods of recruitment varied widely. Some women were recruited by agents while others were taken directly by Japanese military or police. Some had previously worked in brothels in Japan and elsewhere; some were sold by their families; many were tricked by promises of work in factories or hospitals; some were rounded up at gunpoint (see, for example, Poelgeest 1994; Yoshimi 1995; Soh 2008; Qiu 2013). Many suffered terribly as a result of their wartime experiences. The testimony of survivors speaks powerfully of the lasting scars left on the ‘comfort women’s’ bodies and minds. From the early twenty-first century onwards, denial of the forced recruitment of the ‘comfort women’ was strongly promoted by leading members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, who argued that no official documents had been found demonstrating the involvement of the Japanese military in conscripting women at gunpoint. In 2006 Prime Minister Abe publicly stated (despite abundant testimony to the contrary, e.g., Poelgeest 1994) that there was no evidence of forcible coercion of ‘comfort women’ ‘in the narrow sense of the word’ (Tōkyō Shimbun, 7 October 2006, 8). More recently, the Japanese government has devoted part of its substantial budget for the ‘strategic dissemination of information overseas’ (senryakuteki taigia hasshin) to fighting the ‘history wars’, including denial of forced recruitment of the ‘comfort women’, on an international stage (Sankei Shimbun, 2 March 2021, 5). While they primarily focus on arguing that ‘comfort women’ were willing and well-remunerated recruits, the right-wing historical lobby groups also extend their writings to a range of other topics, such as denying that Japan forcibly recruited workers from colonial Korea as wartime labourers and arguing that President Roosevelt was primarily responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor, into which he goaded Japan for his own political ends (see, for example, Moteki 2020, Chapter 1). In the past four years, another important focus for some organizations (such as the right-wing women’s history group Soyokaze and the Japan Nationalist Party) has been an effort to rewrite the history of a massacre of Koreans following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. This massacre was sparked by rumours which led the panicked population of Tokyo, Yokohama and surrounding areas to believe that Koreans were poisoning well-water or planning insurrection and mayhem during the post-disaster chaos. While leading historians of the subject have found no evidence to support these 53

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rumours and have estimated that perhaps as many as 6,000 Koreans and hundreds of Chinese residents were killed in the massacre, Soyokaze and the Japan Nationalist Party downplay the numbers of dead in the massacre while reviving and repeating rumours about Korean pillage, violence and other misdeeds as though they were fact (Uematsu 2019; Suzuki 2020; Suzuki 2022).

Comfort Women, Minorities and the Perpetuation of Trauma: The Ramseyer Papers A central aim of the historical lobby groups discussed here is to move the rehabilitation of Japan’s wartime and colonial history from the far-right fringe into the realm of a­ cademic respectability, both in Japan itself and overseas, particularly in the United States. And indeed, in 2020 and 2021, key aspects of the rhetoric of rehabilitation took a large leap into the realms of internationally recognized peer-reviewed academic respectability, when three articles on Japanese history by Harvard Professor J. Mark Ramseyer were published in English language scholarly journals. The first – ‘On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan’ (Ramseyer 2020a; see also Neary 2021) – dealt with the history of the socially marginalized minority commonly referred to as Burakumin. Here Ramseyer rejected all existing accounts of this history, arguing that Buraku identity was in essence a fiction ­created by people descended from ‘a loose collection of unusually self-destructive poor farmers; who formed communities with astonishingly high levels of crime’. The second article – ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’ (Ramseyer 2021a) – offered an equally sweeping rewriting of the history of the ‘comfort women’, arguing that ‘comfort women’ were simply paid prostitutes who had knowingly and rationally signed contracts offering them relatively generous pay and employment conditions. Ramseyer’s third paper – ‘Social Capital and the Problem of Opportunistic Leadership: The Example of Koreans in Japan’ (Ramseyer 2021c) – depicts members of the Korean minority community which emerged in Japan from the colonial era onwards as ‘dysfunctional’, lacking social capital, having low education levels and high crime rates, and being manipulated by ‘opportunistic fringe-left entrepreneurs’, who create ‘enormous ethnic ­tension’, thus themselves being responsible for hostility and discrimination against the Korean community (23‒26 and 27‒28). Ramseyer states (without qualification) that Koreans who migrated to Japan during the colonial period ‘moved to Japan for the money’, and behaved in anti-social ways, thereby generating ‘statistical discrimination’ from their Japanese hosts (21). He also echoes Soyokaze’s and the Japan National Party’s revision of the history of the 1923 massacre of Koreans, re-telling the rumours of pillage, rape and terrorism by Koreans, while questioning the scale of the subsequent killings. Until 2019, Ramseyer had been known primarily for his work on the Japanese legal system and corporate regulation. From around the beginning of 2019, however, he became engaged with scholars involved in the Historical Awareness Research Committee and related groups, and with the journal Japan Forward, which started championing his views from 2019 onwards (Morgan 2019a, 2019b; Ramseyer 2020b). The three articles which are the focus of discussion here were published in journals in the field of law and economics. Despite the fact that they dealt primarily with extremely contentious issues of Japanese history, none of them seems to have been peer reviewed by any expert in the relevant historical field before publication. When historians called for retraction or correction of the articles, pointing out that they contained a mass of mistakes and misinformation, Ramseyer and leading members of the Japanese historical lobby groups responded by presenting his critics as anti-free 54

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speech ‘mobs’ and ‘bigots’ attacking a respected scholar for daring to question prevailing ­orthodoxies (for example, Morgan 2021). That was predictable. More disturbing, though, was the response of the academic and publishing institutions which are supposed to protect and uphold scholarly standards. Here, focusing particularly on Ramseyer’s articles on the ‘comfort women’ and on Koreans in Japan, I shall argue that Ramseyer’s recent historical writings contain a pattern of failures of scholarly integrity which mirrors the denialist playbook. The spread of such unscholarly practices into mainstream academia poses major challenges for researchers, universities and academic publishers alike, and it risks inflaming community conflicts and inflicting further trauma on already traumatized individuals and groups.

Evading the Inconvenient, Skewing the Documents Ramseyer’s writings follow the denialist playbook, first, in dismissing the testimony of the victims out of hand, without proper attention to their content, stating (for example) that claims about enslaved Korean comfort women are historically untrue. The Japanese army did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels. It did not use Korean women as sex slaves. The claims to the contrary are simply – factually – false. Ramseyer depicts women who spoke of military coercion as having created ‘fiction’, and (without providing details) accuses several of them of deliberately rewriting their stories to ‘extract money from the Japanese government’ (Ramseyer 2021b). By haphazardly branding these women as mercenary liars, he irresponsibly risks compounding the trauma of those who have had the courage to speak out about devastating wartime experiences. Ramseyer’s recent historical writings also follow the denialist playbook in that he, like Irving, fails to engage with existing scholarly literature on his topics. This enables him to ignore the mass of inconvenient factual evidence that this literature contains. In his ‘comfort women’ article, out of dozens of significant academic studies of the topic, Ramseyer refers briefly to just a couple of books, from which he cherry-picks a few fragments of information which happen to suit his arguments. In his article on Koreans in Japan, he includes a single footnote dismissing the value of much of the existing English-language scholarly work on the 1923 massacre of Koreans (and in the process significantly misquoting one of those works). He does make a positive reference to the work of Yamada Shōji, a leading scholar of massacre, whom he describes as having ‘done some of the most careful work on the topic’ (Ramseyer 2021c, 19). This might lead readers to think that Yamada’s conclusions accord with Ramseyer’s. But the only thing that Ramseyer actually cites from Yamada are estimates of the numbers of Koreans living in Japan’s Kantō district at the time of the massacre. He makes no mention of the fact that Yamada’s meticulously sourced essay reaches conclusions diametrically opposed to his own: Yamada concludes that rumours of Korean misdeeds were unfounded and deliberately spread by official bodies including sections of the Japanese police, and that the police and military participated in some of the worst of the massacres of Koreans (Yamada 2012/2013). Ramseyer, like Irving, thus ‘relies on books and sources that directly contradict his arguments’, quoting them in a manner that ‘distorts the authors’ objectives’ (Evans Testimony, section 4.3a). Instead of engaging with existing debates on the history he is discussing, Ramseyer, also like Irving, chooses to rely uncritically on sources whose evidence should be subjected to careful scrutiny by any serious historian. For example, his negative characterizations of the 55

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prewar Korean community in Japan ignore all scholarly work on the subject, in favour of very heavy reliance on a 1933 paper by Miki Imaji, which Ramseyer presents to his readers as though it were an academic work. In fact, the source in question is a report by a 1930s Japanese state prosecutor of ‘thought crimes’, whose main task was to hunt down Koreans seen as subversive by the state (see Kawashima 2009, 249, note 58). More alarmingly still, Ramseyer repeatedly relies on sources which would be inappropriate for use in an undergraduate essay, let alone in a peer-reviewed academic article on a highly sensitive historical topic. His article on Koreans in Japan – having ignored, dismissed or misrepresented much of the scholarly literature on the topic – derives key statements of purported fact from the genre of populist literature known in Japan as ‘Hate Korea Books’ (Kenkanbon) – unreferenced and unreliable works by journalists, freelancers, ex-policemen, right-wing bloggers, etc. with titles such as The Special Privileges and Crimes of Koreans in Japan and South Korea: The Product of Yakuza and Prostitutes (Suganuma 2015; Bandō 2016). Reliance on such sources, not surprisingly, leads to major factual errors. A crucial element in Ramseyer’s depiction of the Korean community in Japan as l­awless and subversive is his discussion of a 1948 uprising and massacre on the Korean island of Jeju (commonly known as the Jeju 4.3 Incident). As is well known, some refugees from the massacre fled to Japan, but Ramseyer’s reliance on unreliable sources produces a wildly exaggerated image of a tidal wave of Jeju communists descending on Japanese shores. He writes that between 15,000 and 60,000 islanders were killed in the 4.3 Incident, but that, as surviving leftists fled surreptitiously to Japan, the population of Jeju then fell from 290,000 to ‘barely 30,000’ in less than a decade – implying an influx into Japan of as many as 200,000 or more people. Ramseyer’s source for these figures is an anonymous online blog set up by an Internet activist with the aim of prophesying the impending simultaneous destruction of the states of Israel and South Korea and ‘the victory of the righteous Japanese empire’ (Anon 2012). The blogger had sourced the statistics on Jeju quoted by Ramseyer from Wikipedia (Anon 2006). They are a misreading of official estimates that, during and after the 4.3 Incident, Jeju’s population fell by about 30,000, not to about 30,000 (National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju April 3 Incident 2003, 452). Ramseyer’s characterization of the postwar Korean community in Japan is thus based on figures which are wrong by a factor of around ten times (see National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju April 3 Incident 2013, 452–453). After being presented with evidence of this error, Ramseyer included the following bald sentence in an erratum to his article: ‘the population figures for Jeju island at the close of Section 5.1.1 are incorrect’ (Ramseyer 2021d). He has made no effort to correct the figures, to revise the text of his article or to reassess the conclusions drawn from his fundamentally flawed data. Where Ramseyer does cite valid historical source material, he (like Irving) repeatedly does so in a way that seriously misrepresents its content to readers. The most obvious p­ roblem with Ramseyer’s ‘comfort women’ article is his failure to find any documentary evidence of any employment contract signed by a ‘comfort woman’. Since the crux of his argument is that they signed contracts, his inability to find even one example undermines his position. Undeterred by this lacuna, Ramseyer goes in search of other, more indirect, documentary evidence. But when he does quote the archives in support of his case, he repeatedly misrepresents or rewords documents to suit his conclusions. He writes, for instance, that in one month of 1938, ninety Korean women ‘petitioned’ the colonial government for permission to go to the Chinese city of Jinan ‘to work as unlicensed prostitutes’. But the source from which he claims to take this information is a colonial government document discussing the 56

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issue of travel permits for China. It contains no reference to any petition; there is nothing to indicate who applied for the permits or whether or not the women for whom the permits were issued were travelling of their own free will, and it is not clear from the wording of the source that they were going to work as ‘unlicenced prostitutes’ (see Stanley et al. 2021; also Onozawa 2022). Ramseyer’s discussions of the 1923 massacre of Koreans are so riddled with misleading use of sources that veteran Japanese journalist Watanabe Noboyuki has devoted an entire book to exposing Ramseyer’s misuse of archival material on the topic (Watanabe 2021). Just one glimpse of these multiple problems can be gained if we look at a passage where Ramseyer describes how, immediately after the earthquake, survivors began to hear rumours of marauding Korean gangs: The Koreans torched buildings, people said. They planted bombs, they poisoned water supplies, they murdered, they pillaged, they raped… The Kahoku shimpo newspaper detailed a confession taken from a Korean caught carrying a bomb. He and other ­activists, he said, had planned a massive terrorist attack on the wedding of the crown prince (later the Showa emperor) scheduled for that fall. In the face of the earthquake, they had accelerated their plans. (Ramseyer 2021c, 17) Ramseyer neglects to mention this account is produced by cobbling together two Kahoku Shimpō articles which may or may not refer to the same incident, and that one of the a­ rticles makes it clear that the ‘confession’ it mentions was extracted, in the midst of some ­unexplained explosions during the massive post-earthquake fire, from a terrified Korean man who had been seized by a mob wielding swords and billhooks. The man was beheaded by the mob as soon as he had ‘confessed’ (Kahoku Shimpō 1923/1964a; Kahoku Shimpō 1923/1964b). The crucial points here, as in the case of Irving’s denialism, are both the number and the nature of the mistakes, misrepresentations, etc. in Ramseyer’s writings. The misinformation and misuse of sources is on such a scale that disentangling it requires voluminous documentation of the sort which does not fit readily into a standard academic article or book ­chapter. Equally important is the fact that the key mistakes, mis-citations, etc. all point in the same direction – sustaining an ideologically predetermined conclusion which would not be ­sustainable without them. A further crucial point is that articles like Ramseyer’s have real social consequences. They have the potential to promote prejudice and damage human lives and social relationships. Within a week of the online publication of ‘Social Capital and the Problems of Opportunistic Leadership’, for instance, messages like the following, from the chief a­dvisor to the Japan First Party (Nihon Daiittō), were being gleefully disseminated throughout the Japanese blogosphere (This Party was founded and is headed by extreme right activist Sakurai Makoto, who – in the words of one of Japan’s leading national newspapers – has ‘repeatedly made hate speech comments and called for the slaughter of ethnic Koreans in Japan’. Akada et al. 2020): Professor Ramseyer’s article shows that ‘Koreans who went to Japan during the imperial era could not read or write, add or subtract’, and that ‘their intention was to come to Japan for a few years to make money, and then return home, so they made no effort to assimilate into Japanese society and created conflict with the Japanese’ etc. In fact, what this Harvard professor says is what we conservative patriots have been saying for a long time. The left wing claimed that this was just historical revisionism 57

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spread by right-wing bloggers and that it was false etc., but it was no mistake, because it is what is being said by an eminent scholar who has conducted academic research… For us [conservative patriots], it is a cause of rejoicing that the falsehoods of the Koreans have now been exposed. (Seto 2021) Ramseyer has done nothing to distance himself from such views.

Beyond Denial I do not think that the academic journals which published Ramseyer’s articles – or their ­publishers, De Gruyter, Elsevier and Springer – would have published historical accounts denying the Holocaust without sending them out to peer review by experts in Holocaust ­h istory. Their willingness to accept Ramseyer’s highly contentious accounts of the past without expert scrutiny from historians doubtless reflected the journals’ understandable unfamiliarity with the field, and their confidence that a Harvard professor with a long academic career would not stray far from standard norms of academic research. More worrying, though, is the journals’ response to the protests about these articles from scholars in the field, who have pointed out the mass of scholarly flaws discussed above (and many more). The International Review of Law and Economics, which published the ‘comfort women’ article, promptly posted a ‘notice of concern’ about the article, stating that they were investigating its content according to the rules set out by the international Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Not until two years later, though, did the journal publish a response by economist Eyal Winter, highlighting the article’s misuse of economic theory and lack of scientific rigour, and pointing out that major assertions made by Ramseyer are ‘not backed up by any evidence’ (Winter 2023). In response to The European Journal of Law and Economics article on Koreans in Japan, h istorian Jinhee Lee and I independently contacted that journal as soon as the article ­ appeared in February 2021, urgently requesting the editors to send the article out for post publication review to independent experts in the field. Four months later, I was informed by the publishers that they had initiated a post-publication peer review process but that most of their reviewers had found the article to be ‘a contribution to law and economics’ and that no evidence of errors that needed correction had yet been discovered. This was surprising, because I had sent the journal a long list of readily verifiable errors and invited them to share these with others, and because Sonia Ryang, a leading historian of Koreans in Japan, had also written to Ramseyer, pointing out that he had misquoted her and seeking a correction. He had instantly apologized and stated that he would immediately ask the journal’s editors to correct his article. When I raised this with the editors, four months after Ryang’s correspondence with Ramseyer, they told me that this was the first they had heard of the matter. The editors and publisher then decided that the issue was just a matter of differing opinions between scholars which should be resolved by a debate between Ramseyer and one of his critics, and they invited me to take part in such a debate by writing a response. Ramseyer would then have had the right to reply to my response, with his reply being the last word in the debate. Despite repeated requests, I was unable to obtain any assurance from the journal that they had ever received reviews of Ramseyer’s article from independent peer reviewers with expertise in the relevant field of Japanese history, and it was unclear whether they would obtain such peer reviews for Ramseyer’s contribution to a debate with me. I wrote a rebuttal article but was not willing to have it published under those conditions. The journal 58

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ultimately responded to the issue by publishing an ‘erratum’ in which Ramseyer conceded to a tiny fraction of his mistakes, while adding further misleading information and reiterating a demonstrably incorrect statement that Koreans were never conscripted into the Japanese military (Ramseyer 2021d; see Fujitani 2011, 45). I raised my concerns about this outcome with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which is a registered charity based in the United Kingdom and is funded by the fees paid by the journals and publishers who are its members; it is the only body which offers any form of oversight of such problems. As well as asking COPE to review the actions of The European Journal of Law and Economics, I requested the organization to look more broadly at the challenges to scholarly and publication integrity raised by the Ramseyer’s recent articles in the context of the global rise of ‘history wars’. COPE’s brief review failed to produce an assurance from the journal that the article had ever been peer reviewed by any experts on the history of the Korean community in Japan. Nonetheless, COPE entirely upheld the actions of the journal. What are the boundaries of proper historical debate? Would a debate between Ramseyer and one of his critics, on the terms proposed by The European Journal of Law and Economics, have produced better understanding of the history of Koreans in Japan? Would understanding of the Holocaust been enhanced by an academic journal debate between Lipstadt and Irving, in which Irving was given the last word? Free speech is the life-blood of academia, but in the world of scholarship, that does not mean that anything goes. Meaningful debate can only take place if scholars and academic publishers follow certain shared ground rules, of which the most basic include care and honesty in the use of facts and source materials, and genuinely independent expert peer review of scholarly publications. In an age of rising nationalism and proliferating online fake news, allowing the erosion of these rules has dire consequences for historical scholarship and community relationships. The challenges discussed here, I believe, require scholars, universities and publishers to address a crisis of academic integrity in the humanities of which the Ramseyer articles are just one small corner. We need, among other things, a genuinely independent publishing ethics body to uphold academic publishing standards and assess responses of journals and academic authors to complaints about publishing ethics. We need academic institutions to define implementable guidelines in the humanities and social sciences – like those in the hard sciences – which nurture free debate while disallowing the misuse and manipulation of sources and data. Last, but not least, we need to recognize that in the humanities and social sciences – just as much as in medical or bio-sciences – failures of scholarly and ethical integrity can cause tangible human harm: aggravating social conflict and perpetuating the trauma left by the sufferings and violence of the past.

Works Cited Akada, Y., Ara, C. and Matsuyama, N. (2020) ‘Sakurai, known for anti-Korean hate speech, seeks seat in Diet’, Asahi Shimbun, 2 September. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 18 March 2021). Anon (2006) ‘Saishūtō 4.3 jiken to Zainichi Saishū shusshinsha ni tsuite’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 March 2021). Anon (2012) ‘Futatsu no 911: Isuraeru to Minami Chōsen no dōji metsubō sensō no kaisho’. ­Online. 121e540464299e4ea3fd6578ad99 Available HTTP: (accessed 10 May 2022). Bandō, T. (2016) Zainichi Tokken to Hanzai, Tokyo: Seirindō.

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Tessa Morris-Suzuki Evans, Richard J. (2000) ‘David Irving, Hitler and Holocaust Denial’. (Report prepared for the Lipstadt-Irving Trial). Sourced from the website ‘Holocaust Denial on Trial’, curated by Deborah Lipstadt et al. Emory University, https://www.hdot.org/evans_toc/ (accessed May 2022). Fujitani, T. (2011) Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Hayashi, F. (1964) Daitōa Sensō Kōteiron, Tokyo: Banchō Shobō. Irving, D. (1963) The Destruction of Dresden, London: William Kimber. Irving, D. (1977) Hitler’s War, New York: Viking Press. Kawashima, K. (2009) The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Lipstadt, D. (1993) Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, New York: The Free Press/London: Penguin Books. Morgan, J. (2019a) ‘Harvard Japanese law specialist Ramseyer wins “Order of the Rising Sun” award’, Japan Forward, 17 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 23 May 2021). Morgan, J. (2019b) ‘Harvard Professor Mark Ramseyer asks, “What’s gotten into the Korean ­judiciary”’, Japan Forward, 31 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 20 May 2021). Morgan, J. (2021) ‘Conform or get attacked: Bigots use Comfort Women issue to assault free speech in Japan’. Japan Forward. 20 October. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 10 May 2022). Moteki, H. (2020) Japan’s Master Plan for Victory: What Could Have Been, Tokyo: Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact. National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju April 3 Incident. (2003) The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, Jeju City: Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation. Neary, I. (2021) ‘Professor Mark Ramseyer and the Buraku question: An introduction’, The AsiaPacific Journal Japan Focus. 19(9): 2. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 11 January 2022). Onozawa, A. (2022) ‘Problems of J. Mark Ramseyer’s “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War”: On Japan’s licensed prostitution contract system’. The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus. 20(6): 2. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 14 May 2022). Poelgeest, B. van Gedwongen Prostitutie van Nederlandse Vrouwen in Voormalig Nederlands-Indië, the Hague, report to the Second Chamber of the States General, 24 October 1994. Qiu, P. (2013) Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramseyer, J. M. (2020a) ‘On the invention of identity politics: The Buraku outcastes in Japan’, Review of Law and Economics. 16: 2. Ramseyer, J. M. (2020b) ‘Japan in 2020: Making sense of professors in overwhelmingly insular American universities’. Japan Forward. 4 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 20 May 2021). Ramseyer, J. M. (2021a) ‘Contracting for sex in the Pacific War’. International Review of Law and Economics. 65: 1–8. Ramseyer, J. M. (2021b) ‘Recovering the truth about the Comfort Women’, Japan Forward, 12 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 5 June 2021). Ramseyer, J. M. (2021c) ‘Social capital and the problems of opportunistic leadership: The example of Koreans in Japan’. European Journal of Law and Economics. 52: 1–32. Ramseyer, J. M. (2021d) ‘Correction to: Social capital and the problem of opportunistic leadership: The example of Koreans in Japan’, European Journal of Law and Economics. 52: 1–32. Seto, H. (2021) ‘Hābādo Daigaku kyōju – Chōsenjin wa kane to tame ni Nihon e’, Seto Hiroyuki BLOG Nihon yo doko e? Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 7 June 2021). Soh, C. S. (2008) The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan, Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press.

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Unwriting the Wrongs Stanley, A. et al. (2021) ‘“Contracting for sex in the Pacific War”: The case for retraction on grounds of academic misconduct’, The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus. 19(5): 13. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 15 April 2021). Suganuma, M. (2015) Yakuza to Kisen o Tsukutta Daikanminkoku: Nikkan Sengo Uramenshi, Tokyo: Bijinesu Sha. Suzuki, Y. (2020) ‘Chōsenjin 6000-nin gyakusatsu kinenhi’ o kōsei ni nokoshite yoi no ka’. On the webpage of the Japan Nationalist Party. 17 October. Online. Available HTTP: https://www.­ kokuminto.jp/archives/9756 (accessed 15 June 2022). Suzuki, Y. (2022) ‘Nihon ni gyakusatsu jinmyaku atta?!’ On the webpage of Nihon Josei no Kai Soyokaze. 15 June. Online. Available HTTP: http://blog.livedoor.jp/soyokaze2009/archives/51941920.html (accessed 15 June 2022). Tanaka, M. (1987) ‘Nankin Gyakusatsu’ no Sōkatsu: Gyakusatsu Hitei Jūgo no Ronkyo, Tokyo: Kentōsha. Tawara, Y. (2017) ‘What is the aim of Nippon Kaigi, the ultra-right organization that supports Japan’s Abe administration?’ The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus. 15(21): 1. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 September 2021). Thompson, P. (2000) The Voice of the Past: Oral History (3rd Edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trial Transcripts of the Lipstadt-Irving Trial. Sourced from the website ‘Holocaust Denial on Trial’, curated by Deborah Lipstadt et al. Emory University, https://www.hdot.org/trial-materials/­trialtranscripts/ (accessed May 2022). Uematsu, S. (2019) ‘Chōsenjin gyakusatsu tsuitō shūkai o tsubusu? “Soyokaze” ireisai no mokuteki wa’. Shūkan Kinyōbi. 27 September. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 12 May 2022). Violi, P. (2017) Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Space, History, trans. Alastair McEwan, Oxford: Peter Lang. Watanabe, N. (2021) Kantō Daishinsai ‘Gyakusatsu Hitei’ no Shinsō: Hābādo Daigaku Kyōju no Ronkyo o Kentō suru, Tokyo: Chikuma Shinsho. Winter, E. (2023) ‘Comments on “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War” by Mark Ramseyer’, International Review of Law and Economics ( journal pre-proof ), 16 January. Online. Available https:// www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0144818823000029?via%3Dihub (accessed 17 January 2023). Yamada, S. (2012/2013) ‘What happened in the area of Greater Tokyo right after the Great Kantō Earthquake? The state, the media and the people’, Comparative Genocide Studies. 3. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 15 February 2021). Yoshimi, Y. (1995) Comfort Women. Sex Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II, Trans. Suzanne O’Brien, New York: Columbia University Press.

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6 THE WEST AND THE DISSEMINATION OF JAPANESE HISTORICAL REVISIONISM Karoline Postel-Vinay

Although East Asia’s memory battles are generally fought within the countries of the region, some conflicts are internationalized on a larger scale, involving North American and European societies. Apart from the Vietnam War, which holds a singular place in post1945 international history, most of the memory conflicts developing beyond East Asia are, unsurprisingly, about the Pacific War, a regional war that became global after 1941 and that triggered global trauma. Issues such as the contested commemoration of the nuclear ­bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or discussion about the mistreatment (in violation of the Geneva Convention) of prisoners-of-war by the Japanese Army, are the most wellknown illustrations of this globalized contested trauma. But there is also, increasingly, a Western participation in memory controversies relating to events that involved mainly East Asian actors, and where actual trauma concerned a minority of Western victims or only a small number of Western witnesses. This trend is well illustrated by the recent internationalization of Japanese historical revisionism beyond East Asia. As this chapter stresses, the activism of Japanese revisionists was already discernible in Europe and North America in the 1980s. It defined a specific component—a ‘Japan and the West’ component—that played out in the dynamics of commemoration and contestation of East Asian trauma, and that became far more visible in the early twenty-first century. This chapter also argues that the spillover of East Asian memory battles onto the international scene, and more specifically the Western scene, takes place at a time when the growth of nationalism around the world threatens to make those battles increasingly intractable.

East Asian Trauma Goes West Shusenjo by Miki Dezaki, beyond being a documentary film on a major memory battle, became an illustration of the spillover of East Asian trauma issues on a broader international scene (Dezaki, Frost and Vickers 2021). The movie itself is about the controversies surrounding the Pacific War’s ‘comfort women’ issue—defined by a United Nations report as an ‘issue of military sexual slavery in wartime’ (United Nations 1996, 1)—and features interviews from different perspectives: memory activists, revisionists, academics, as well as men and women in the street. After the movie was released in public and private venues in Japan, South Korea and beyond, some of the prominent conservative figures interviewed by 62

DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-7

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Dezaki launched a lawsuit against him and his producers, claiming that the director deceived them into a­ greeing to talk on the record. The legal action quickly grew into a larger p­ olitical ­controversy covered by global media, which involved, on the one hand, ­leaders of the Japanese historical revisionist movement as well as some representatives of Japan’s state and local authorities, and, on the other hand, concerned citizens in diverse capacities and from various countries. For example, in 2019, the Kawasaki city council opposed the inclusion of Shusenjo at that year’s Kawasaki Film Festival, citing safety concerns as the movie had attracted right-wing denunciations and was at the core of a legal dispute. This decision triggered a protest, notably by Kore-eda Hirokazu, the multiple award-winning film director, which increased media attention and eventually led to the rescheduling of the projection of Shusenjo at the closing of the Kawasaki festival. Also in 2019, the French university of Sciences Po Lyon, after organizing a screening of Dezaki’s movie for students, received a letter from the Japanese consulate pointing that the audience might draw conclusions from the movie that could have ‘an unfavourable influence on the good relations of scientific exchanges between France and Japan’.1 This reaction echoed the regular interferences of Chinese diplomats into the academic life of democratic countries, even if the choice of words by the Japanese Consul was not as harsh as some of China’s ‘wolf warrior’ rhetoric and despite the fact that his letter stressed that his intent was not to oppose freedom of expression. For several decades after 1945, there was quite a contrast between the attention and debate devoted to war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the European theatre of Second World War, and the relatively limited publicity given to crimes that took place on the East Asian stage. Historian Ienaga Saburo’s long fight with the Japanese Ministry of Education over the use of his work on the Pacific War (Ienaga 1968) for national textbooks was for a long time hardly discussed outside of Japan, and then only by a few Western scholars (Bellah 1965, Saaler 2005, Nozaki 2009). Mao Zedong’s China did not leave much space, at least in the public sphere, for the commemoration of the victims of war crimes. It was only in the post-Mao era, in 1983, that the idea of a museum about the Nanjing Massacre was launched: a smaller version of what exists today was built in 1985, expanded in 1995 and expanded again in 2007 (Denton 2014). The issue of women forced into sexual slavery during the Pacific War was not publicly discussed in South Korea until the 1990s and is still almost invisible in North Korea’s official historical narrative. At the international level, the specificity of gender-related war crimes, and notably those covered by the euphemism ‘comfort women’, was not fully acknowledged either until the last decade of the twentieth century. Although some judges of the post-1945 International Military Tribunal for the Far East mentioned the question of forced prostitution during the Tokyo trial, there was no immediate legal follow-up. The only relevant initiative was a peripheral one: in 1948 the Dutch authorities organized the Batavia Temporary Court Martial that eventually convicted Japanese military individuals as well as civilians for enforced prostitution of Dutch women in Indonesia (Borch 2017). By and large, the Tokyo international trial as well as the Nuremberg counterpart reflected the normative debate of the time about the conditions of war, of which the question of violence against women and girls was almost absent. International norms evolve, along with social progress and ethical awareness: in 1993, the conflict in former Yugoslavia and the scale of rape and abuse of women and adolescent girls spurred the United Nations General Assembly to adopt the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women. Research and publications in the 1990s paved the way for the spillover of East Asian memory battles into the international public arena. The publication and translation into English of Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s seminal work on ‘comfort women’ (Yoshimi 1995) signalled 63

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a turning point. A transnational movement started to emerge (Koyama, Motokazu, ­Morris-Suzuki and Yamaguchi 2016). The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Sexual Slavery, a people’s tribunal held in Tokyo in December 2000, was organized by three NGOs from South Korea, Japan and the Philippines and involved judges who participated in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, including its president Gabrielle Kirk McDonald. This and numerous other initiatives, debates and publications made Western audiences become much more aware of the Pacific War’s war crimes issues. The East Asian scene that Westerners witnessed and participated in during the 1990s was however, not as tense as the period that followed. That last decade of the twentieth century was marked, in Japan, by a succession of official apologies, notably that of Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi in August 1995, for the Imperial Army’s crimes during the Pacific War and the recognition of the need for Japanese history textbooks to acknowledge and present those crimes. This reconciliation mood in Tokyo triggered a counter-reaction from Japanese neo-nationalists that grew increasingly virulent and influential in the new millennium, c­ reating a strong polarization that was also fed by the rise of nationalism in neighbouring countries. Western academia, media, politicians and others got more and more involved in the East Asian memory debates and controversies, mostly on the side of opponents to h ­ istorical revisionism, although as Miki Dezaki’s documentary illustrates, some Western personalities chose to side with the revisionist movement, as we will see more in detail below. One could argue that Western actors became more present in memory conflicts regarding East Asian history because those memory battles became more intense and louder. Simply put, more East Asian noise triggered more Western attention. The controversies around the statues representing a ‘comfort woman’, or rather a ‘comfort’ female adolescent, that have been erected outside South Korea, and specifically in Glendale, California (Rooney 2018), exemplify this trend. There is also a deliberate intention on the part of the ‘combatants’ and provocateurs in the memory battles to attract non-East Asian, and more particularly North American and European, attention. Even before those battles escalated and globalized, Japanese promoters of historical revisionism have been targeting Western audiences, with mixed success, since the 1980s (Buruma 1987, Grassmuck 1990, Lincicome 1993, He 2013).

Japanese Historical Revisionism in the Shadow of Internationalization (kokusaika) Policy Japan’s relation with the outside world under Nakasone Yasuhiro premiership (1982–1987) was a paradoxical one. Nakasone stood firmly by the US-Japan security alliance by affirming that his country would be America’s ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ but then made outrageous remarks, for example, saying that an American could not be as intelligent as a Japanese because US immigrants, in particular Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, brought ‘the average level down’ (Burgess 1986). Nakasone worked on improving relations with Beijing, renewing a bond of trust with his successful visit to China in 1984, but in the following year he became the first post-WWII prime minister, acting in his official capacity, to pay his respects to the souls of Japanese soldiers, including convicted war criminals—such as Matsui Iwane, involved in the Nanjing Massacre—enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine. More generally, the Nakasone years were both about opening Japan to the world under the banner of kokusaika, or ‘internationalization’, and about the Conservative mainstream power shifting towards the hard right, with calls for the reinforcement of patriotism and the promotion of a national history rewritten for that purpose (Nakano 2015, Hofmann 2021). 64

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Kokusaika meant many things, from trade liberalization to the internationalization of higher education (Breaden, Steele and Stevens 2014). Yet after some years of implementation, it became clear that its main preoccupation was Japan’s relation with the United States and, to a lesser extent, with Europe, but not so much with the rest of the world (Postel-Vinay 1994) or with the foreign, mostly Asian, minorities within Japan (Onuma 1990). Furthermore, in the Japanese society of the 1980s, there was an assumption that ‘internationalization’ entailed encounters with English-speaking, fair-skinned, blue-eyed gaijin—a term that means literally ‘a person from outside’ and that refers implicitly to people of European ancestry, in contrast with the official term gaikokujin which means people from foreign c­ountries. In other words, the process of becoming more ‘international’ was by and large confused with socializing with people that fit the definition of gaijin, usually North Americans and Europeans. This confusion meant consequently that Korea, Taiwan and China, Japan’s closest neighbours geographically, were at the periphery of Nakasone’s narrative of internationalization. From that perspective, and as contradictory as it may sound, opening Japan to the world and improving its integration into the international scene were thus compatible with ignoring or distorting the history of its actions in neighbouring countries during the Pacific War. It also implied that Western public opinion would not really feel concerned by past war crimes whose victims were mainly not gaijin but East Asian. Following that logic, Japanese neo-nationalists expected to be welcomed with opened arms by Westerners as representatives of the ‘international Japan’ envisioned by the Nakasone government (Buruma 1987, Grassmuck 1990, Lincicome 1993). Up to a point, that logic was not contradicted by reality, as illustrated by the famously strong relationship between Ronald Reagan and Nakasone Yasuhiro, dubbed the ‘Ron-Yasu’ relationship. And as historian Yoshida Takashi notes, the US president avoided commenting on the nascent memory battles in Northeast Asia, arguing that he ‘would rather not rehash the war feelings’ (Yoshida 2006, 118). A notable illustration of this paradoxical internationalization of Japan in the 1980s is the outreach strategy in North America and Western Europe adopted by Sasakawa Ryoichi, a personal friend of Nakasone and, at the time, a well-known public figure in Japan, a billionaire linked to the pre- and post-war ultranationalist movement and the yakuza underworld (Kaga 1993). Arrested as a class-A war criminal in 1945, he was more nostalgic than ashamed of Japan’s militarist past. As noted by the CIA in a declassified memo, Sasakawa announced in 1972 his intention to provide ‘sound education to the youth of the whole world’, while accusing the Japan Teachers Union of ‘mass producing rotten children’ (Central Intelligence Agency 1981). This project materialized in the 1980s with the aim of asserting his vision in the higher education sites of the Western world. Using his vast financial resources, Sasakawa established the US-Japan Foundation in 1980, the Great-Britain Sasakawa Foundation in 1983, the Scandinavia Sasakawa Foundation in 1985, and the Franco-Japanese Foundation in 1990. The respective administrators of these foundations then approached North American and European universities with attractive gifts that were often accepted, albeit rarely without debate, and were sometimes turned down by individual universities such as the University of Chicago, MIT and McGill in North America or officially banned by organizations such as the European Association for Japanese Studies (those initial stances were not, however, set in stone, and could later vary with a change of administration). The controversies triggered by Sasakawa’s agenda in Western countries highlighted a diversity of opinions, feelings and positions towards Japanese revisionism. Some of Sasakawa’s successes in the 1980s were due to Western ignorance of or indifference for what this figure of Japan’s neo-nationalist movement actually represented. But like-minded nationalists—for example Bruno Gollnisch, a French scholar and vocal member of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s former far-right party, the National 65

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Front—in the West acknowledged their association with Sasakawa as an expression of a shared worldview (Hübinette 2007).

The Twenty-First Century Transnational Neo-Nationalist Scene The 1990s were not a prosperous period for neo-nationalism and historical revisionism in Japan. As mentioned above, it was a period of official apologies, even if the use of terms such as ‘hansei’, usually translated as ‘remorse’ and/or ‘self-reflection’, sometimes created a controversy within the controversy with the emergence of apologists for Japan’s apologia discourse (Yamazaki 2006). The pressure for giving more space to militaristic Japan’s war atrocities in the national history curriculum that was triggered by the textbook controversies of the 1980s increased and started to show results: in the 1990s all secondary school textbooks covered the ‘comfort women’ issue. The yakuza organizations, with their cozy links with ultra-nationalism and figures such as Sasakawa Ryoichi (Kaplan and Dubro 1986, Siniawer 2015), were under assault: a law against violent groups or botaiho was implemented in 1992 (Herbert 2000). It looked like the end of an era. On 20 July 1995, among other media outlets, the British newspaper The Guardian announced: ‘Ryoichi Sasakawa, philanthropist, billionaire, politician, candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, friend of the great and good, war criminal and “don” of Japan, has died’. Soon afterwards the foundation that he created in Japan, that was initially called the ‘Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation’ and since 1990 referred to as the Sasakawa Foundation, was asked to change its name by the Japanese government. Following a corruption scandal involving a member of the foundation, the Ministry of Transport (to which the foundation was legally affiliated) insisted on a clear dissociation of the organization from the name of the man who as the Kyodo News agency put it on 26 May 1995 ‘was a class A war criminal who spent time in jail after 1945 but who later made himself known for his donations in Japan and abroad’. The heirs of Ryoichi chose the name ‘Nippon Foundation’, creating a strong possibility of public confusion with Japanese state-sponsored, ‘Japan Foundation’.2 By the turn of the millennium the pendulum swung back. Neo-nationalists and a­ dvocates of historical revisionism regrouped, established new associations and gradually asserted ­themselves on the Japanese political scene (Hein and Selden 2000, Kingston 2016). The Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho-o Tsukuru Kai), also known as Tsukuru-kai, established in December 1996 in order to fight a ‘­m asochistic’ view of history, produced a revisionist textbook that eventually received governmental approval for educational use in 2001. This, along with Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s official visit to the Yasukuni shrine, signalled a clear turning point that inaugurated a new period of polarization in and around Japan, fed mostly by memory wars but also by other issues such as territorial disputes about islands, often islets, located between the archipelago and the continent. The tension between Japan and its Northeast Asian neighbours reached a peak not attained since the end of the Pacific War. Besides this new level of tension, the period was, and still is, different from the 1980s in at least three ways: the more systematically Western-targeted initiatives by historical revisionism promoters, the involvement of Western actors and the global rise of nationalism. Echoing the kokusaika approach of the old days, the entrepreneurs of Japanese historical revisionism in the early twenty-first century have demonstrated an ambition to ‘go West’, aiming primarily at an audience in the United States, but also some European countries and a loosely defined global English-speaking internet crowd. This ambition is explicitly expressed in the mission statement of The Society for the Dissemination of Historical 66

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Fact (SDHF) presented on its English language website where it says: ‘we have resolved to make historical facts as they pertain to modern Japanese relations with neighbouring ­countries, especially China, available to English speakers via literature to be posted at this site’.3 This literature, mostly denying the criminality of the Nanjing Massacre or of the ‘comfort women’ system but also defending the practice of whaling, is not only available on the website but is also sent by email around the world, several times per month, to academics and politicians without their consent. One of the prime features on the SDHF website is Higashinakano Shudo’s pamphlet on the Nanjing Massacre, in which the last chapter is entitled ‘New Evidence Leads to the Conclusion That There Was No Massacre in Nanking’ (Kasahara 2008, Richter 2008). This pamphlet was published by Sekai Shuppan in 2005 and was then actively ­promoted by the Tokyo Foundation, a think tank established by Sasakawa Ryoichi in 1962 and subsequently chaired by Ryoichi’s son, Sasakawa Yohei. As the director for research of the organization explained, more than 2,400 copies of the book were sent by the Tokyo Foundation between 2005 and 2008 to major university libraries as well as to individual scholars. The package came with a summary of the book that stated that the conclusions of the investigation undertaken by Higashinakano ‘show that the “Nanking Massacre” is a product of wartime and postwar propaganda’ and added that ‘without the benefit of this book, an understanding of the facts about Nanking is not possible’.4 In the early years of the new millennium, it was probably somewhat difficult for Western scholars, except for veterans and experts of the issues at stake, to fully assess the significance of the international push by Japanese historical revisionism’s promoters. In June 2006, after many scholars and libraries in the United States had received a copy of Higashinakano’s book along with the memo by the Tokyo Foundation, a debate was proposed on H-Asia, a network for historians and specialists of Asia, but it did not attract many participants. By 2015, the picture had notably changed. In May of that year, historians Jordan Sand and Alexis Dudden coordinated an ‘Open Letter in Support of Historians of Japan’ that expressed concern about the efforts of Abe Shinzô’s government and the Japanese far-right to silence ­critical voices on the ‘comfort women issue’ both in Japan and in the United States. Originally an American initiative, the letter was also circulated in Europe and Australia, and obtained over 450 signatures by Western scholars in Japanese studies. The swiftness with which the letter was disseminated and signed was indicative of the powerful backlash that Japanese revisionists triggered by advocating a denialist discourse internationally. As the coordinators of the Open Letter noted, there was now undoubtedly a new environment that was often inhospitable to objective historical inquiry on certain topics (Ennis 2015). With the backing of a government with close ties to the neo-nationalist movement, the advocates of historical revisionism started to have a tangible impact on the position of scholars, intellectuals and journalists in the West specializing in Japan’s history and society. On the one hand, the former managed to get noticed by a larger audience, while on the other hand, the latter became more involved in debates in which they would not necessarily have participated some years earlier. By drawing the limelight to one of Japan’s darkest chapters and the scrutiny that entailed, the revisionists managed to tarnish the nation’s brand, undermining their own agenda. In contrast with the kokusaika decades when neo-nationalists’ tools of persuasion were limited to paper publications, in-presence meetings and the telephone, the new millennium opened all the possibilities of the internet. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki (2021) argues, historical revisionists in Japan rely on the classic methodology of Holocaust denial. That entails, inter alia, focusing on minor details and discrepancies to divert attention from well-documented facts and overwhelming evidence, such as claiming that the absence of a signed order for 67

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a wartime massacre of civilians obliterates the reality of that massacre. Without modifying the basic techniques of historical denial, the internet brings to revisionists not only a new sounding board but also a new setting where genuine academic research is confronted with a cascade of unsubstantiated ‘alternative facts’ and misleading distortions and half-truths. In this context, the promoters of historical revisionism can more easily compensate for their lack of scholarly research and credibility. An example of this trend was the online creation of a fake institute called the ‘Princeton Institute for Asian Studies’ aimed at disseminating revisionist views on the ‘comfort women’ issue while borrowing the name, status and colour code of a well-established and prestigious university. The real Princeton University’s representatives reacted by requesting changes in order to clarify that the so-called institute had no affiliation with the university (Allen 2019). The globalization of Japanese historical revisionism and its enhanced visibility in Western countries, especially in the United States, has triggered more coordination on the part of Japanese studies scholars wishing to respond to this trend. It has also, apparently, inspired some Western individuals to side with the advocates of revisionism. The case of ‘Texas Daddy’, who is interviewed in Miki Dezaki’s documentary, illustrates both the state of confusion created by some online debates and how remarkably detached the proponents of revisionism can be from the historical realities—and human issues—at stake. Tony Marano, a retired employee of a telecommunication company with no background or knowledge of Japan, became ‘Texas Daddy’, a gaijin mascot for the revisionist movement in Japan because of his dislike of an anti-whaling advocacy group based in the United States. Since whaling is also an issue that preoccupies neo-nationalists in Japan, Marano attracted the attention of a far-right Japanese businessman and suddenly came to specialize in ‘comfort women’ bashing on the internet with lively videos, as well as authoring, or rather lending his name to, several books in Japanese promoting denialist narratives. At the other end of the spectrum of intellectual legitimacy, Japanese historical revisionism also gained the support of Mark Ramseyer, a Japanese law scholar at Harvard, who published a paper on the ‘comfort women’ system that followed the main denialist arguments, trivializing the system as a business of willing and paid prostitution (Dudden 2021). Although academic vigilance prevailed and the paper did not go beyond the preview stage and was not published in the peer-reviewed journal that the author was aiming at, it became nonetheless a reference for English language neo-nationalist websites such as that of SDHF.

Whither International Ethical Progress Japanese historical revisionism is also supported in the West by straightforwardly transnational political links, defined by established political parties. On the eve of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, in August 2010, the Japanese far-right organization Issui-kai invited European party leaders of similar ideology, including Adam Walker of the British National Party and Jean-Marie Le Pen of the French National Front, to visit Tokyo and Yasukuni. This was not an entirely new phenomenon as Issui-kai has from the start, when it was created in the 1970s by followers of Mishima Yukio, aimed at the international coordination of far-right movements. Transnationalism is a common development practice of political parties, even nationalistic ones. In Europe, leaders of far-right parties sharing neo-Nazi sympathies have regularly come together since the 1970s (Chebel d’Appolonia 1992). What was new however, in comparison with the 1970s, was that a meeting such as the one of the Issui-kai with its European counterparts in 2010 took place at a time when the position of those parties on the political stage of their respective countries was on the verge 68

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of shifting from fringe to mainstream. In 1996, a reporter for AP News could still write about Japan that ‘there’s no reason to expect a surge in the popularity of the radical right any time soon’ (Coleman 1996). Twenty years later, the influence of the neo-nationalist movement Nippon Kaigi, or ‘Japan Conference’, was overwhelmingly present at the very heart of the national government. The ascent of nationalist movements within liberal democracies was not limited to Japan: they made notable progress in the West, either by gaining ideological influence within established parties such as the Republican Party of the United States, increasing their representation in the European Parliament, or by winning presidential elections as in Hungary and Poland. Whereas the growth of nationalism in East Asia had already for some time ‘complicated the picture’ of the memory wars—as historian Bob Wakabayashi (2007) would put it—the emergence of a global far-right, with strong proponents in Western countries, made the conversation even more problematic (Postel-Vinay 2017). As a result, the possibility of remembering and making sense of the trauma of the Pacific War is becoming ever more uncertain. From the perspective of international cooperation, the merits of globalizing the memory of traumas from the Pacific War can be measured by their impact on norms and rules related to conflict and post-conflict management. Again, the acknowledgement of gendered crimes such as the practice of mass rape as a weapon of war in the former Yugoslavia has helped to create a new legal instrument to prevent such crimes. In the absence of a legal output on the issue of ‘comfort women’ from the international tribunal in Tokyo just after the war, the work of historians as well as the testimonies of the survivors proved to be crucial to contribute to the reinforcement of tools for the prevention of violence against women and girls. In 2014, Abe Shinzo’s government made a direct request to the author of the 1996 United Nations-commissioned report on military sexual slavery to retract some parts of the document (Panda 2014). The request, which was turned down, triggered yet another diplomatic incident with the South Korean government and attracted international media attention. Although media coverage referred to the history of the ‘comfort women’ during the Pacific War, the topic is inevitably framed as a bilateral dispute that obscures the multilateral reality of this system of sexual slavery. Whereas the UN report was part of a broader reflection on the problem of gendered violence globally, the ‘comfort women’ issue was nationalized by both Japan and South Korea: the question of the lifetime trauma experienced by women and girls whatever their nationality—that has been highlighted by Dutch and South Korean victims alike—was de facto overshadowed by preoccupations with national pride. The political use of memory and trauma, either through denial, as in the case of Japanese historical revisionism, or through the building of ‘victimhood nationalism’ (Lerner 2020) as illustrated by recent trends in China and South Korea (Wakabayashi 2007; Watt 2021) is not however specific to East Asia even though history conflicts are particularly intense there. That use of memory and trauma is an unavoidable part of international politics and can even help to promote norms in the field of human rights, but there is a threshold beyond which history is politicized and distorted. The problem of the nationalization of memory and trauma issues becomes even more ­vexing when it takes place in a global context where the spread of neo-nationalism is accompanied by the advent of post-truth politics in democratic societies. The preference for o ­ pinions over facts and evidence, or for populist narratives over scientific expertise, has played out in many global issues from climate change to COVID-19, as well as the recounting of wars. In that sense, Abe Shinzo’s project of rewriting the history of the Pacific War in accordance with his vision of a ‘beautiful Japan’ (utsukushii kuni-e) echoes Donald Trump’s ambition to ‘make America great again’. This global trend threatens basic features of democracies. It 69

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challenges the possibility of a shared public history and therefore jeopardizes the process of defining collective lessons that can be learned from the past in order, ­optimistically, not to repeat it or, at a minimum, to produce norms and rules that can mitigate some of its criminal dimensions. Whereas the use of ‘alternative facts’ is a common practice of authoritarian regimes, there is a general expectation that democratic governments have an obligation to protect historical truths. In that sense, the fact that historical revisionism gained so much currency within Japanese governing circles in the beginning of the twenty-first century— far more than during the 1980s—is particularly striking. It remains to be seen in the longer term whether it will be a temporary aberration or part of a larger trend where a decreasing faith in facts in democratic societies sustains the rise of revisionist entrepreneurs and keeps East Asia divided over its shared past.

Notes 1 Letter signed by Japan’s Consul in Lyon, 4 December 2019: although the letter has been duly registered by the university’s administration, it has not been made officially public, but has widely circulated informally. 2 The branches established by Sasakawa Ryoichi in Europe and America did not change their names and hence continue to pay homage to their founder. The use of the name ‘Sasakawa’ was one of the core issues of a lawsuit launched, and lost, by the French branch (Postel-Vinay and Selden 2010). 3 See https://www.sdh-fact.com/, accessed 8 May 2022. As with many revisionist and/or far-right leaning online sites, the choice of words is carefully made in order to avoid outright confrontation (Hall 2021). Yet a closer look at the content leaves little doubt as to the views that are defended. 4 Sent and signed by Chairman Kimindo Kusaka, dated February 2006.

Works Cited Allen, P. (2019) ‘Website Using ‘Princeton’ Name Promotes Contentious Historical Outlook’, The Daily Princetonian. 3 October. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 8 May 2022). Bellah, R. (1965) ‘Ienaga Saburo and the Search for Meaning in Modern Japan’ in M. B. Jansen (ed.) Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 369–424. Borch, F. (2017) Military Trials of War Criminals in the Netherlands East Indies 1946–1949. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Breaden, J., Steele, S. and Stevens, C. (2014) Internationalising Japan: Discourse and Practice. London: Routledge. Burgess, J. (1986) ‘Nakasone Suggests Minorities Put U.S. Society Behind Japan’s’, The Washington Post, September 24. Buruma, I. (1987) ‘A New Japanese Nationalism’, The New York Times Magazine, April 12. Central Intelligence Agency (1981) Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act-Declassified and Approved for Release by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2005, ‘Sasakawa Ryoichi’, 27 January 1981, National Archives and Records Administration. Chebel d’Appolonia, A. (1992) ‘Les Partis d’Extrême-droite en Europe’, Cultures et Conflits, 7: 17–30. Coleman, J. (1996) ‘Right-Wing Blues: Little Public Sympathy for Japan’s Ultranationalists’, AP News, 13 July. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 8 May 2022). Denton, K. (2014) Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Dezaki, M., Frost, M. and Vickers, E. (2021) ‘Debating Shusenjo – the Main Battlefield of the Comfort Women Issue’, The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, 19 (5). Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 8 May 2022). Dudden, A. (2021) ‘Supplement to Special Issue: Academic Integrity at Stake: The Ramseyer Article Four Letters’, Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, 5 (2). Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 8 May 2022).

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The West and the Dissemination of Japanese Historical Revisionism Ennis, P. (2015) ‘Anatomy of the Open Letter’, The Oriental Economist, 16 May. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 8 May 2022). Grassmuck, K. (1990) ‘Japanese Businessman’s Background Stirs Debate Over Whether Colleges Should Accept His Gifts’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2. Hall, J. (2021) Japan’s Nationalist Right in the Internet Age: Online Media and Grassroots Conservative Activism. London: Routledge. He, Y. (2013) ‘40 Years in Paradox: Post-normalisation Sino-Japanese Relations’, China Perspectives, 4: 7–16. Hein, L. and Selden, M. (eds.) (2000) Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Publishing Co. Herbert, W. (2000) ‘The Yakuza and the Law’ in J. Eades, T. Gill and H. Befu (eds.) Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press: 143–158. Hofmann, R. (2021) ‘The Conservative Imaginary: Moral Re-Armament and the Internationalism of the Japanese Right, 1945–1962’, Japan Forum, 33 (1): 77–102. Hübinette, T. (2007) ‘Asia as a Topos of Fear and Desire for Nazis and Extreme Rightists: The Case of Asian Studies in Sweden’, Positions-East Asia Cultures Critique, 15 (2): 403–428. Ienaga, S. (1968) Taiheiyô sensô. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Kaga, K. (1993) ‘Saigo-no-Don. Sasakawa Ichizoku-no Anto’, Bungei Shunju, August, p.187. Kaplan, D. and Dubro, A. (1986) Yakuza. Japan’s Criminal Underworld. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kasahara, T. (2008) ‘Higashinakano Osamichi. The Last Word in Denial’ in B. T. Wakabayashi (ed.) The Nanking Atrocity 1937–1938. Complicating the Picture. New York: Bergahn Books. Kingston, J. (ed.) (2016) ‘Nationalism in Japan – Special Feature’, Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, 14 (20). Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 8 May 2022). Koyama, E., Motokazu, N., Morris-Suzuki T. and Yamaguchi, T. (2016) Umi o Wataru Ianfu Mondai: Uha no Rekishisen o Tou. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Lerner, A. (2020) ‘The uses and Abuses of Victimhood Nationalism in International Politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 26 (1): 62–87. Lincicome, M. (1993) ‘Nationalism, Internationalization, and the Dilemma of Educational Reform in Japan’, Comparative Education Review, 37 (2): 123–151 Morris-Suzuki, T. (2021) ‘Un-Remembering the Massacre: How Japan’s “History Wars” Are Challenging Research Integrity Domestically and Abroad’, Georgetown Journal of International u nAffairs, 25 October. Online. Available HTTP: https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2021/10/25/­ remembering-the-massacre-how-japans-histor y-wars-are-challenging-research-integritydomestically-and-abroad/ (accessed 8 May 2022). Nakano, K. (2015) ‘New Right Transformation in Japan’ in M. Mullins and K. Nakano (eds.) Disasters and Social Crisis in Contemporary Japan: Political, Religious, and Sociocultural Responses. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nozaki, Y. (2009) War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Postwar Japan. The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and Ienaga Saburo’s Court Challenges. London: Routledge. Onuma, Y. (1990) Kokusaika: Utsukushii gokai ga umu seika. Tokyo: Toshindo. Panda, A. (2014) ‘Japan Denied Revision of UN Comfort Women Report’, The Diplomat, October 17. Postel-Vinay, K. (1994) La Révolution Silencieuse du Japon. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Postel-Vinay, K. (2017) ‘The Global Rightist Turn, Nationalism and Japan’, Asia Pacific Journal Japan Focus, 15 (10). Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 8 May 2022). Postel-Vinay, K. and Selden, M. (2010) ‘History on Trial: French Nippon Foundation Sues Scholar for Libel to Protect the Honor of Sasakawa Ryōichi’, Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, 8 (17). Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 8 May 2022). Richter, S. (2008) ‘Historical Revisionism in East Asia: What Does Politics Have to Do with It?’ in S. Richter (ed.) Contested Views of a Common Past. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.25–46. Rooney, S. (2018) ‘The Politics of Shame: The Glendale Comfort Women Memorial and the Complications of Transnational Commemorations’, De arte, 53 (2–3): 86–102 Saaler, S. (2005) Politics, Memory and Public Opinion: The History Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society. Munich: Ludicium. Siniawer, E.M. (2015) Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Karoline Postel-Vinay United Nations (1996) Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Its Causes and Consequences, Radhika Coomaraswamy, in Accordance with Commission on Human Rights Resolution 1994/45. Geneva: UN. Wakabayashi, B.T. (2007) The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38: Complicating the Picture. New York: Berghahn Books. Watt, L. (2021) ‘East Asian Victimhood Goes to Paris: A Consideration of WWII-Related Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Nominations to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Project’ in R. Hansen, A. Saupe, A. Wirsching and D. Yang (eds.) Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War: Narratives from Europe and East Asia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 296–316 Yamazaki, J. (2006) Japanese Apologies for World War II: A Rhetorical Study. London: Routledge. Yoshida, T. (2006) The Making of the ‘Rape of Nanking’: History and Memory in Japan, China and the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yoshimi, Y. (1995) Jûgun ianfu. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

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7 OVERCOMING TRAUMA AT CHIDORIGAFUCHI Japan’s ‘National Cemetery’ and the Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War Sven Saaler and Collin Rusneac

Introduction In central Tokyo, there is a site called Chidorigafuchi. It is easy to find on Google Maps, which lists locations such as Chidorigafuchi Park, Chidorigafuchi Moat and Chidorigafuchi Boat Parking [sic]. Clicking on the photos which accompany these locations unleashes an impressive demonstration of the beauty of Japanese cherry blossoms—Chidorigafuchi is one of the venues from which the Japanese media reports annually about the progress of kaika, or the ‘opening of the flowers’. Less widely known is Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery (hereafter CNC), postwar Japan’s official site dedicated to the commemoration of Japanese victims of the Second World War (see Figure 7.1). In Google Maps, it is hidden behind the splendour of cherry blossoms and is easily overlooked if one does not explicitly search for it. CNC was designed in the 1950s to offer an alternative to Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto Shrine where Japan’s fallen soldiers and sailors are worshipped as gods or deities. Part of its rationale was to depart from the ‘fundamentalist’ ultranationalism that Yasukuni represents (see Mullins 2021). Because the ideology embodied by Yasukuni had facilitated the mobilization of the Japanese for total war and, by extension, had been responsible for the deaths of more than three million Japanese—not to mention the twenty to thirty million war-related deaths in East and Southeast Asia—it seemed inappropriate to preserve it as an institution of mourning. Yasukuni and other shrines dedicated to the worship of the war dead received a further blow during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952) when State Shinto was banned (Nakai 2018). Consequently, the Japanese government proposed building a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, following the European model of a secular war memorial designed to deal with the trauma caused by the large number of deaths sustained during the First World War. Following lengthy deliberations, CNC was finally inaugurated in Tokyo in 1959. Differing from the European Tombs of the Unknown Soldier, where the interment of the remains of one or a few soldiers is symbolic, CNC is the final resting place for the remains of large numbers of war dead—370,269 individuals as of 2022 (CSB 2022)—making it, at least in theory, the nation’s central site for mourning the war dead. Nevertheless, CNC has failed to achieve broad recognition, mainly due to the obstruction campaigns waged by Yasukuni DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-8

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Figure 7.1  Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery (photo by the authors)

and its supporters, who have actively fought to defend the shrine’s position as the ‘traditional’ site of war commemoration in Japan. In this chapter, we analyse the role of CNC in the national discourse regarding the collective trauma resulting from the mass dying and suffering in the Asia-Pacific War (on the efforts—or lack thereof—to overcome individual war-related trauma, see the Japan-related chapters in Micale and Pols 2021). To be sure, by the time unconditional surrender was signed on 2 September 1945, Japan’s bereaved families were in dire need of consolation. The shock was profound as 90 per cent of the 2.4 million fallen soldiers and almost all of the nation’s 800,000 civilian victims had died in the last twenty months of the war, i.e., between 1944 and 1945 (Yoshida 2017). In response, government officials began to explore new ways of commemorating the war dead and consoling the nation’s bereaved families. We begin by charting the process of establishing CNC as a new site to commemorate the war dead, then investigate the opposition to the new memorial by the nationalist-militarist establishment, which had its own ideas about overcoming the trauma caused by war and defeat. Lastly, we outline why and how CNC re-emerged as an alternative site for dealing with Japan’s wartime legacies in the early twenty-first century.

The Concept of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier The first ‘Tombs of the Unknown Soldier’ were established in London and Paris in 1919 (Wittman 2011). The unprecedented number of war dead during WWI posed an existential challenge to the legitimacy of the nation state. States had mobilized their citizenry for 74

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war and were thus directly responsible for sending millions to their deaths. The mass dying ­t raumatized millions, including families without a tradition of military ‘service’, who struggled to understand why their husbands, sons or fathers had to die (Mosse 1990). Furthermore, many of those who died in the conflict remained unidentified, buried in unmarked mass graves dug hurriedly to prevent the spread of contagious diseases, including the Spanish flu. Even today, more than half of the soldiers who died in WWI do not have a known grave—a situation which exposes the inability of the modern nation state to properly ‘administer’ the rites of honouring those dying for the ‘national cause’ and to address the resulting psychological burden experienced by the bereaved families. To cover up these shortcomings, the governments of the belligerent countries took a variety of approaches. First, they encouraged and supported the building of local memorials in which the names of the ‘sons of the village’ who had not returned from the front were inscribed. These memorials can still be found in many European towns and villages, sometimes in the city centre, local graveyards, churchyards or other suitable places of commemoration. Second, governments ordered that the hastily interred bodies of dead soldiers be exhumed and given more fitting graves in spaces today known as ‘war cemeteries’. New organizations, such as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in the United Kingdom and the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge in Germany, were founded to organize the process. The work of digging up millions of dead bodies, identifying as many of them as possible and giving them a proper reburial in a dignified space is still ongoing—a process further complicated by the even larger death toll of WWII (and, in some regions, post-1945 conflicts). Lastly, aware of the daunting task confronting them, central governments came up with the concept of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The idea was to take one or two bodies of dead soldiers, ceremoniously carry them to the nation’s capital and lay them to rest in newly designed spaces, some of which had established links to war commemoration. In Paris, for example, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was built beneath the Arc de Triomphe, consecrated during Emperor Napoleon’s rule as a site to commemorate officers who had died in his wars; a total of 660 names are inscribed in the stonework of the Arc (Divry 2017). Similarly, the Italian Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was added to the Vittoriano, a site built to venerate the first king of a united Italy, Vittorio Emanuele. Benedict Anderson in the opening sentence of his classic study Imagined Communities underlines the importance of these monuments, stating that there are ‘no more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism … than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers’ (Anderson 1991, 9). The establishment of these Tombs of the Unknown Soldier in Europe did not pass unnoticed in Japan (see Horiuchi 1928). But because the country had suffered a relatively small number of casualties during WWI and had not experienced national trauma on the scale of European nations, Japan continued to worship—rather than mourn and commemorate— its fallen soldiers at Yasukuni Shrine and the local shōkonsha (shrines dedicated to ‘loyal souls’ that in the 1930s were consolidated and renamed Gokoku Shrines, shrines of national defence; see Murakami 1974; Shirakawa 2015; Takenaka 2015).

Japan’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier The need for a new kind of war memorial in Japan emerged emphatically after the AsiaPacific War (1931–1945). Resulting in the death of more than three million Japanese, the war had thoroughly discredited the praxis of consolation offered by State Shinto and the 75

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Yasukuni Shrine. Most remains of the war dead had been abandoned far from Japan, m ­ aking ­veneration according to Shinto traditions impossible. Some urged that Yasukuni be burned down, given that it had played a major role in mobilizing citizens to join such a disastrous war in the first place and thus had become one of the main sources of the ensuing trauma. Although this course was avoided, Yasukuni lost its privileged position as a national ­institution when State Shinto was banned by the Allied Occupation of Japan. Furthermore, the revised Japanese Constitution of 1947 stipulated the separation of religion and state (Article 20), seemingly ruling out the involvement of Yasukuni in national ceremonies of any kind. While the occupation authorities acknowledged the need for Japan to mourn and ­commemorate its war dead (Woodard 1972), discussions about a new national institution did not begin in earnest until after the end of the occupation in 1952. In that year the government set up a commission charged with planning the construction of a ‘Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’. A broad consensus was achieved at both the political and social level on the concept for the memorial; even the Socialist Party—a fervent opponent of nationalist war commemoration—expressed its agreement (ZHCSBH 1989, 2). On 11 December 1953, the government passed a resolution announcing its plans for the new site (KKT 2007, 338). In additional statements, it pledged to repatriate the remains of the nation’s war dead, ­scattered across the Asia-Pacific region (ibid., 339f ). The main role in the planning process fell to the National Association for the Support of War Victims (Zenkoku Sensō Giseisha Engokai). Notwithstanding its close connections with Japan’s wartime leadership (its honorary president was former Army Minister Ugaki Kazushige, one of the few wartime generals not tried as a war criminal), the Engokai strongly supported the idea of a new commemorative institution, stating that ‘we can no longer rely on the Yasukuni Shrine, which now is just one of many religious bodies’ (cited in Horiuchi 2013, 42f ). However, despite the Engokai’s support, conservative groups supporting Yasukuni— including the Association of Bereaved Families (Nihon Izokukai) and the various ­veterans’ associations—resisted the idea of a new memorial. During discussions about the new institution, these organizations vowed to defend Yasukuni’s role as the central site for the commemoration of Japan’s war dead. Rejecting the Engokai’s views, they argued that the Yasukuni Shrine should not be treated as ‘just another religious body’; rather, ‘it is necessary to take into account the people’s attachment to this traditional site of mourning’ (KKT 2007, 350, 352). Flatly rejecting the necessity of ‘a tomb’, one member of the National Diet, demonstrating bizarre logic, argued that ‘it is not the wish of the war dead to have their remains interred in a state-administered tomb of the unknown soldier’ (cited in Horiuchi 2013, 46; emphasis added). Aizawa Kan, deputy chairman of the Izokukai, argued that if ‘a tomb’ was to be built, it should be located within the precincts of the Yasukuni Shrine (KKT 2007, 342). As a result of such pressure, during a 1954 meeting of the commission planning the new memorial, a map of Yasukuni was distributed along with a request to identify a suitable location for the new memorial within its boundaries (KKT 2007, 346f ). However, due to opposition from representatives of other religious groups, as well as constitutional restraints—specifically, the separation of state and religion in Article 20—this course of action proved impractical. To appease the supporters of Yasukuni, the government issued a memorandum promising that the new institution would not automatically supersede the shrine (Horiuchi 2013, 47). Next, it announced that the new memorial would be built on a site in Chidorigafuchi administered by the Imperial Household Agency (KKT 2007, 353). On 3 December 1956, the Cabinet announced the start of construction of a ‘tomb of 76

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the unknown war dead’ (mumei senbotsusha no haka) in Chidorigafuchi, which would house ‘the remains of those who died in war that could not be returned to their families’ and which would also serve as a site for ‘memorial services’ (irei gyōji) (KKT 2007, 353). Three years later, on 28 March 1959, a ceremony was held to inaugurate what was now called Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery (Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusha Boen).1

The Characteristics of Chidorigafuchi What are the main features of Chidorigafuchi? As the government had made clear from the start of deliberations on the new memorial, while Yasukuni merely keeps lists of service personnel who died in war, believing that the ‘enshrinement’ of these lists transforms each individual into a Shinto deity, the principal role of CNC was to host the actual remains of unidentified fallen soldiers. In addition to human remains repatriated by government missions or private groups, CNC accommodates remains extracted from Japanese war memorials in China—such as the Harbin Chūreitō (Harbin Tower of Loyal Souls)—which were interred here in 1959. Despite the construction of CNC, Yasukuni Shrine campaigned to protect its ‘right’ to worship those war dead who met the institution’s criteria—men who had died in battle, as regular members of the imperial military forces, and whose names and dates and places of death had been confirmed. In a major breach of the constitutional separation of religion and state, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) provided the shrine with lists of service personnel killed in the Asia-Pacific War, based on their pension records (Nihon Keizai Shinbun 2010), allowing Yasukuni to add further names to its commemoration roster throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In many cases, however, the date and place of death of a fallen soldier remained unknown, precluding a significant number of war dead from being enshrined at Yasukuni. The government had been unable to confirm the fate of many soldiers who had died of starvation on isolated islands or sailors who had perished on sunken ships. During the retreat of the imperial military forces, dead soldiers had been hastily and unceremoniously buried in mass graves throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Even seventy-five years after the war, almost half of Japan’s fallen soldiers remain missing—the remains of 1.28 million servicemen have been repatriated to Japan, while 1.12 million are still unaccounted for (CNCMF 2020). MHLW began supporting the repatriation of the remains of fallen soldiers (ikotsu shūshū) from the 1950s and continues to do so. Typically, when soldiers’ bones are unearthed, they are brought back to Japan (Trefalt 2017; Hamai 2021). If these remains can be identified, they are returned to their families. Servicemen who remain unidentified are laid to rest in an underground ossuary at CNC. This practice became the main raison d’être of Chidorigafuchi—it filled a void that Yasukuni could not. Today, CNC is the resting place for the remains of more than 370,000 fallen soldiers (CNCMF 2020), and its underground ossuary continues to be enlarged (see Figure 7.2). Another meaningful function of CNC is to commemorate civilian victims of war. Since 1963, 800,000 civilians—mainly the victims of air raids on Japanese cities—have also been commemorated here (CSB 2022). Civilian victims of war are generally excluded from Yasukuni, which privileges members of Japan’s imperial military forces. Because CNC is a non-religious institution, all Japanese can use the site to pray for the souls of the war dead. In the same vein, it also evades the chief sticking point of the ‘Yasukuni problem’ (Yasukuni mondai)—its incompatibility with the constitutional separation of state and religion. 77

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Figure 7.2 Construction work to expand the underground ossuary of CNC (2013) (photo by Sven Saaler)

Finally, CNC differs from Yasukuni in that it does not set out to justify Japan’s recent wars as ‘just’ wars and refrains from glorifying war in general. This allows the government to use the site for visits by foreign dignitaries, and since visits to war memorials are often included in official state visits, Chidorigafuchi fulfils that purpose with little negative reaction. For example, in October 2013, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel visited Chidorigafuchi—partly to underline the US government’s opposition to prime ministerial visits to Yasukuni (South China Morning Post 2013).

National Ceremonies for the War Dead However, notwithstanding its official designation as Japan’s ‘National Cemetery’, Chidorigafuchi’s role in official war commemorations remains limited. Each year on a date in the first half of August, the ‘Ceremony to Mourn the Victims of War and Pray for Peace’ (Sensō giseisha irei narabi ni heiwa kinen shikiten) is held at CNC. Although ceremonies are held throughout the year, this one is especially notable because it is attended by representatives of the government, Buddhist, Christian and other religious organizations, and personnel from Japan’s Self Defence Forces (SDF), as well as members of the imperial family (ZHCSBH 1989, 60–69, 2009, 71f ). In 2022, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio visited Chidorigafuchi on the morning of 15 August, to offer floral wreaths, while other cabinet members chose to visit Yasukuni. At CNC, at 11:55 AM, members of two opposition parties and NGOs related to the peace 78

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movement held a memorial event (see Figure 7.3), indicating that the National Cemetery is now more important to the opposition than the national government. The official ceremony held by the Japanese state to commemorate the war dead, h ­ owever, happens elsewhere. Known as the ‘National Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead’ (Zenkoku senbotsusha tsuitōshiki), this event is held on 15 August, the day on which Emperor Hirohito announced to his people in a radio address in 1945 that Japan was ready to surrender. In 1963, this date was designated by the Japanese government as the official ‘Day to Mourn the War Dead and Pray for Peace’ (Senbotsusha o tsuitō shi heiwa o kinen suru hi)—popularly known as the ‘Day to Commemorate the End of the War’ (Shūsen kinen no hi). The 15 August ceremony is attended by the prime minister and cabinet members, the presidents of both houses of the Diet, and the president of the Supreme Court—the heads of all three branches of the Government of Japan—as well as the emperor and empress. Unless special restrictions are imposed, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, several thousand representatives of

Figure 7.3 ‘15 August Gathering to Commemorate the Victims of War and Plead for Peace’ held in Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery on 15 August 2022.  In the centre, wreaths offered by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (photo by Sven Saaler)

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bereaved families are also invited. The ceremony, which includes a minute’s silence at 12.00 o’clock and reaches its climax in short speeches by the prime minister and the emperor, is broadcast live on NHK, Japan’s public TV station. Videos of the ceremony are posted online on sites such as the official YouTube channel of MHLW. This ceremony was first held in Shinjuku Gyōen in 1952, then in 1959 at the CNC and in 1964 at the Yasukuni Shrine. Since 1965, however, it has been held in Budokan, the Martial Arts Hall completed for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and afterwards used as a multi-purpose hall, frequently hosting rock concerts by groups including the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Kiss and Queen. It is also in close vicinity of both Yasukuni, still the preferable location for a national ceremony by conservatives, and Chidorigafuchi. The government’s reluctance to continue holding the National Ceremony at Yasukuni resulted from popular opposition to the breach of the separation of state and religion, as mandated in the c­ onstitution. Yet, neither would the ceremony return to CNC, mainly because of obstructionist activities by supporters of the Yasukuni Shrine. From the 1950s to the 1970s, conservative groups in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), disappointed by the government’s decision to move the 15 August ceremony away from Yasukuni Shrine, proposed nationalizing Yasukuni, thereby transforming the shrine into a national memorial for the war dead. While proposals for such ‘Yasukuni legislation’ (Yasukuni hōan) were rejected no fewer than five times, being controversial even within the LDP (see Mullins 2021, ch. 2), the controversy had the effect of further side-lining CNC. Today its status remains only vaguely defined. Notwithstanding its significant d­ esignation as Japan’s ‘National Cemetery’, CNC’s legal status is that of a ‘burial park’ (boen), a very unusual term in Japanese law. Institutionally, it falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Environment (being an extension of the Outer Gardens of the Imperial Palace, Kōkyo gaien), rather than the more powerful MHLW or the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, which are mostly responsible for the commemoration of the war dead (Shushō Kantei 2002). In addition to these administrative impediments, CNC has not been wholeheartedly embraced by Japanese society as an important site of collective memory and mourning. While each year several million visitors visit Yasukuni Shrine (this number includes visitors to various shrine festivals, most of which are irrelevant to the war dead), the annual number of visitors to CNC hovers around 200,000 (Horiuchi 2013, 6). The main problem with CNC, however, is that it does not explicitly address the historical context of the deaths of those laid to rest and commemorated there. The inscriptions and markers seen by visitors fail to offer any statements of reflection or repentance regarding Japan’s wars of aggression in the twentieth century. Neither do they mention the issue of Japanese responsibility for the Asia-Pacific War—and thus the nation’s responsibility for the deaths of those whose remains have found their last resting place here. If anything, CNC has been moving in the opposite direction in the twenty-first century, echoing the spread of historical revisionism in Japanese politics (see Saaler 2005, 2014, 2016, 2020, 2022). In 2010, two new memorial stones were set up in the precincts of the National Cemetery (see Figure 7.4). Reflecting a long-held resentment against the Soviet Union by Japanese conservatives, they are dedicated to two specific groups of war victims: those who died during repatriation from Japan’s puppet state of Manchukuo in Northeastern China (after Moscow had joined the war against Japan on 8 August 1945), and those who died as prisoners of war, captured by the Red Army and then interned in Siberia until the 1950s. On the front, each stone displays an inconspicuous inscription, ‘Heiwa Kinenhi’ (Memorial to Pray for Peace) and ‘Tsuitō Ireihi’ (Commemorative Memorial), respectively. Yet the 80

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Figure 7.4 Memorial stones in Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, set up in 2010 (photo by Sven Saaler)

back of each stone carries detailed explanations in Japanese and English about their real purpose—one is titled ‘A Cenotaph for the Postwar Victims of Forcible Detention’ and the other ‘An Eternal Peace Memorial to the Victims who Died during Postwar Repatriation’. The commemoration of these two groups was advocated by Horiuchi Mitsuo (see Horiuchi 2013), former chairman of the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery Memorial Foundation (Zaidan Hōjin Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusha Boen Hōshakai, ZHCSBH). These stones reflect the dominance of a victim-centred narrative of the nation’s wartime history in contemporary Japanese society (see Orr 2001), which stands in stark contrast to the fact that a national memorial dedicated to the victims of Japan’s wartime aggression—in China, Southeast Asia, and throughout the Pacific region—remains a notable gap in Japan’s landscape of war memory.

The 2001 Debate about a ‘New Institution’ for Commemorating the War Dead Discussions about the role of CNC in national life re-emerged in 2001, when Koizumi Junichirō violated the nearly two-decade-old taboo on prime ministers visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in their official capacity (see Saaler 2005, ch. 2). Koizumi continued to visit the shrine throughout his tenure (2001–2006), stirring heated controversy on a global scale. Apart from its historical role as a pillar of Japanese militarism, Yasukuni Shrine had become more controversial since 1978. In that year, it enshrined individuals found guilty of Class A war crimes on the so-called Tokyo Trials (1946–1948) and executed shortly thereafter (Mullins 2010). Recognizing the emerging complications, Koizumi thus set up a commission to consider the establishment of a ‘new institution’ to commemorate the nation’s war dead in a less controversial—and thus more acceptable—environment. 81

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The main task of this body, the ‘Discussion Group to Consider a Memorial Facility for Remembering the War Dead and Praying for Peace’ (Tsuitō, Heiwa Kinen no tame no Kinenhi-tō Shisetsu no Arikata o Kangaeru Kondankai), was to clarify the question of whether a national memorial was indeed necessary for Japan’s ‘victims’ of war and, if so, in what form, under what designation and where it should be built. The first question was puzzling, given that Japan’s ‘National Cemetery’ is located around the corner from the Prime Minister’s Office. Yet what was even more puzzling—explaining why the Discussion Group never achieved anything—is that the debate started from the assumption that this ‘new memorial’ would not be intended as a ‘substitute’ for Yasukuni Shrine (Shushō Kantei 2003a, second and ninth meeting)—even though the controversies around the shrine were the rationale for the creation of this group. Given that public intellectuals including Umehara Takeshi had proposed building a new memorial where the people could honour the war dead in a less controversial setting as early as the 1980s (see Mullins 2021, 123–128), the question did not pose a particular challenge. Large amounts of taxpayers’ money could have been saved by disbanding the Discussion Group once it had explicitly stated that it had no intention of doing its job. As the minutes of the Discussion Group’s meetings reveal (Shushō Kantei 2003a), some of its members argued that Yasukuni Shrine was so firmly anchored in people’s awareness that it should remain the central site of commemoration. This argument was rooted in the 1950s opposition to CNC discussed above. Sakamoto Takao, a well-known war apologist, referred to nineteenth-century concepts of nationalism in opposing a ‘new institution’: The nationalism of the nineteenth century is currently decreasing in importance and, as illustrated by the development of the EU, the international community cannot be renewed when we limit ourselves to nationalism. However, in commemorating the war dead, even though we may discern everywhere … tendencies to reconsider traditional forms of commemoration …, we have nevertheless not yet moved into a new phase of internationalization. No attempts have been made, especially by our neighbours, to approach the commemoration of war victims with an international perspective that reaches beyond Korean or Chinese nationalism …. On what grounds should Japan embrace a new direction in this regard? (Shushō Kantei 2003a, third meeting) Limiting his examples to Korea and China, Sakamoto was obviously unaware of the ­multinational character of many war cemeteries in Europe—how France, for example, since the interwar period, had provided space for the war memorials of a multitude of nations (including Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the USA). He also ignored plans by European nations to build new, multinational memorials (such as the L’Anneau de la Mémoire, the Ring of Memory, aka the International Memorial of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, in Northern France, discussed from the early 2000s and inaugurated in 2011). More pertinently, he also displayed a lack of familiarity with the large number of memorials dedicated to the Japanese (!) war dead, built in places as diverse and far from Japan as Malta (established in 1917), Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. Nevertheless, Sakamoto and other outspoken commentators remained firmly opposed to a new institution. A key point in the commission’s deliberations was the question of who should be ­commemorated in the new memorial. The group favoured an inclusive approach, arguing that, ‘according to Japan’s cultural traditions, we have always had in our country the wonderful custom (bifū) of commemorating enemies and friends together’ (third meeting). 82

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While this statement, at least as far as Yasukuni is concerned, is simply untrue—because, as we have seen, the shrine only permits the worship of members of the Japanese imperial ­m ilitary forces—some committee members argued that a new memorial should cast a wider net. It should incorporate not only Japanese war dead—both military and civilians—from 1868 to 1945 but also those members of the SDF who died during United Nations missions and foreigners who died fighting for Japan in WWII. Significantly, it would also commemorate victims from opposing sides, once again both military and civilians, including the victims of the Nanjing Massacre, as at least one member of the committee controversially demanded (at the fifth, sixth and ninth meetings). The Discussion Group presented a report to the public on 24 December 2003 (Shushō Kantei 2003b), in which it stressed the necessity of establishing a new national memorial that respects Japan’s self-identity as a ‘peace state’ (heiwa kokka). The group’s deliberations suggest that, above all, the new memorial was intended to reduce foreign policy conflicts related to the ‘Yasukuni problem’ (ibid., ch. 2). However, contradicting this approach, the report also expressed strong opposition to any critical representations of Japan’s war responsibility in a new commemorative institution. It rejected any notion of a ‘war of aggression’ (shinryaku sensō) and urged that the Asia-Pacific War should instead be referred to as a ‘war caused by Japan’. This emphasis resulted from the conviction held by some members of the commission that, in a democracy, it is ‘not the duty of the government to provide a one-sided (ichigiteki) interpretation of history and the past’ (ibid., ch. 2.3). In the new memorial, therefore, the war dead should be commemorated without reference to any particular historical interpretation. While a ‘new institution’ established along these lines would surely fail to gain widespread acceptance, its opponents still felt outraged even by this timid proposal. The self-appointed defenders of the Yasukuni Shrine held a ‘gathering to protest against a national memorial’ in June 2002, while the Discussion Group was still in session. The National League of Veterans’ Organizations (Sen’yūren) posted numerous statements of opposition to a ‘new memorial’ on its website (Zenkoku Sen’yūkai Rengōkai 2002). And during his second visit to Yasukuni in April 2002, Prime Minister Koizumi remarked that ‘even after a new memorial has been established’, he would still make ‘official visits to Yasukuni’, thus implicitly answering the question whether a ‘new institution’ would solve the ‘Yasukuni problem’ and making the Discussion Group he himself had summoned an entirely futile endeavour.

Concluding Remarks Japanese society was thoroughly traumatized as a result of the Asia-Pacific War. Clinging to delusions of victory until mid-1944—fed by unrelenting government propaganda and indoctrination—the Allied air raids of Japanese cities after the fall of Saipan in July 1944 awakened the Japanese to the harsh reality that Japan was losing the war and its people were dying, in vast numbers. The existing shrines dedicated to the commemoration of the war dead—the Yasukuni Shrine and the Gokoku Shrines—were unable to ‘keep up with the demand’ and could no longer enshrine all the souls of the war dead. As Japan’s armies retreated, bodies of fallen soldiers were not returned to their families, but instead were abandoned in the jungles of the Pacific islands, in the Philippines, in China and elsewhere. To address the problems relating to the commemoration of the war dead and the consolation of bereaved families, a Japanese version of Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was proposed in 1952 and inaugurated in 1959 as Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery. CNC was established to help the nation recover from the trauma of mass dying during the war and compensate for the state’s failure to give victims of war a proper burial or even provide bereaved 83

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families with reliable information about the fate of their relatives who did not return from the battlefield. However, it failed to receive broad recognition or acceptance, being constantly resisted as a site of commemoration by reactionary forces who favoured returning to a prewar style of worshipping the war dead. But CNC also conspired in its own demise by failing to offer an alternative view of Japan’s war legacy that would assess the nation’s conduct and responsibilities in more critical ways, in line with postwar Japan’s proclaimed identity as a ‘peace state’. In fact, its location on a site administered by the Imperial Household Agency symbolizes the complex relationship between the dead soldiers whose remains were put to rest here and their former commander-in-chief, Emperor Hirohito, who survived the war and continued to reside in the Imperial Palace, just across Chidorigafuchi Moat. Despite this, no sign of self-reflection is discernible on any of the markers or inscriptions on the site. On the contrary, historical revisionism infiltrated the site in the early 2000s, when new markers of Japanese victimhood were set up on its precincts. The failure of CNC resulted in Yasukuni’s resurgence as the dominant site of war commemoration in the twenty-first century—for bereaved families as a site of mourning, for Japan’s nationalists as a site of war glorification and for non-Japanese as a symbol of Japan’s unwillingness to make amends for its wartime record and a surviving pillar of Japanese militarism. While these developments resulted in a number of critical studies of Yasukuni (Akazawa 2005; Shirakawa 2015; Takenaka 2015; Mullins 2021), a general search in academic databases for ‘Chidorigafuchi’ produces more articles on the flora and fauna of Chidorigafuchi Moat than on Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery. Most of the available information on CNC is published by ZHCSBH personnel (Horiuchi 2013) or by ZHCSBH itself (1989, 2009, 2019) (a notable exception is Hamai 2021, ch. 4). This material is helpful for historians as a primary resource, and careful reading reveals the reasons for the failures of CNC. In his 2013 book Yasukuni and Chidorigafuchi (note the order of the proper names in the title), former ZHCSBH chairman Horiuchi Mitsuo devotes only one chapter to the history of CNC. In what sounds like an admission of defeat, he emphasizes that ‘Yasukuni’s importance as an institution worshipping the heroic souls (eirei) of those Japanese who died fighting for their country’ (Horiuchi 2013, 9) remains unchallenged. Frequently using war-glorifying language, such as his references to the ‘heroic souls’ of the nation’s fallen soldiers who fought a war for the ‘liberation of Asia’ (kōa, ibid., 23), and notably failing to present a critical interpretation of Japan’s war legacy, Horiuchi must take some of the blame for failing to transform Chidorigafuchi into a viable alternative venue for commemorating the victims of war in accordance with postwar Japan’s understanding of itself as a peace state (heiwa kokka). Just setting up a map of the Asia-Pacific, indicating where and how many Japanese soldiers died in the war, and a stone with a poem of lament by Emperor Hirohito, does not amount to a serious attempt to come to terms with a violent past. Finally, turning to the search for effective ways of overcoming collective trauma, the question can be asked whether trauma is something that should be surmounted, or whether it may serve some important functions. Without the memory of war engrained in the fabric of social awareness, humanity may well lose touch with its gruesome reality. Philosopher Marc Augé has interpreted war cemeteries in Europe (particularly cemeteries in Normandy) in this light. Beautifully designed (see Figure 7.5), they are, to be sure, appropriate places of mourning; yet they fail to preserve the collective memory of the cruelty of war (on this, see also Akazawa 2005). ‘Nobody could say’, Augé writes, that this arranged beauty [of war cemeteries] is not moving, but the emotion it arouses is born from the harmony of forms, which does not evoke raging battles, nor the fear of 84

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Figure 7.5  Bény-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery, Reviers/Normandy (photo by Sven Saaler)

the men, nothing of what would actually restore some of the past realistically lived by the soldiers buried there. Beautiful, quiet war cemeteries mask the certainty … that these dead died in heaps, in fragments, in piles, in pieces, their limbs bent at impossible angles and their muddy clothes sometimes ripped from their bodies by the velocity of the manmade force that took their lives. (Augé 2004, 434f; emphasis added) In the spring of 2022, at the time of writing this chapter, images like the ones evoked in Augé’s statement are appearing in news programmes on a daily basis. Seventy-seven years after WWII, powerful nations are traumatizing each other once again—but with much higher stakes, given that we are living in an age where nuclear weapons have widely proliferated. One hundred years after they were first built, the world’s Tombs of the Unknown Soldier have notably failed to reduce the possibility of a repetition of mass dying in war, which these solemn monuments were built to lament.

Note 1 A second ‘National Cemetery’ was established in Okinawa in 1979 because the number of Japanese soldiers who died in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa was so high. See https://heiwa-irei-okinawa. jp/facility/okinawasenbotsushaboen (accessed 6 May 2022). The result of a private initiative, a Buddhist ‘Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’, the Ryōzen Kannon, was established in Kyoto in 1955. See Milne and Moreton (2022).

Works Cited Akazawa, S. (2005) Yasukuni jinja, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

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Sven Saaler and Collin Rusneac Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, London: Verso. Augé, M. (2004) Oblivion, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery Memorial Foundation (CNCMF) (2020), Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 20 April 2022). Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusha Boen (CSB) (2022) Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusha Boen. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 June 2022). Divry, A. (2017) Les Noms Gravés sur l’Arc de Triomphe, Paris: SPM. Hamai, K. (2021) Senbotsusha ikotsu shūshū to sengo Nihon, Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan. Horiuchi, B. (1928) ‘Chūkon no sonsū to kokumin seishin’, Kōkoku, 349: 1–5. Horiuchi, M. (2013) ‘Yasukuni’ to ‘Chidorigafuchi’ o kangaeru, Tokyo: Shōdensha. Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan Chōsa Oyobi Rippō Kōsakyoku (KKT) (2007), Shinpen Yasukuni-jina mondai shiryōshū, Tokyo: Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan. Micale, M. and H. Pols eds. (2021) Traumatic Pasts in Asia: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma, 1930 to the Present, New York: Berghahn. Milne, D. and D. Moreton (2022) ‘Remembering and Forgetting the War Dead at Ryōzen Kannon’, Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus, 20/11, No. 2. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 December 2022). Mosse, G. L. (1990) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, New York: Oxford University Press. Mullins, M. (2010) ‘How Yasukuni Shrine survived the occupation: a critical examination of popular claims’, Monumenta Nipponica, 65/1: 89–136. Mullins, M. (2021) Yasukuni Fundamentalism: Japanese Religions and the Politics of Restoration, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Murakami, S. (1974) Irei to shōkon, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Nakai, K. (2018) ‘State Shinto’, in Saaler, S. and C. W. A. Szpilman (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History, Abingdon: Routledge, 147–159. Nihon Keizai Shinbun (21 December 2010) ‘Yasukuni gōshi de no kuni no meibo teikyō “seikyō bunri ni teishoku” Ōsaka kōsai hanketsu’, Nihon Keizai Shinbun. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 20 April 2022). Orr, J. (2001) The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Saaler, S. (2005) Politics, Memory, and Public Opinion. The History Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society, München: Iudicium. Saaler, S. (2014) ‘Bad war or good war? History and politics in post-war Japan’, in Kingston, J. (ed.) Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan, London: Routledge, 135–146. Saaler, S. (2016) ‘Nationalism and history in contemporary Japan’, Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus, 14/20, No. 7. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 5 January 2022). Saaler, S. (2020) Men in Metal. A Topography of Public Bronze Statuary in Modern Japan, Leiden: Brill. Saaler, S. (2022) ‘Heisei historiography: academic history and public commemoration in Japan, 1990– 2020’, in Murai, N. et al. (eds.) Japan in the Heisei Era (1989–2019): Multidisciplinary Perspectives, New York: Routledge, 287–298. Shirakawa, T. (2015) ‘Senbotsusha irei’ to kindai nihon: junnansha to gokoku jinja no seiritsushi, Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan. Shushō Kantei (2002) ‘Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusha Boen ni tsuite’, Shiryō 2: Chidorigafuchi senbotsusha boen, zenkoku senbotsu-sha tsuitō-shiki ni tsuite. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 1 April 2022). Shushō Kantei (2003a): Tsuitō, Heiwa Kinen no tame no Kinenhi-nado Shisetsu no Arikata o Kangaeru Kondankai. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 1 April 2022). Shushō Kantei (2003b): Hōkokusho. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 1 April 2022). South China Morning Post (2013) ‘Kerry visit to Tokyo cemetery seen as US message over Yasukuni Shrine.’ Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 6 May 2022).

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Overcoming Trauma at Chidorigafuchi Takenaka, A. (2015) Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Trefalt, B. C. (2017) ‘Collecting bones: Japanese missions for the repatriation of war remains and the unfinished business of the Asia-Pacific War’, Australian Humanities Review, 61: 145–159. Wittman, L. (2011) The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Woodard, W. P. (1972) The Allied Occupation of Japan 1945–1952 and Japanese Religions, Leiden: Brill. Yoshida Y. (2017) Nihongun heishi, Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha. Zaidan Hōjin Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusha Boen Hōshakai (ZHCSBH) (1989) Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusha Boen sōken sanjūnen-shi, Tokyo: ZHCSBH. Zaidan Hōjin Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusha Boen Hōshakai (ZHCSBH) (2009) Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusha Boen sōken 50nen-shi, Tokyo: ZHCSBH. Zaidan Hōjin Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusha Boen Hōshakai (ZHCSBH) (2019) Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusha Boen sōken 60nen-shi, Tokyo: ZHCSBH. Zenkoku Sen’yūkai Rengōkai (Sen’yūren) (2002) Tsuitō shisetsu shinsetsu hantai undō. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 April 2022).

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8 TELLING STORIES OF WAR TRAUMA Japan’s Popular Manga Akiko Hashimoto In August 1945, Japan’s Second World War ended in a total and bitter defeat. It was a ­devastating national collapse that followed years of aggressive Imperial expansion and gruelling war. The global conflict had unleashed massive death and destruction, killing over sixty million people, twenty million of them in Asia alone, and many of them civilians (Weinberg 2005). After its surrender, Japan lost national sovereignty, bore the guilt for war crimes and was occupied by the victors. In postwar Japan, the violence, death, loss and national humiliation of the war would be remembered for generations as an indelible cultural trauma. A cultural trauma occurs ‘when members of a collective feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways’ (Alexander 2004, 1). The Second World War was unmistakably such an event. In ensuing decades, the memory of military violence, deaths and surrender proliferated in popular culture, historical accounts and the cultural media. This war memory would over time come to forge a powerful ‘trauma culture’ that was then passed on from one generation to the next. This chapter explores how war and loss emerged as cultural trauma depicted in Japan’s popular culture from the 1950s through the present day. I consider the discourses that arose in the decades following defeat and focus on the popular narratives that have taken root in the public consciousness. Of special interest here are the representations and criticism of military violence, destruction and death that have come to comprise the core of Japan’s trauma culture genre. I pay special attention to examples of popular manga that stand out in illuminating the trauma of war. As we will see, this trauma genre fuels and reinforces Japan’s anti-military sentiments and has become the backbone of Japan’s postwar pacifism.

War Trauma in Popular Culture Since the early 1950s, Japan’s popular culture has played a prominent role in shaping ­narratives of war. The vast cultural output—including novels, biographies, films, television, documentaries, manga serials, anime, art, journals, newspapers and magazines—has probed the meaning of war and defeat in the public imagination. Influential producers of war stories have spanned successive generations from the wartime generation’s reckoning with firsthand experience of carnage and loss, to the postwar generation trying to fathom what went 88

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so wrong in their national past and even within their own families. This memory work has come to complement the considerable effort of public intellectuals, journalists, historians and teachers who have offered their interpretations of what happened, how, why and with what consequences. Shaping the narrative of war began immediately after Japan’s surrender, as the US Occupation imposed from above its version of wartime events on the traumatized population. Perpetrator guilt was pronounced by the Allies in the Tokyo war crimes tribunals (1946–1948) according to their version of victors’ justice that pinned blame for the war on reckless, ambitious and incompetent military leaders who committed crimes against peace and violated war conventions. Thousands of perpetrators of higher and lower ranks were convicted as war criminals for their illicit conduct in East and Southeast Asia (1946–1951). However, a national reckoning clarifying the responsibility of the Showa Emperor and others who escaped accountability remained elusive. The Japanese people were also not held accountable for the war, as they were said to have been misled by a deceptive militarist state (Hashimoto 2015). The war trauma genre in popular culture emerged against this political backdrop, helping to fuel the anti-military, pacifist sentiments that became a dominant force in postwar Japan. Typically, these trauma stories have been rife with anger and resentment towards the military command that caused mass deaths of their own soldiers. Pointing to the countless strategic errors, impossible war plans, misguided invasions and disregard for the value of human life, this genre developed a persuasive antipathy towards the military that it indicted.

The Narratives of Defeated Soldiers One of the common themes to emerge from the considerable body of work in popular ­culture focuses on Japan’s conscript soldiers who fought at the battlefront, were defeated and, in many cases, killed. Six million Japanese conscripts were mobilized to serve in the Asia-Pacific War (1941–1945), with 38 per cent (2.3 million) never returning (Yoshida 2017). These conscripts—sent to fight across the vast Asia-Pacific region from Northeast China to the South Pacific—died at a rate higher than that of German soldiers (33 per cent) and nineteen times the rate of US soldiers (2 per cent). Towards the end of war, as they lost their ­supply lines of food, medicine and ammunition, 60–70 per cent of Japanese soldiers died from starvation, disease and abandonment, and not from warfare (Fujiwara 2001; Yoshida 2017). Imagining and reimagining the trauma of defeated soldiers who were abandoned en masse in far-away battle zones has been an enduring theme, and a litmus test to probe the meaning of ‘patriotic sacrifice’ in the postwar self-understanding of the nation. The trauma of the ‘sacrifice’ made by Japanese soldiers is often closely intertwined with the military code that prohibited retreat or surrender. The infamous Imperial code, Senjinkun, exhorted soldiers to fight to the last breath, rather than living to experience shame as a prisoner of war. As an absolute Imperial order, Senjinkun is repeatedly seen as the cause of the mass suicides committed by soldiers and civilians (Fujii 2000). This military ethos of the time clearly illustrates the Imperial military’s disregard for life. Whether soldiers are portrayed as perpetrators, victims or heroes, popular cultural accounts of the war dead do not escape the reality that sacrificing for the nation was ultimately futile. This sense of futility at the squandered lives of those who ‘died in vain’ is at the centre of the trauma genre that questions the value and meaning of dying for the nation. In the early postwar decades, representations of soldiers’ experiences in popular culture were based on first-hand experiences and often autobiographical. Conscripted men who 89

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came back from the war produced books that would become classics, such as Requiem for Battleship Yamato (Yoshida 1952, 1985), The Fires in the Plain (Ōoka 1952) and The Human Condition (Gomikawa 1958). These soul-searching novels resonated with an audience eager to understand and look for meaning in the mass violence and unprecedented numbers of dead from the war. Requiem for Battleship Yamato documented the story of 3,000 naval personnel on a suicide mission to attack a US warship in the sea of Okinawa near the end of the war. The largest battleship ever built, it never reached its target and sank after an overwhelming attack by 700 American bombers. The story chronicles the proud officers onboard and their anguish over their impending deaths, questioning the futility of giving up their lives for the country. Fires in the Plain is also based on actual events and tells the story of defeated soldiers fleeing in the tropical jungles of the Philippines who are pushed beyond the limits of their humanity. In a tale of descent into hell, sick soldiers are abandoned by their own comrades and left to fend for, or kill, themselves. Starvation pushes them over the edge to unimaginable acts, resorting, finally, to cannibalism and falling into insanity. The Human Condition follows the life of a conscientious Japanese supervisor-turned conscripted soldier in occupied Manchuria. He tries to survive the war without compromising his integrity, but after a long struggle, he finally reaches the tipping point when his humanism irrevocably breaks down in a Soviet labour camp. These weighty cultural narratives and themes were popularized as blockbuster films not only in the 1950s, but also in different cultural media thereafter, especially as film remakes in the 2000s and 2010s. Probing the meaning of sacrifice and the futility of soldiers’ deaths have been important themes for many decades in films, television features and documentaries, each time reimagining the cultural trauma and passing it on to the next generation. As the economy recovered and the nation’s standard of living improved, the discourse and representation of the war expanded and diversified. Adding to television depictions, new print media, such as graphic novels and teenagers’ weeklies, also entered the mix, along with a burgeoning number of memoirs, newspaper and magazine reports, editorials, investigative journalism, fiction and nonfiction. The graphic novels that became ubiquitous on the popular culture scene from the 1960s were particularly influential in shaping the consciousness of the younger generation. These war stories (senkimono) typically offered narratives of Japanese soldiers as gallant but tragic heroes who did not survive the war. In the popular manga series, The Falcon of Shidenkai (Chiba 1963–1965), for example, a group of ace pilots who are victors in combat are finally ordered to fly kamikaze missions, never to return (Fukuma 2007). Also popular were war manga and anime, not only about soldiers but also featuring the families on the home front who endured strategic Allied bombings. Barefoot Gen (Nakazawa 1982–1987; anime version 1983) offers the tragic narrative of a family who barely survive the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and struggle to live in the obliterated city. Grave of the Fireflies (Studio Ghibli 1988) offers a tragic account of a young brother and sister orphaned by air raids in Nagoya who die of starvation as homeless drifters. To All Corners of the World (Kōno 2008– 2009; anime version 2016) chronicles a young woman’s life in the military port of Kure that was severely damaged by napalm bombing. Her belief in a ‘just war’ is totally shattered under the weight of the overwhelming violence she sees all around her. Firmly established in the trauma genre, manga and anime stories such as these were devoured by postwar generations, frequently recycled also as peace education material in schools, on television and in local communities. This trauma genre often assigns blame and responsibility for the war to Japan’s reckless military leadership and casts them as villains. It is not surprising, then, that this narrative 90

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has been subject to intense criticism, referred to sometimes as the ‘Tokyo Trial’s version of history’ (‘victors’ justice’). Over the years, counternarratives emerged to challenge these images of an incompetent military and their unfortunate subordinates. On the one hand, investigative journalists and liberal intellectuals insisted on condemning the war as one of aggression in which ordinary soldiers were complicit as perpetrators of invasion and oppression. Japanese soldiers were not simply good men caught in a bad war but also culpable intruders and tormentors in East and Southeast Asia, as historians and writers have revealed (Honda 1972; Morimura 1981–1983). On the other hand, veterans’ groups and conservative intellectuals sought to exonerate the tarnished military men who were, after all, their fathers and uncles. In this view, Japanese soldiers had selflessly responded to the call of duty, fought bravely and sacrificed their lives for a purpose higher than themselves; the Tokyo Trial is portrayed as a sham designed to humiliate the Japanese military forever (Fukuma 2007; Hashimoto 2015). We will return to this discussion at the end of the chapter after discussing key graphic novels of the trauma genre that have been popularized in the national media.

War Narratives in Popular Manga and Graphic Novels Manga provides a more accessible mode of learning war history for younger generations compared to textbooks or conventional literature. Embraced first by the baby boomers who welcomed this new expressive voice unencumbered by traditional formats, young readers flocked to the graphic stories without the heavy moralizing that sometimes accompanied ‘serious’ literature. War manga—written by the wartime generation for the postwar ­generation—encouraged the latter to develop strong negative moral sentiments about the dreadful things that happened in the past, even if they did not always know what or why events happened with accuracy. Manga war stories helped nurture those negative emotions by fostering a visceral response to graphic portrayals of military violence and futile deaths, effectively offering pathways for postwar generations who never experienced the war to feel the emotions of horror of military violence as a vicarious traumatic experience. The negative emotions about the Asia-Pacific War cultivated in popular culture such as manga and anime would also become powerful motivators of moral conduct. In manga dark history can be rendered into morality tales, rich with emotion and even caricature and irony. Told by fictional characters, war manga can take more artistic liberties than history books and render war history into entertaining cultural products that nevertheless cultivate a sense of indignation for the injustice of war. Even when the postwar audience encountered accounts of terror that seemed unfathomable, they could still understand that this violence could really happen to ordinary people like them, just like it did to their parents and grandparents. As heroic protagonists often die tragically at the end of these war stories, the lesson for the audience is clear: never again. By inciting emotions of fear and empathy in turn, manga stories can also sidestep comprehensive rigor and assessment of history. The complex reality that heroes, victims and perpetrators are often the same people in war is also often left untouched. The responsibility for the larger war is often largely marginalized in the plot. To explore the trauma genre more fully, we will now turn to two war manga stories produced by two different generations of artists. The first, Mizuki Shigeru, is a graphic novelist who was himself a war veteran who wrote about his own experiences on a Pacific Island where the Japanese had been annihilated. The second, Takeda Kazuyoshi, is a graphic novelist of the postwar generation who never experienced the war himself but wrote about actual historical events on a war-ravaged Pacific Island through extensive research and interviews 91

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with survivors. Together they show the continuity of the trauma genre in Japan over the span of fifty years.

Manga Narratives of Soldiers in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea Mizuki Shigeru’s oeuvre of manga on defeated soldiers fighting to their deaths is arguably some of the most iconic manga war stories that have been popularized in postwar Japan (1973, 2007). Based on his own experiences of the war in which he was severely injured, Mizuki’s account of battle in the South Pacific is a fictionalized memoir based on actual historical events. His collection of war stories dates from the 1970s, when he was already well known as a graphic novelist and manga artist of folklore ghost stories (Kitarō) among the baby boomer generation. His graphic tales of doomed foot soldiers stranded on tropical islands at the end of the war have had an enduring appeal with younger generations ever since they were first published as an accessible way to learn about the ‘reality’ of war and military life in Imperial Japan. In his graphic tales, Mizuki depicts his war experience as a meaningless, desperate abyss. He shows traumatic violence, arbitrary military commands and, most of all, his desensitization to the massive number of deaths around him. He does not mince words about the cruelty and callousness of the Japanese military and the military state that sent their men into the jaws of death. Hazing is rampant in the everyday life of soldiers who are beaten remorselessly and abused. Short on supplies of food, ammunition and medicine, frontline soldiers in the tropical jungle are fatally exposed to disease, starvation, injury and death. Misguided military strategies stretched resources far too thin and sent their soldiers to faraway islands in campaigns that were unsustainable. The monstrous no-surrender order enforced hundreds of thousands to die by suicide charge (gyokusai). Mizuki delivers these grim messages in dramatic manga style—with a mixture of realistic, graphic illustrations of violence; colourful characters with authentic emotions; and tongue-in-cheek humour, all of which move the plot along with crisp dialogue and commentary. In a typical acerbic tone, Mizuki declares that his life as a rookie soldier was as expendable as socks (2011, 368). Mizuki’s graphic novel about his army unit’s suicide charge, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (Sōin gyokusai seyo!), was first published in 1973. In a compelling first-hand account, he tells the story of a suicide charge that killed 500 men on the island of New Britain (Papua New Guinea), recklessly ordered by an idealistic and inept battalion commander. A sizeable Japanese army of 100,000 men had occupied New Britain since 1942 as a military base, but fierce battles ensued as Allied forces landed and attacked by sea. The violent conflict ultimately led Mizuki’s battalion in Baien to carry out an ‘honourable’ suicide charge into the enemy’s line of fire with no hope of return. In the chaos, 81 of 500 men survived the charge that was supposed to kill them all. Since all had already been reported dead by General Headquarters, the survivors were then ordered to charge to their deaths again to cover up this administrative error. The alternatives for these men, if they refused the order, were death as punishment for desertion or death by starvation. Given these choices, it was clear that death by suicide was the only option that allowed these soldiers an honourable discharge. Ultimately all the survivors from the platoon finally perished by marching into enemy fire, except for the Chief of Staff sent by Headquarters who managed to escape alive. There is no heroism or nobility in these soldiers’ sacrifice. No one died thinking patriotic thoughts about the Emperor or the fatherland. What is depicted through these pages are young, exhausted men dying needlessly what is often called a ‘dog’s death’—an image that is at the centre of Japan’s reckoning with war trauma (Fukuma 2009). As Mizuki recounts, his 92

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fellow soldiers in far-away Baien died in vain for no strategic gain on the whim of arbitrary orders. They were dehumanized, devalued, then squandered by field commanders who were serving only themselves. War stories such as these offer a sobering message to the reader that war is absurd; the Japanese military’s top brass were untrustworthy and often incompetent, and so we must never let war happen again. Mizuki’s scathing anger at the ‘dog’s death’ of fellow soldiers has been in c­ irculation for five decades as his work has become popularized in multiple media, reprints and ­reproductions. His war stories have been available as TV feature films, documentaries, book ­collections, and, more recently, through a daily television show about his family life in 2010. With each remake, his war stories influence a new generation of audiences to be suspicious of the state and of the Japanese military (Natsume 1997). His powerful condemnation of war and war history has shaped the trajectory of postwar manga, along with the work of his contemporary manga artists like Tezuka Osamu, Nakazawa Keiji and Ishinomori Shōtarō (Penney 2008). Mizuki’s work also inspired the next generation of graphic novelists like Takeda Kazutoshi whose work we will turn to in the next section.

The Manga Narratives of Soldiers in Peleliu, Palau Takeda Kazuyoshi’s graphic novel Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise describes the fate of soldiers who fought on the island of Peleliu in Palau during the Asia-Pacific War, ordered never to lay down arms until victory. But victory never came, and nor did any reinforcements or ­supplies. Hiding in damp underground caves in the tropical jungle isolated from the world, they did not even find out for two years that the war had ended. Takeda’s war stories, published in 2016–2021 in eleven volumes, describe desperate soldiers who are pushed beyond the limits of their humanity, trapped by a no-surrender order in a losing battle. It is a fictionalized story of actual historical events on the island of Peleliu, where 10,000 Japanese troops were annihilated in one of the most brutal ground battles of the Pacific War. Takeda’s story takes the reader not only through the fierce two-month battle but also through the subsequent two years of desperate survival in the jungle; the final capitulation of thirty-four men; and then, decades later, the heart-wrenching, guilt-ridden return to Peleliu to excavate the dead that the men had left behind. Peleliu’s plot initially centres on combat against American troops, but soon shifts to the tense conflict that develops within the isolated group of men that turns ugly and even deadly. The novel does not shy away from the reality that soldiers, when pushed over the edge, were capable of doing anything for their own self-preservation. Trust and civility are in short supply for those facing constant fear, doubt, disease and starvation; over time, the story reveals how they resort to sabotage, betrayal, stealing and even cannibalism. After months of attrition, the men’s courage is put to the ultimate test over whether to capitulate when it becomes evident that the war is probably lost. Different views over capitulation boil over, with some deadly consequences. Takeda makes these difficult themes accessible and relatable by depicting the characters as ordinary men ‘like you and me,’ with mundane lives and everyday needs. The protagonists are shown as appealing figures with large heads and lovable facial features like wide eyes. But by mixing the pages with realistic, graphic illustrations of atrocities and carnage, Takeda’s message to the audience is unmistakable: war is abominable, and there is nothing beautiful about dying in it. After a suicide charge, all that is left behind are dead bodies that are ‘repulsive, filthy, and leave a hideous stench’ (Takeda 2017b). In the climax, the entrapped soldiers face an existential dilemma: should they obey or defy the Senjinkun military order to die for the country when the war may be over? The second 93

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lieutenant who had been a stellar leader refuses to believe in Japan’s defeat and orders his men as patriotic soldiers to look for a chance to ambush the Americans. The two main protagonists of the story suspect that Japan has already lost the war and must muster the courage to capitulate to the Americans to save all their comrades in hiding. As the antagonism between the two sides draws out, more die from the quarrel even though the war is actually over. The final message of this traumatic story is clear: wasting precious life is unconscionably wrong. The protagonist cries in despair: ‘No way I’m gonna die in a place like this’ (konna tokorode shinitaku nai) (Takeda 2017a). The postscript in the last volume of the series brings the audience to 1972 and 2017 as the Japanese veterans and survivors look back at their traumatic experience in Peleliu. Several made their first trip back to Peleliu after twenty-five years, together with the families of the fallen, to erect a memorial by the sea and to excavate and repatriate the remains of those they had left behind. We meet the ageing former lieutenant who squealed when he was taken captive, leading to the incineration with flamethrowers of the Japanese soldiers hiding in caves. We also meet the ageing former second lieutenant who prohibited surrender even after Japan’s defeat, which led good men to die in vain. The protagonist of the story himself is still possessed by his best buddy’s death and looks desperately for his remains. No one had escaped the wounds of war trauma; they have all lived their postwar years in grief, guilt, regret, self-loathing and searching in vain for a peace of mind. Another forty-five years later, it is the next generation’s turn to visit Peleliu. The protagonist’s grandson now joins the search party to repatriate the bodies that had been left behind. Over 2,000 bodies are still missing on an island where 10,000 men had perished in vain. The grandson has now inherited and accepted the grievous trauma as part of his own history. There are no shining heroes in this wretched history. Peleliu is today again a paradise in the South Pacific with beautiful coral reefs and forests, but the remnants of war are still there, just beneath the surface.

The Changing Genre of War Trauma When people in a defeated nation are confronted with new questions of remilitarizing the country, it is crucial for them to face their deeply held distrust for the military that had led them astray in the past. Distrust of the military has been a constant throughout postwar Japanese history and remains a critical part of the nation’s anti-war creed. Attempts to build trust in the military—or the Self Defence Force—and to gain confidence in them as a force protecting people’s lives have been met with substantial scepticism by liberal, public and civic leaders as well as by grassroots pacifist movements (Seraphim 2006). These doubts have erupted time and again in political disputes such as over teaching patriotism in schools, restricting the mandates of participating in UN Peacekeeping Operations, limiting the scope of collective self-defence in security treaties and, now, revising Japan’s peace constitution (Hashimoto 2011). Misgivings about remilitarization are still widespread: when international surveys ask people if they would be willing to put themselves on the line and volunteer to fight for their country, Japan ranks consistently lowest (Yonekura 2021, 148). As sociologist Yoshida Yutaka (2011) points out, revering or exalting the war dead never became the basis of mainstream culture nor a fertile foundation of nationalism in postwar Japan. The Yasukuni Shrine—with a dwindling number of members and supporters today— has never managed to resuscitate the myth of the fallen soldier and the prewar belief that the war dead would become sacred spirits (gunshin), notwithstanding its infamous Yushukan war museum. Perhaps this is not surprising, since it is hardly possible for postwar generations 94

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raised in a pacifist society to cultivate an aspiration to emulate young men who met violent deaths. Over time, however, the tarnished image of defeated soldiers has also been moderated in an attempt to forge an ameliorative narrative that renders the cultural trauma more palatable (Eyerman 2019). The men of Battleship Yamato, for example, have been recast—in reactionary political discourse and popular culture—not as role models to emulate but as objects of gratitude to whom Japan owed its postwar peace and prosperity (Ichinose 2015). Also competing against the trauma genre since the late 1990s are the narratives of historical revisionism that valorize the vanquished Japanese soldiers. Externalizing the blame for the war on foreign enemies, these populist manga narratives have aimed to exonerate and rehabilitate the Imperial soldiers by recasting them as heroes who fought in a ‘just war’ (Fujioka and Jiyūshugishikan Kenkyūkai 1996, 2005; Kobayashi 1998, 2007). While such neo-nationalist drive has not succeeded in debasing the salient pacifist trauma narrative, it has gained some traction in obscuring the locus of war responsibility (Oguma and Ueno 2003. See also David McNeill’s chapter in this volume). The war trauma genre in Japanese popular culture has been criticized for both doing too much and too little to define and memorialize the defeated soldiers. On the one hand, it has been criticized for not going far and deeply enough to describe perpetrator history—­ especially the injury and death inflicted on tens of millions of Asian victims (Orr 2001). On the other hand, it has also been admonished for the opposite: that it goes too far in promoting Japan’s negative self-identity (Fukuma 2009). However, the moral evaluation that the war was wrong, and that it should never happen again—the message of Mizuki’s and Takeda’s war trauma stories—has remained remarkably persistent for a long time, especially when the wartime generation could still bear witness. As those wartime witnesses pass away in a nation that is now run by the postwar generations, the narrators and carriers of war memory are now the children and grandchildren of the defeated soldiers of the Second World War. This shift has brought about new developments in the war stories of popular culture. In the new iteration of Second World War stories, the descendants inheriting the tainted legacy of their fathers and grandfathers have sought to re-envision them as soldiers who fought not for the fatherland and Emperor, but to protect their loved ones at home (Hashimoto 2015). The Eternal Zero, for example, features an ace zero fighter pilot in a kamikaze squad (tokkō) who is determined at all costs to return from combat to his beloved family (Hyakuta 2006, manga version 2010; film version 2013). By recasting the meaning of fighting and dying in the war, the descendant narrators attempt to rehabilitate the misguided soldier and to convert the war story into a family love story. In this evolving genre, the defeated grandfathers were vulnerable, flawed men who fought in the wrong war, but who nevertheless deserve empathy and compassion. This refocus, however, conveniently allows the descendants to obfuscate the broader responsibility for Japan’s war of aggression and to save themselves from asking the hard question: what would I have done if I had been in their shoes and ordered to make the ultimate sacrifice in a war of aggression? The underlying morality tale embedded in the new war stories is self-referential: the war that happened to grandpa can also happen to me, so it must be stopped (Hashimoto 2015, 80). Yet, this brand of pacifism is today at a crossroads when Russian belligerence has shattered international peace in Ukraine and Europe. This contemporary crisis comes at a time when the grandpas with direct war experiences are no longer alive to give guidance. Japan’s war veterans’ and survivors’ associations have been rapidly disbanding and many regional peace museums built by the wartime generation have been closing (NHK 2020; Yomiuri Shimbun 2020). As the physical reminders of the Second World War dissipate, however, the young generation is decidedly not eager to join the ranks of the Self Defence Force: it is 95

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reported that record numbers of new graduates from the National Defence Academy decline to enter the Self Defence Force every year (Asahi Shimbun 2022). In this evolving international environment, Japan would be better served with more nuanced critiques of war that could take them beyond simply ‘never again.’

Works Cited Alexander, J. C. (2004) ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.’ in Alexander, J. C., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser, N., and Sztompka P. (eds.) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (pp. 1–30). Berkeley: University of California Press. Asahi Shimbun. (2022) ‘Bōeidai no ninkanjitai, kako nibanme ni ōi 72nin.’ Asahi Digital 3.30.2022. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 13 July 2022). Chiba, T. (1963–1965) Shidenkai no taka. Shōnen Magazine. Tokyo: Kōdansha. Eyerman, R. (2019) Memory, Trauma, and Identity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fujii, T. (2000) Heishitachino sensō: Tegami, nikki, taikenki o yomitoku. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha. Fujioka, N., & Jiyūshugishikan Kenkyūkai (1996) Kyōkashoga oshienai rekishi. Tokyo: Fusōsha. ——— (2005) Manga: Kyōkashoga oshienai rekishi. Tokyo: Sankei Shinbunsha. Fujiwara, A. (2001) Uejini shita eireitachi. Tokyo: Aoki Shoten. Fukuma, Y. (2007) Junkoku to hangyaku: ‘Tokkō’ no katari no sengoshi. Tokyo: Seikyūsha. ——— (2009) ‘Sensō taiken’ no sengoshi. Tokyo: Chūkō Shinsho. Gomikawa, J. (1958) Ningen no jōken. Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō. Hashimoto, A. (2011) ‘The Cultural Trauma of a Fallen Nation: Japan, 1945.’ in Eyerman R., Alexander, J. C., and Breese, E. B. (eds.) Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering (pp. 27–51). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. ——— (2015) The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan. New York: Oxford University Press. Honda, K. (1972) Chūgoku no tabi. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha. Hyakuta, N. (2006). Eien no zero. Tokyo: Ōta Shuppan. Ichinose, T. (2015) Senkan yamato kōgi: Watashitachi ni totte taiheiyō sensō towa nanika. Kyoto: Jimbun Shoin. Kobayashi, Y. (1998) Sensōron. Tokyo: Gentōsha. ———. (2007) Patori naki nashonarizumu. Tokyo: Shōgakkan. Kōno, F. (2008–2009) Konosekai no katasumini. 3 volumes. Tokyo: Futabasha. Mizuki Shigeru. (1973) Sōin, gyokusai seyo! Tokyo: Kōdansha. ———. (2007) Āa gyokusai; Mizuki Shigeru senki senshū. Tokyo: Ohzora Shuppan. ———. (2011) Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. Trans. J. Allen. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Morimura, S. (1981) Akuma no hōshoku: ‘Kantōgun saikinsen butai’ kyōfu no zenbō. Tokyo: Kōbunsha. Nakazawa, K. (1982–1987) Hadashi no Gen. Tokyo: Chōbunsha. Natsume, F. (1997) Manga to ‘sensō.’ Tokyo: Kōdansha Shinsho. NHK (2020) Kurōzuappu gendai: Shiryōkanga., ireihiga., ‘rekishi’ga kieteiku. 07.30.2020 Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 13 July 2022). Oguma, E., & Ueno, Y. (2003) ‘Iyashi’ no nashonarizumu: Kusanone hoshu undō no jisshō kenkyū. Tokyo: Keio Gijuku Daigaku Shuppankai. Ōoka S. (1952) Nobi [The Fires in the Plain]. Osaka: Sōgensha. Orr, J. J. (2001) The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Penney, M. (2008) War and Japan: The Non-Fiction Manga of Mizuki Shigeru. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Volume 6 Issue 9 Article ID 2905. Seraphim, F. (2006) War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Asia Center. Studio Ghibli. (1988) Grave of the Fireflies. Tokyo: Tōhō Studio. Takeda, K. (2016–2021) Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise. 11 volumes. Tokyo: Hakusensha ———. (2017a) Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise. Volume 2. Tokyo: Hakusensha. ———. (2017b) Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise. Volume 3. Tokyo: Hakusensha.

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Telling Stories of War Trauma Weinberg, G. L. (2005) A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (2nd ed). New York: Cambridge University Press. Yomiuri Shimbun (2020). ‘Izokukai, ‘jidainonamini sakaraezu’ kaisan aitsugu…Kōreika de kaiin ­genshō; Shikin atsume konnan.’ 8.15.2020 Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 13 July 2022). Yonekura, R. (2021). ‘Sengo jānarizumu’ to sengo nihon: Sensō no kioku wa dō tsukurarete kitanoka. Tokyo: Kadensha. Yoshida, M. (1952) Senkan yamato no saigo. Tokyo: Sōgensha. ———. (1985) Requiem for Battleship Yamato. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Translated by Richard Minear. Yoshida, Y. (2011). Heishitachi no sengoshi. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. ———. (2017). Nihongun heishi: Ajia-taiheiyō sensō no genjitsu. Tokyo: Chūkō Shinsho.

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9 BACK TO THE FUTURE Contested Wartime Trauma in Japanese Popular Culture David McNeill

Gift of Fire The race to build an atomic bomb during the Second World War ended in an airburst 580 metres above Hiroshima that killed 140,000 people and destroyed the city in August 1945. Nagasaki was obliterated three days later, taking another 70,000 lives (Selden, 2016). These catastrophic events, the climax of a great orgy of destruction visited on Japan, including the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo that killed well over half a million civilians and reduced nearly seventy cities to charred rubble, initially left little imprint on Japanese popular cinema. During the US-led occupation (1945–1952), censors prohibited coverage of Allied wartime atrocities and Occupation-era crimes in everything from mass media and books to film and theatre (Feleppa, 2004). Sekigawa Hideo’s polemical docudrama Hiroshima, produced by the Japan Teachers Union, was not released until 1953 and then only in schools and community centres. The more sentimental film Children of Hiroshima, created by Shindo Kaneto, was more widely seen but criticized for treating the bombing as a tragedy rather than a humanmade atrocity (Hoberman, 2012). The March 1945 US firebombing of Tokyo, one of the most destructive assaults ever carried out on a civilian population, fares even worse in terms of cinema representation (Sams, Saotome, 2015). Silence reigned for decades: Adrian Francis, director of the documentary Paper City (2020), lamented that family members of the 100,000 dead were ‘desperate’ to have their story told because it had essentially disappeared from popular view (Francis 2021). The dearth of films offering a critical take on the 1944–1945 era is partly a legacy of Occupation censorship but also due to the later reluctance of Japanese directors and distributors to be associated with wartime controversy or the political left. Not until 2021 did ­cinema finally dramatize one of the more fascinating subplots in the nuclear story: the attempt by wartime Japanese scientists to build their own atomic bomb. Taiyo no Ko (Gift of Fire, 2021) depicted the attempt to develop a nuclear weapon at Kyoto University, led by physicist Arakatsu Bunsaku, a protégé of Albert Einstein (Atomic Heritage Foundation (2016). The Imperial Japanese Navy ordered an initially sceptical Arakatsu to construct a nuclear weapon in 1942 (a separate bomb project, commissioned by the imperial army was undertaken in Tokyo under Nishino Yoshio, known as the father of nuclear physics in Japan). The director, Kurosaki Hiroshi, who spent ten years struggling to finance his film, stressed 98

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that this history was not secret, just not fodder for popular consumption. ‘All the information is freely available but it’s in academic studies, not in novels or movies; I researched offthe-shelf books in a Hiroshima library. It’s just that almost nobody wanted to tell the story’ (McNeill, 2021). Cinema provides a distorted lens for viewing controversies of the past. For decades, American movie narratives erased minorities and peddled stereotypes, faithfully if unconsciously recording the nation’s deep racial fissures (Murguía, 2019). Movies depicting the ‘heroic narratives’ of American conduct in what is still seen as the ‘good war’ of 1941–1945 still overshadow the savagery of its air campaign in Japan (Selden, 2012). The ‘underlying sense of horror and uncertainty’ in the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s, with their deadly femmes fatales, reflected the challenges to the patriarchy and the family wrought by Second World War (Kaplan, 1987); the science-fiction boom that followed was later interpreted as deflected cold-war paranoia. Plus ca change: the cinematic superheroes who have dominated the box office since the 2000s might be seen as a cultural by-product of American military power, ‘little muscular emblems of the American state,’ at a time when its supremacy is in decline (Rooney, 2016). As a loser in the war, and a client state in the US-led transformation of the world ­a fterwards, Japan initially steered clear of Hollywood’s triumphalism. Most Japanese films produced during the nation’s high-growth years (1950–1990) avoided glorifying the conduct of the imperial wartime military or expressing sympathy for its actions. The enemy was largely faceless, rarely named, and represented mostly by its machines of destruction, such as the tank and the bomb (in contrast to the vindictive or often nakedly racist portrayals in American and British productions). It might be argued that much of the war was culturally swept under the carpet. The common cinematic currency was repentance, or sombre reflections on war, rather than finger-pointing at the causes or perpetrators. Godzilla, perhaps Japan’s most iconic cinematic creation, is often understood as a metaphor for nuclear Armageddon—and Japan’s victimhood—without explicitly stating either. The first entry in the series, Gojira (1954), released the same year as the crew members on a Japanese fishing boat were exposed to the fallout from a US thermonuclear test on the Bikini Atoll, sees the prehistoric dinosaur reawakened by nuclear-weapons testing, then attacking Tokyo with his radioactive breath ( Jacobs, 2012; Igarashi, 2000). There were certainly occasional cinematic salvos from the right: Tenno To Nichiro Dai Sensou (The Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War) was the first postwar movie to put the emperor in a leading (even hagiographic) role and the highest grossing movie of 1957 (Stegewerns, 2014). Partly funded by right-wing sources, it resurrected many of the expunged prewar tropes of military sacrifice and virtue (Wolf et al., 2007). Dai Nippon Teikoku (1982), a rare sympathetic portrayal of wartime Prime Minister Tojo Hideki, is billed on Internet Movie Database, probably the world’s most popular source for movie information, as a ‘jingoistic defense of Japanese imperialism’ (IMDB, 2022). Comic books for boys also began trading in graphic fantasies, particularly about kamikaze suicide pilots, almost as soon as the American overlords departed, beginning with the 1955 bestseller Sakai Saburō Record of Air Combat (Kōdachi, 2020). There followed Zero-sen Red (Zero Fighter Red), Zero Senkō Kōshin Kyoku (The March of Zero Fighter), Reppū, Zero-sen Arashi (The Storm of Zero Fighter) and many more (Nakayama, 2017). Perhaps the best known was Zero-sen Hayato by Tsuji Naoki, which depicts pilots attacking a fictitious enemy base. The manga was serialized in the weekly boys’ magazine Shukan Shonen King from 1963, and, unusually, an animated version was shown on TV in 1964 (Fujitsu, 2021). Kōdachi (2020) argues that despite its chestbeating, Zero-sen Hayato was still infused with the values of pacifist Japan. A homily at the end of each episode said: ‘We never forget this, that both enemy 99

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and foe alike are human beings’. Moreover, the television series caused controversy. The original broadcaster was TBS, but protests by labour unions prompted the creators to move to the more accommodating broadcaster Fuji TV (Fujitsu, 2021). Pacifist postwar Japan, nevertheless, produced a string of acknowledged antiwar ­m asterpieces (Russell, 2011). In the Buddhist-inflected The Burmese Harp (1956), for example dir. Ichikawa Kon, Japanese and Allied soldiers in Burma find their common humanity in the communal, unifying act of singing, leading to the peaceful surrender of the Japanese troops. Many reviewers noted the lack of bitterness or even blame directed at the Allied troops, all the more remarkable ‘when one considers that Ichikawa’s own family lived through the horrors of Hiroshima’ (Parmelee, 2011). The 575-minute epic, Ningen no Joken (The Human Condition, 1959–1961), directs its fury inwards, at the hypocrisy and violence of wartime society and Japanese army leaders, rather than at the enemy. Nobi or Fires on the Plain (1959, also directed by Ichikawa) hints at cannibalism—the Imperial Army literally eating itself—as it records the descent into wartime barbarism and inhumanity.

Pride Japan’s long postwar boom ended when its asset and real-estate bubble popped in the early 1990s. Economic growth slowed dramatically from an average of 9 per cent a year during the boom years (1950–1973), and 4 per cent between 1975 and 1991, to 0.9 per cent in the following three decades (Katz, 2022). The listless economy, as well as a series of disasters and moral panics about youth, ageing, public safety and much else, fuelled a period of national unease and political ructions. In 1993, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was ejected from power for the first time since 1955; the party has since formed a series of coalition governments to continue its dominance in the upper house. Between 1997 and 2012, no fewer than seventeen leaders rotated through the prime minister’s office. As Japan drifted economically and politically, many of its citizens believed—indeed accepted—that the country’s best was in the past. In 2010, Japan lost its place as the world’s second largest economy to China, giving up a title it had held since 1968, when it surpassed West Germany. The loss, coupled with ebbing faith in the Japan-US alliance, touched a nerve and reinforced a deep fear among nationalists. Several political leaders sought to stem this decline but by far the most consequential was Abe Shinzo, who was Japan’s longest-serving leader since the War when he quit in 2020. His political aims were always clear. In December 2012, after he returned to office following a hiatus of five years, he famously made a pilgrimage to the tomb of his grandfather Kishi Nobusuke, where he pledged to ‘recover the true independence’ of Japan. Kishi was a minister in Japan’s war cabinet, later arrested (but freed) by the Allied Occupation as a suspected Class-A war criminal. Abe channelled his grandfather’s political philosophy. The legacy of Japan’s wartime defeat—emperor demoted, military neutered—was a temporary debasement (Abe, 2007; McNeill, 2020). Above all, independence meant casting off Japan’s alien 1947 constitution imposed by the victorious Allies. ‘Japan is back,’ he announced in one of his first major policy speeches abroad (MOFA, 2013). In his book Towards a Beautiful Japan (2007) Abe recalls a childhood stigmatized by his family’s association with the out-of-fashion nationalist politics of his grandfather, and his resentment at the hold of left-wing ideas on postwar education and intellectual life. Abe belongs to a political tradition that rejects much of the accepted narrative on the war, especially Japanese misconduct and atrocities. He pleased his supporters by injecting patriotism into the public education system, challenged Japan’s ‘apology diplomacy’ in relation to its nearest neighbours and roiled relations with 100

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China and South Korea over Japan’s wartime role by disputing much of the history of that period, including war crimes and colonial repression. Like the Reaganite America of the 1980s, when pumped-up celluloid offerings like Rambo, Delta Force and Missing in Action responded to political chest-beating by culturally reasserting US hegemony, Japan’s changing political zeitgeist leaked into popular culture. Arguably the most striking example was the success of Eien no Zero, or The Eternal Zero, about two modern-day Japanese children learning about their grandfather’s past as a reluctant kamikaze pilot. Drawing on a bestselling book by Hyakuta Naoki, a former TV scriptwriter, the movie was the third highest grossing film released in Japan in 2013. Though many found its celebration of national pride, sacrifice and heroism moving, the movie’s ultimate message was ambiguous at best. Its central character, played by Miyabe Kyuzo, rebels against his fate, but in the final scene he smiles while ploughing his plane into an American aircraft carrier, making it, in the final analysis, noted one critical reviewer, ‘propaganda aimed at deluding’ younger people (Watanabe, 2014). Hyakuta represented a strand of conservative thought in Japan newly emboldened during the Abe years. In 2014, he condemned Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo as ‘cruel massacres,’ and called the Imperial Japanese Army’s own massacre of civilians in the Chinese city of Nanjing in 1937 ‘Chinese propaganda.’ He reiterated long-standing nationalist criticism of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946–1948), commonly known as the Tokyo War Crimes trials, saying they were designed to ‘fool people’ by concealing those American atrocities. Why, he asked, ‘should Japan take all the blame for the past?’ It wasn’t only the Japanese who committed war crimes, and there was no reason to teach such things to children, he said. Abe famously said he was ‘deeply moved’ by Eternal Zero; his wife Akie said that she ‘couldn’t stop crying’ while watching it (Schilling, 2014). Abe and Hyakuta wrote a book together, Japan! Be Proud of Yourself in the Center of the World (2013), and in the same year the prime minister controversially installed Hyakuta on the board of NHK, Japan’s powerful public broadcaster, which—rarely adversarial—became ever more timorous and co-opted by the powers that be during the Abe years (McNeill, 2016a, 2016b). In 2014, Hyakuta publicly clashed with anime director Miyazaki Hayao, a titan of Japan’s cultural left (Akimoto et all, 2017). Mizayaki’s Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises), released the same year, tells the story of wartime aeroplane-maker Horikoshi Jiro, based on the real Japanese designer of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. In its time considered to be the world’s best aerial fighter plane, the Zero opened the war against America by leading the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. By 1945 it had lost its technical advantage and teenage kamikaze pilots were ramming Zeros into American fleets. Born in the year of the Pearl Harbour attack, Miyazaki was imprinted with the pacifism typical of his generation. Asked why he had made a movie about a ­weapons-maker, he replied that engineers are ‘neutral.’ ‘It was wrong from the beginning to go to war,’ he said. ‘But…it’s useless to blame Jiro for it’ (The Economist, 2013). The Zero, he said, ‘represented one of the few things we Japanese could be proud of— [they] were a truly formidable presence, and so were the pilots who flew them.’ Lest anyone be confused about his stance on the War, however, he singled out Eien no Zero, saying it was ‘based on a piece of historical military fiction full of lies’ (Loveridge, 2014). While promoting his movie, Miyazaki published an article in his studio’s house magazine expressing his ‘disgust’ at the government’s plans to upgrade Japan’s army, navy and air defense forces and said he was taken aback by how ignorant politicians were of Japan’s wartime history. Hyakuta reacted angrily to this criticism, even questioning Miyazaki’s sanity. ‘I’m just a simple patriot. Who I hate are people with anti-Japanese or traitorous sentiments,’ he 101

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said (Loveridge, ibid.). Many rightists supported this odd accusation that Japan’s greatest living filmmaker in fact hated Japan, particularly in the furious online debate the exchange ­provoked. If the success of Miyazaki’s work is any indication of the outcome of this faceoff between two competing versions of the past, however, Miyazaki triumphed—The Wind Rises was the highest grossing Japanese movie of 2013. Yet Forever Zero was but a single entry in a revisionist canon that had been expanding since the late 1990s, when a revival of neo-nationalist thought (which congealed around the post-Cold War debate on whether to allow Japan’s military to have a more muscular role) found expression in cinema. Gerow (2006) notes a string of big-budget war movies, notably Aegis (bokoku no Ijisu) and Yamato (Otokotachi no Yamato), ‘a melodramatic retelling of the last days of the famed (wartime) battleship Yamato’. Filmmakers, and studios in need of hits, were increasingly likely to cast off the pacifism of the postwar years. Many of these celluloid depictions were ‘conservative’ in the sense of taking pride in the actions of the wartime generation while depicting them as victims of circumstances in a ‘bad war’ beyond their control. But some were more overtly nationalist, denying Japanese crimes or responsibility for the war and emphasizing not victimhood but ‘Japanese bravery in the fight against Western aggression and colonialism’ ( Jaworowicz-Zimny, 2018). Among the latter was The Truth about Nanjing (2007), funded and supported by a network of supporters and nationalist politicians, which, like Hyakuta, dismissed the massacre as Chinese propaganda. One of the earliest entries, however, and more likely to stir sympathy, was Puraido: Unmei no Shunkan (Pride, 1998), depicting the vindictiveness of the United States and its allies as they tried Japan’s wartime leaders. The movie, also funded by right-wing businessmen (Higashi Nippon Hausu, a housing construction company, provide most of its budget), tapped into long-standing conservative grievances about the conduct of the trials, which found twenty-five political and military leaders, including Prime Minister Tojo, guilty of planning or prosecuting the war (in the movie, Tojo accuses the Americans of hypocrisy for putting him in the dock despite having incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Some right-wing academics have argued since the 1990s that the trials were, in the words of one, ‘the starting point of the ruination of Japan’ (Kobori, 2011). Liberal media outlets such as the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, meanwhile, lamented the movie’s take on history: that Japan had been forced into the war to defend itself and liberate Asia from Western colonialism and the convictions of Tojo and his colleagues for war crimes were legally unsound. Nevertheless, the dreary melodrama was a smash hit at the box office. Another entry in the right-wing cinematic canon was ‘Merdeka’ (2001), featuring a Japanese lieutenant who drills Indonesian soldiers as an elite fighting force during the war and, after Japan’s loss, leads them in their struggle for Indonesian independence—another nod to the revisionist credo that Japan was a liberator, not tormentor, of its wartime Asian neighbours. ‘The red-blooded, jut-jawed hero’ was described by Mark Schilling (2014), film reviewer for The Japan Times, as a ‘war-recruiting poster brought to life.’ For Those We Love (Ore-kami, 2007) eulogizes kamikaze pilots as heroes defending Japan (the script was written by Ishihara Shintaro, Tokyo’s neo-nationalist former governor). Other movies were open to more ambiguous interpretations. Sea Without Exit (Deguchi no Nai Umi, 2007) depicts young military recruits struggling with their doubts about the doomed war as they prepare to steer kaiten (human-guided torpedoes) into the enemy. Best Wishes for Tomorrow (Ashita e No Yuigon, 2007, from a script co-written by Roger Pulvers), explores the morality of American’s urban firebombing campaign by sympathetically portraying the real-life Japanese officer Okada Tasuku, who ordered the execution of thirty-eight captured American airmen. The movie 102

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can be seen as a condemnation of American self-righteousness and reflection on how people behave in war. ‘How do we confront evil without becoming evil ourselves,’ asked Pulvers (McNeill, 2018). Gerow (2006) cautions against ‘monolithic perceptions’ of right-wing revisionist ­nationalism in recent Japanese movies and popular culture. The brief survey above suggests a wide spectrum of interpretations, from the strutting fanaticism of Aegis to the thoughtful reflections of the darkness of the human spirit in Best Wishes. We are meant to sympathize with the brilliant, idealistic young scientists in Gift of Fire while understanding their dilemma. The scientists earnestly debate the morality of their work aimed at building a Japanese nuclear weapon. ‘If we dropped the bomb on San Francisco an estimated 200,000 people would die,’ says one during a US air raid. It would be ‘300,000,’ he is corrected. ‘If we don’t build it the Americans will; if they don’t the Soviets will,’ says another. When someone questions the ethics of their work a young engineer angrily shouts, ‘my brother died. I don’t want his death to be in vain.’ Later we watch the main character walking among makeshift funeral pyres burning great piles of bodies in Hiroshima’s blasted landscape. ‘This is the reality of what we are trying to achieve,’ he muses darkly. In contrast to earlier postwar movies, ‘which remained cognizant of the reality of defeat’ even while trying to find glory, Gerow (2006, 1) argues that many of the more recent entries are bolder ‘in revising history to fantasize Japanese victories, free, in some sense, of the “taboos” of postwar Japanese democracy that so many on the pop culture right complain of.’

Unbroken Japan’s changing political atmosphere meant that reception of foreign movies about the war could be unpredictable. Several of these, notably Railway Man (2014), which contained graphic scenes of Japanese soldiers torturing British prisoner-of-war Eric Lomax, were released in Japan without incident, perhaps because their ultimate message was forgiveness. This is despite the left-wing, explicit anti-emperor views of Lomax’s real-life Japanese tormentor, Nagase Takashi (McNeill 2005). The film’s director said one of his aims was to reignite political debate about waterboarding, which emerged during the administration of US President George W. Bush (Bond, 2014). Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), directed by Clint Eastwood, was also warmly received, in sharp contrast to the reception given to The Sands of Iwo Jima (1947), starring John Wayne. A shrill and jingoistic recruitment poster for a ­generation of Marines (it inspired, among others, Ron Kovic, the paraplegic Vietnam veteran whose story was dramatized in Born on the Fourth of July) depicting big-hearted US grunts pitted against fanatical, banzai-screaming ‘Nips’ and ‘Japs,’ the movie has few fans in Japan. But Eastwood, a long-standing Republican and cinematic right-winger, was careful with his groundwork, interviewing, among others, survivors of the Battle of Iwo Jima. His interviewees included Ishihara Shintaro, Tokyo’s famously nationalist governor, and Shindo Yoshitaka, a leading Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politician whose grandfather General Kuribayashi Tadamichi was handpicked by wartime Emperor Hirohito to lead the defence of the island. ‘He told me he didn’t want to make a movie simply about war, but about families and the human heart,’ said Shindo, recalling his meeting with Eastwood (McNeill, 2006a, 2006b). Shindo added that Japanese soldiers like his grandfather were not fighting ‘just to die honourably’ but to protect their loved ones. ‘The reason they fought to the last man was to delay the air raids on their families and the Japanese people. It doesn’t matter if the soldiers were from America or Japan; they fought to protect their families.’ 103

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Unbroken (2014), however, ran into trouble in Japan. Angelina Jolie’s movie tells the story of Louis Zamperini, an American wartime bomber pilot sent to a Japanese POW camp. Starved and beaten by a sadistic guard, he barely survived and later struggled with alcoholism and depression. The movie and the translation of the bestselling book on which it is based were targeted in an orchestrated right-wing Japanese media campaign, amplified by online chatter that branded them anti-Japanese. A small distributor, Bitters End, rescued it from cinematic oblivion after Toho-Towa, the local distributor for Universal Studios, balked. After over a year of controversy, the movie was tentatively rolled out in art-house cinemas, far from its natural home in multiplexes. A cinema in Tokyo provided a trial run for another thirty-four venues around Japan, with a one-month gap between the first and second screening, enough time to gauge the reaction from nationalist protestors. Unbroken should have resonated with audiences everywhere because its central character embraced reconciliation. Zamperini, who died in 2014 at the age of ninety-seven, visited Japan after the war to meet the men who had been his captors. Ostensibly, the most problematic scene depicted Zamperini being tortured by prison guard Watanabe Mutsuhito (‘the Bird’), who forces him to hold a heavy beam above his head before viciously beating him. Watanabe fled and was never brought to justice. He later became a successful businessman. Zamperini was one of 30,000 Allied prisoners in Japan, of whom 10 per cent died, says Tokudome Kinue, executive director of the US-Japan Dialogue on POWs, an NPO (McNeill 2016). The camp where Zamperini was held, in Naoetsu on the Japan Sea coast, was notoriously inhumane: about sixty Australians died from disease and mistreatment there from 1942 to 1945. When the war ended, eight guards were tried and executed, more than any other POW camp in Japan. This background, which neo-nationalists might prefer to forget, helps explain the hostile reaction to the movie, but by pushing the sadistic Watanabe  to  the narrative frontlines and relegating other nameless and faceless Japanese tormentors to the background, Jolie hardly did herself any favours in the world’s third largest film market. The movie crystalized Japan’s cultural tug-of-war over history (Hashimoto, 2015). The generations of ­ordinary Japanese who fought the amnesiac ranks of neo-nationalists, many with first-hand knowledge of the war, were dwindling, allowing second-hand accounts and fictional portrayals to fill the gap in perception and knowledge. In Naoetsu, a group of local people working with the families of former Australian soldiers created one of the handful of domestic memorials to Japan’s wartime victims. A small park marks the spot where the camp once stood. Most of the people who built the memorial in 1995, however, have passed away. Around the town, which this author visited in 2016, few seemed aware of the camp or the fact that it has been immortalized in a Hollywood movie. My taxi driver couldn’t find the memorial and nobody seemed to have seen the movie. ‘I don’t think people care about something that happened so long ago,’ said Ishida Yukiko, who lived less than a kilometre from where the camp once stood (McNeill, 2016).

Shifting Views Since 2012, Japan’s government has expanded attempts to disseminate revisionist views of the war and undermine the content and credibility of its previous official statements about wartime culpability, particularly against China and Korea (Morris-Suzuki, 2021). School textbooks have expunged references to war crimes under pressure from politicians and lobby groups (including the Association of Young Parliamentarians for Considering History Textbooks, whose executive secretary was once Abe Shinzo). 104

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In 2015, the Education Ministry mandated that school textbooks must reflect the government position on history and territorial issues. Under Abe, ‘moral education’ became a compulsory subject in elementary school. Children are now taught honesty, self-control, love of family and nation, and ‘pride as a Japanese’ (Bamkin, 2018). Pop culture has long flirted with such quasi-nationalist themes. For a quarter of a century, manga artist Kobayashi Yoshinori has helped millions of young Japanese fill in the gaps in their dry textbook histories with heavily illustrated political essays that venerate Imperial Japan’s military achievements and dismiss its record of war crimes (Sakamoto 2008). Like Hyakuta, Kobayashi is animated by anger at Japan’s modern predicament— its lack of diplomatic and military autonomy and subservience to America—and by nostalgia for the honour and patriotic self-sacrifice embodied by bushido (samurai moral code) (ibid.). Such populist nationalism shades into xenophobia and racism. Before and during the Abe era, a wave of comics and books normalized xenophobia and racism. These are collectively known as kenchū-zōkan—‘dislike China, hate South Korea’ (Rosenbaum et al, 2013). Bestselling manga became a platform for expressing anti-Americanism and a sense of Japanese victimization. Many of these comics are crude revenge fantasies directed at the Americans: Hajime no Ippo (Fighting Spirit), for example, a popular boxing manga published in the weekly Shonen Magazine, treated readers to x-ray drawings of an American’s ‘ribs and internal organs being destroyed by the smaller Japanese fighter’s blows’ (Penney, 2009). Other pop-culture examples in the revisionist canon include Yamada Muneki’s HyakuNen Ho (The Hundred Year Law) and Arikawa Hiro’s Soratobu Kouhoushitsu (Public Affairs Office in the Sky), in which the female protagonist, as a sort of proxy for Japan’s spoiled, feckless youth, reappraises the Japanese Self-Defence Forces (SDF). The book was turned into a television drama, with the cooperation of the SDF, which praised it for contributing to the ‘knowledge and understanding’ of military equipment, uniforms and good manners in the forces. Most Japanese are likely to fit such representations into their existing worldview. Despite decades of attempts to rewrite the past—and Article 9—the hold of pacifism appears to remain strong. As The Economist (2015) noted on the seventieth anniversary of the war, Japan has not fired a single bullet in anger since 1945. ‘In the 70 years before that, war was central to its progress.’ Yet, the effect of years of revisionist popular literature and celluloid images can hardly be dismissed. Many of these texts trade in national pride, nostalgia, and a sense of victimhood and humiliation at Japan’s postwar neutering. As such they are capable of eliciting emotional responses and making audiences susceptible to manipulation. The sharpest differences between Japan and the rest of the world over interpretations of Second World War history remain, as ever, over the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: a Gallup poll in 1945 showed that 80 per cent of Americans approved. Thereafter, this figure has declined, though by 2015 the Pew Research Center claimed that 56 per cent of Americans still believed the use of the weapons were justified, a stark contrast to the 54 per cent of Japanese who rejected that view (Stokes, 2015). In 2000, NHK carried out one of the largest postwar surveys of public opinion about Japan’s long war (1931–1945), including explicitly asking if it was a war of aggression (Saaler, 2006). The result in this and subsequent surveys by the Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun ( Japan’s most popular newspapers) in May 2005 was an overwhelming ‘yes’. A Yomiuri poll in October 2005 said 68 per cent of Japanese citizens believed that Japan was the aggressor in the war against China. This suggests that attempts by the right at that point to blur culpability or to blame the US had yet to have a major impact (see Moteki, 2022). 105

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More recent polls show evidence of the apology fatigue played up by Abe. A 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center found that the number of Japanese who thought Japan had sufficiently apologized for the war was up 13 per cent since 2006 (Stokes, 2016). More telling, perhaps, are the increasingly intolerant views held by Japanese with regard to their neighbours (and vice versa). In particular, negative stereotypes of Korea and China abound: about eight-in-ten Japanese described the Chinese as ‘arrogant’ and three-quarters as ‘nationalistic.’ ‘Neither public sees the other as honest’ (Pew, 2016). A separate survey c­ arried out by The Asahi Shimbun (2015) found that only 1 per cent described Japan’s ties with its neighbours as ‘very good.’ While the reasons for these sharply divergent views are complex, popular culture has certainly played a role. The Abe era witnessed the rise of what Abe Hiroyuki (2015) calls self-satisfied media narcissism, expressed in a ‘deluge’ of television programmes and books extolling Japan’s supposedly unique virtues. Just one book, Takeda Tsuneyasu’s Nihon wa Naze Sekai de Ichiban Ninki ga Aru no Ka (Why Is Japan the World’s Most Popular Country?), has sold more than half a million copies (Abe, 2015). Hayakawa (2017) also point to the striking rise in the number of TV programmes praising Japan since the 2010s. First-hand memories of the war among the Japanese have played a vital role in shaping the country’s postwar pacifism—and the views of its citizens towards defence issues and the role of the Self-Defence Forces (SDF). It seems safe to assume that as direct memories of the war fade, conflicts in how Japanese see the past will grow. Moreover, nationalism in Japan’s neighbours also appears to be fuelling a retreat from attempts to forge a shared interpretation of the past. South Korea has increased school history teaching about Japan’s wartime misdeeds. In 2016, a film on the horrific experiences of ‘comfort women’ financed by thousands of individual donors topped the box office in South Korea. In China, a compulsory text on the 1937 Nanjing massacre was adopted in 2013 for use in all its classrooms. In addition, dozens of Chinese movies every year demonize the brutal Japanese invaders. To paraphrase Marx rather freely, history seems doomed to be repeated, once as tragedy and the second time as a bad war movie.

Conclusion Reflection has long battled official amnesia with regard to the Second World War in Japan, but since the late 1990s there has been a shift in cinematic and cultural representations away from the sombre pacifist cultural sentiments that dominated the postwar years towards bolder, more complicated, nationalist-tinged and even narcissistic depictions of the conflict. The impact of this shift remains to be seen but one consequence is that Japan and its neighbours are moving far apart on shared interpretations of the past.

Acknowledgement Kato Nao contributed to the research and writing of this chapter.

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David McNeill com/interest/2014-11-18/author-naoki-hyakuta-thinks-hayao-miyazaki-got-a-few-screwsloose/.81180 (accessed 23 July 2022). McNeill, D. (2005), “Building Bridges Over Hate: Thai-Burma Railroad Legacy”, Asia Pacific Journal, Available online: https://apjjf.org/-David-McNeill/1762/article.html (accessed 22 July 2022). McNeill, D. (2006a), “Flags of our Fathers: Commemorating Iwo Jima”, Asia-Pacific Journal, Available online: https://apjjf.org/-David-McNeill/2048/article.html (accessed 26 June 2022). McNeill, D. (2006b), “Flags of our Fathers: Commemorating Iwo Jima”, Volume 4 Issue 1. Available online: https://apjjf.org/-David-McNeill/2048/article.html (accessed 22 July 2022). McNeill, D. (2016a). “Remanufacturing Consent: History, Nationalism and Popular Culture in Japan”, in Press Freedom in Contemporary Japan. Edited by Jeff Kingston, London: Routledge, pp. 160–171. McNeill, D. (2016b), Unbroken: Angelina Jolie War Film Accused of being ‘Racist’ and ‘AntiJapanese,’ The Independent, 4 February. Available online: https://www.independent.co.uk/ arts-­entertainment/films/news/unbroken-angelina-jolie-war-film-accused-of-being-­r acist-andantijapanese-a6853941.html McNeill, D. (2018), “Liv: The Truth of War in a Pair of Cornflower Blue Eyes”, The Japan Times, Available online: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2018/02/10/books/liv-truth-war-paircornflower-blue-eyes/ (accessed 3 July 2022). McNeill, D. (2020) “Shinzo Abe: A Resilient Leader Who Tilted Japan to the Right”, The Irish Times, August 28. Available online: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/shinzo-abe-aresilient-leader-who-tilted-japan-to-the-right-1.4340962 (accessed 7 June 2022). McNeill, D., Personal Interview with Hiroshi Kurosaki, 15 September, 2021. Available online: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/new-film-pushes-japan-to-confront-awartime-taboo-1.4674055 (accessed 3 July 2022). Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, “Japan is Back” (Policy Speech by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe), 22 February, 2013. Available online: https://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/pm/abe/us_20130222en. html (accessed 1 July 2022). Morris-Suzuki, T. (2021), “The Reception of the Ramseyer Comfort Women Article in Japan: Historical and Political background”. Available online: http://chwe.net/irle/morris_suzuki_­ reception.pdf (accessed 1 July 2022). Moteki, H., “The US, not Japan, was the aggressor”, The Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact (undated). Available online: https://www.sdh-fact.com/essay-article/318/ (accessed 3 July 2022). Murguía, S.J. (2019) The Encyclopedia of Racism in American Films, London: Rowman and Littlefield. Nakayama Hideyuki (2017), “Tokkotai Eiga no Keifugaku”. The Genealogy of Kamikaze Movies. Iwanami (Tokyo) https://www.iwanami.co.jp/book/b281694.html Parmelee, S. (2011), “Such Inexplicable Pain: Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp”, Christian Scholar’s Review, Available online: https://christianscholars.com/such-inexplicable-pain-kon-ichikawasthe-burmese-harp/ (accessed 22 July 2022). Penney, N., “Nationalism and Anti-Americanism in Japan – Manga Wars, Aso, Tamogami, and Progressive Alternatives,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 17-2-09, April 26, 2009. Available online at http://apjjf.org/-Matthew-Penney/3116/article.html (last accessed, 10 December, 2022). Rooney, S. (2016), “Superheroes and the Myths of American Power,” Literary Hub, Available online: https://lithub.com/on-superheroes-and-the-myths-of-american-power/ (accessed 4 July 2022). Pride (Puraido: Unmei no Shunkan) ( 1998) directed by Shunya Itō. Rosenbaum, R. (2013), “Manga and the Representation of Japan in History”. London: Routledge. Russell, Catherine (2011), Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited, The Continuum International Publishing Group, New York. Saaler, S. (2006), Politics, Memory, and Public Opinion, Munich IUDICIUM Verlag GmbH. Sakamoto, R. (2008), “Will you go to War? Or will you stop being Japanese?’ Nationalism and History in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s ‘Sensoron’”, Asia Pacific Focus, Available online: https://apjjf. org/-Rumi-SAKAMOTO/2632/article.html (accessed 23 July 2022). Sams, R., Saotome, K. (2015), Saotome Katsumoto and the Firebombing of Tokyo: Introducing the Great Tokyo Air Raid, Asia Pacific Journal, Volume 13 | Issue 10 | Number 1. https://apjjf. org/2015/13/9/Saotome-Katsumoto/4293.html (accessed 22 July 2022). Schilling, M. (2014), “Debate Still Rages Over Abe-Endorsed WW2 Drama”, The Japan Times, February 20. Available online: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2014/02/20/films/debatestill-rages-over-abe-endorsed-wwii-drama/ (accessed 22 July 2022).

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Back to the Future Selden, M. (2016), “American Fire Bombing and Atomic Bombing of Japan in History and Memory”, Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 14 | Issue 23 | Number 4. Available online: https://apjjf.org/2016/23/ Selden.html (accessed 26 May 2022). Stegewerns, D. (2014), “Establishing the Genre of the Revisionist War Film: The Shin-Toho Body of Post-Occupation War Films in Japan”, in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War. Edited By King-fai Tam, Timothy Y. Tsu, Sandra Wilson, Routledge. Stokes, B. (2015) “70 years after Hiroshima, Opinions Have Shifted on use of Atomic Bomb”, Pew Research Center, Available online: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/08/04/70-yearsafter-hiroshima-opinions-have-shifted-on-use-of-atomic-bomb/ (accessed 18 June 2022). Stokes, B. (2016), “Hostile Neighbors: China vs Japan”, Pew Research Center, 13 September. Available online: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2016/09/13/hostile-neighbors-china-vs-japan/ (accessed 17 June 2022). Watanabe, J. (2014), “The Eternal Zero: Propaganda in the Service of Present-Day Militarism”, World Socialist Web Site, 2 April. Available online: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/04/02/ zero-a02.html (accessed 22 June 2022). Wolf, D., Marks, S., Menning, B. (eds.) (2007), The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero. Vol. 2 (History of Warfare, Vol. 40). Leiden: Brill

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10 SHARED COMPLICITY IN WAR CRIMES IN JAPANESE DETENTION CAMPS, 1941–1945 Sandra Wilson

Atrocities in war are often presented as a relatively simple morality tale in which good and evil are obvious, and in which perpetrators should be pursued in the interests of justice for victims. Cases from the Asia-Pacific region during the Second World War suggest a more complex reality, including cases relating to prisoners in captivity. Camps in which the Japanese military held Allied prisoners of war (POWs) or civilian internees were notorious for brutality and privation. While Japanese military personnel grievously mistreated many prisoners, they were sometimes aided by Allied inmates: by senior officers seeking to control their own subordinates, or in other circumstances. This reality, however, is rarely acknowledged in the voluminous literature on Japanese detention camps in Second World War, fundamentally because to do so would disturb settled ideas of what constitutes mistreatment of prisoners in wartime. Some forms of willing collaboration with Japanese forces have attracted scholarly ­attention, notably cooperation by local people with Japanese regimes in occupied areas. Members of Chinese or Southeast Asian elites, or ordinary local people, participated in Japanese-sponsored administrations, volunteered for military service, acted as spies, helped to identify anti-Japanese insurgents or played a wide range of other roles that aided the occupiers (Agoncillo 1984; Brook 2005; Lingen and Cribb 2017; Xia 2017). Collaboration is also recognized as a feature of the recruitment of ‘comfort women’ to provide sexual services to Japanese troops serving overseas. The Japanese authorities relied not only on their own efforts at recruitment and those of Japanese brokers, but also on middlemen and local organizations in Korea and in occupied territories. Many Korean women were recruited or coerced into sexual service for the Japanese military by fellow Koreans (Tanaka 2001, 37–38). In ­ rganizations Japanese-occupied Indonesia, heads of local communities and community o helped to recruit local women to serve as military prostitutes (Kumagai 2016, 21). By contrast, Allied complicity in war crimes committed in camps in the Asia-Pacific region, although discernible in some primary sources, has been largely omitted from ­post-war accounts of those crimes. The issue was suppressed from the start, in the legal proceedings against suspected Japanese war criminals that began in 1945. At the trials, any evidence that might have implicated the Allies in war crimes was normally disallowed, ignored or never presented in the first place. As Drumbl observes, criminal law does not easily tolerate blurring of categories: it is represented by ‘finality, disjuncture and category: 110

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guilty or not-guilty, persecuted or persecutor, abused or abuser, right or wrong, powerful or powerless’. Further, ‘Victims are to be pure and ideal; perpetrators are to be unadulterated and ugly’ (Drumbl 2016, 218). Nevertheless, some Jewish inmates of detention camps who had collaborated with the Nazis were prosecuted after the Second World War. In about forty trials in Israel between 1950 and 1972, dozens of suspects were prosecuted and jailed for collaborating with the Nazis and assaulting Jews in their wartime roles as police or administrators in ghettoes or in camps as kapos: that is, as prisoners who worked under SS guards on administrative tasks or in supervising forced labour (Porat 2019, 1–2). Small numbers of kapos were also tried in Europe, and in some instances they were executed. One kapo case was heard in the U.S. in 1987 (Wolf 2007; Bazyler and Tuerkheimer 2014, 198–199, 201). Survivor testimony in memoirs and other accounts of life in prison camps under the Japanese also tends to avoid reference to shared Allied responsibility for any crimes that were committed. This is especially the case with testimonies written well after the conflict, when collective memory had helped to shape the ways in which war experience was publicly presented. Aside from court-martial cases within individual national armies, there were no trials of Allied military personnel for wartime atrocities. ‘War crimes’ were defined at the time not as crimes committed during war but more narrowly as crimes committed by enemy soldiers for which they could be held to account. Atrocities committed by one’s own side were military crimes but not war crimes (Wilson et al. 2017, 29). With only one side deemed legally liable for war crimes, acknowledgement of Allied complicity was uncomfortable and inconvenient. At a more profound level, recognition of shared responsibility would have called the standard interpretations of war crimes into question by recognizing that, in the extreme circumstances of war, soldiers on both sides had to be flexible and adaptive in their dealings with each other in order to survive. Any such acknowledgement would then have clouded the very definition of what constituted a war crime and which actions might be legitimate in wartime. In this sense, the idea of shared complicity struck at the heart of the mid-century model of justice for war crimes victims. Once the war ended and the lines between the virtuous victors and the reprehensible vanquished had been clearly drawn, questions about the behaviour of the winning side were unwelcome. For Allied POWs who had witnessed what they considered to be inexcusable behaviour among camp inmates on their own side, however, the memory remained traumatic for decades afterwards (Beaumont 1988, 147, 182; Maynard 2014, 178–179).

Japanese Detention Camps Crimes committed in Japanese camps have been particularly prominent in public memory of atrocities in the Pacific War, as abundant evidence about them was collected during and immediately after the conflict. The crimes identified in post-war trials as most characteristic of camp life were the brutal beating and occasional execution of prisoners, the failure to provide prisoners with the food and medical care that they needed and forcing sick prisoners to work (Wilson et al. 2017, 68–70). Estimates of the number of prisoners taken by the Japanese military range up to 350,000, more than half of whom were Asian soldiers fighting within or alongside European armies. In general, Japanese authorities had little interest in keeping Asian soldiers as POWs, and many of them were released at an early point. Perhaps 140,000 POWs remained after the release of most of the Asian captives. They were incarcerated in camps that often included captives from multiple Allied nations and that were located throughout the Japanese empire: 111

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in Japan itself, and in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Korea, China proper, Manchuria, Taiwan and the Pacific islands. In addition, Japanese authorities interned some 150,000 civilians of European origin who had been living as expatriates or settlers in territories now controlled by Japan, of whom about 130,000 were in the Netherlands Indies. Internment centres for enemy civilians were established principally in Java but also throughout Southeast Asia and in Hong Kong, Manchuria, China proper, Korea and Japan (Wilson 2022, 200–202). The detention of high numbers of prisoners was a great strain on the resources at the command of the Japanese authorities, especially as the majority were captured early in the war and were held for over three years. Conditions varied considerably, but many detention camps suffered critical shortages of food, medicine and clothing, and had inadequate shelter and sanitation facilities. Staffing of the camps was also a problem. The Japanese army, which was responsible for most prisoners, was not large: at its peak, in 1945, its strength was slightly under six million, compared with over eight million in the U.S. army (Drea 2009, 235; ‘Research Starters: U.S. Military by the Numbers’). Japanese forces were also thinly spread. Over the course of the Asia-Pacific War, the army was stationed throughout Southeast Asia and as far afield as New Guinea and Guadalcanal. POW camps were divided into a ­complicated system of main camps and branch camps; some of the latter were in remote places, distant from main camps, and troops could be stretched across large distances (Wilson 2022, 205). Captives in Japanese-run camps were subject above all to the authority of Japanese staff, who consisted of a commander; subordinate military personnel, who might comprise a small number of non-commissioned officers, medical staff and interpreters; and guards, who formed by far the largest segment of camp staff, though there might still be shortages. In addition to the authority of Japanese camp staff, another system of management operated among the prisoners themselves. Military hierarchies were preserved among POWs, who remained under the command of the most senior officers of their own force. The Japanese authorities would also select as commander of the prisoners one officer from among the Allied inmates, who might or might not be the highest ranking officer across all the national forces represented in the camp (Flower 1996, 245). In internment camps, a leadership c­ ommittee might be appointed by the Japanese commander or chosen by the detainees themselves, sometimes through the means of elections (Archer 2004, 74, 83, 84; Van den Heuvel 2008, 196; Yap 2012, 340). Senior Allied Officers liaised with the Japanese staff about conditions for prisoners, work duties and other matters. They also organized the day-to-day life of the detainees, thus relieving the Japanese staff of the need to devote manpower to these tasks. In some cases, they performed the crucial task of organizing and supervising work parties, and of selecting which prisoners were too sick to work (Beaumont 1988, 143–144). Co-operation with the enemy in sustaining the life of the camps sometimes extended into fraternization, and, as Flower observes, the dividing line between cooperation and collaboration was narrow (Flower 1996, 244–245). The British commander at Kinsayok in Thailand played bridge until late at night with Japanese camp staff (Flower 1996, 246). A senior Australian medical officer wrote dismissively of him in his diary: ‘He co-operates with the Nipponese’. But in an indication of the difficulty of distinguishing between collaboration and useful negotiation, he ­a fterwards added a footnote: ‘Later I realised that Lt-Col. Lilly was a shy, dedicated man, ­experienced in business dealings with the Japanese’ (Dunlop 1986, 325). The Allied commander at Chungkai, also in Thailand, went to dinner parties and played poker with his captors, in the belief that many concessions for the prisoners in the form of food, medical

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supplies and an increase in paid jobs around the camp resulted from such engagement with the enemy (Flower 1996, 246).

The Problem of Discipline Some key incidents of Allied complicity in the mistreatment of prisoners in camps arose from the need to discipline POWs and civilian internees. Discipline was a major issue in camp management, especially after May 1942, when the Japanese Army Ministry announced that all white POWs would be made to work (‘Furyo shori yōryō’ 1942). The decision that military prisoners would work meant that discipline would be crucial, and the lack of infrastructure in occupied territories meant that some groups would be situated in areas that were difficult to supply. Regimes of hard labour, when combined with shortages of food and medicine, weakened prisoners and made them vulnerable to illness and injury. The Japanese military’s ambitious war plans meant that sick prisoners were forced to work, making them sicker and killing some of them. The work issue was a key element that distinguished POWs in Japanese custody from civilian internees. Most internees were women, children and old men. Some internees did hard physical work, but most did not. Few did arduous or prolonged labour apart from men who had first been reclassified as POWs, mainly on the grounds that they had joined colonial militias immediately before the Japanese invasion (Swedish Legation 1945). For the captors, maintaining discipline among the prisoners in both POW and internment camps was a crucial goal because it allowed camps to be run with a minimal number of staff, avoided attracting negative attention from regional superiors, and made it more likely that work projects would achieve the required rate of progress. Maintaining discipline was equally important, however, to the leaders among the detainees. Equitable distribution of resources helped to keep prisoners as healthy and free of injury as possible. It also minimized tension within the prisoner population and thus reduced the risk of intervention by the Japanese camp staff. It was therefore necessary to ensure that prisoners remained orderly and obeyed the commands of their leaders. As Lt Col William Scott, the senior officer at the camp on Hainan island off the coast of southern China, told his officers: ‘Crimes [among prisoners] had to be stopped at once and the type of man who would not respond to appeals for honesty and decency must be ruled by fear’ (Beaumont 1988, 180). The stealing of food was the major problem. Detainees stole food from each other, from camp gardens and from common stores. Especially when food was in critically short supply, it was imperative for the prisoners’ leaders to suppress stealing. On Hainan island, Australian prisoners distrusted Scott’s methods of dealing with offenders, but informal leaders nevertheless formed their own ‘vigilance committee’ to punish fellow prisoners for stealing (Beaumont 1988, 184). Even the smuggling of goods or messages into a camp was dangerous: it tended to promote tension because it benefited some prisoners over others, and there would also be trouble if the Japanese camp staff found out (Van den Heuvel 2008, 203). And if prisoners attempted to escape or otherwise disrupted the smooth running of the camp, the Japanese camp staff might implement collective punishment of a wider group of inmates, or even of the whole camp population, to discourage others from attempting similar misdemeanours. Leaders among the detainees in POW and internment camps usually managed to maintain order. But some prisoners were particularly recalcitrant, and some leaders were less effective than others. Inevitably, situations arose that authority figures among the prisoners could not handle.

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The image of prisoners confined in small cages and exposed to the elements as a p­ unishment for indiscipline in POW camps has become a symbol of Japanese cruelty. In at least one case, however, the cage was not instigated by the Japanese. On the island of Ambon in the Netherlands Indies, the cage was originally erected in the late stages of the war at the instigation of the camp’s Australian senior officer, apparently with the support of other officers. At a time of acute food shortage, indiscipline in the camp posed a serious threat. The Australian officer had attempted by various means to stop prisoners stealing food from gardens and camp stores but had been unsuccessful. More conventional methods of punishment were unavailable, not feasible, or had proven ineffective—for example, reducing rations, increasing work duties, imposing fines or reducing rank. The officer first asked the Japanese camp staff to let him use a guardroom for disciplinary purposes, but he was refused. The Japanese staff instead directed him to build a different means of detaining prisoners: an open cage about two metres square. Originally the cage had no roof. Later it was enclosed to provide protection from rain. Prisoners were held for one or more nights in the cage, usually for stealing food. After a time, the Japanese camp staff took over use of the cage, which was much feared and hated among the prisoners (Beaumont 1988, 146–148; Maynard 2014, ix–xii, 175–180). After the war, many survivors of the Ambon camp denied that indiscipline had ever been a problem, and some former Australian officers either denied completely that the cage had existed or else claimed that the Japanese had invented it. On the other hand, an official inquiry into the Australian administration of the camp, held immediately after the war, recognized that the Australian commanding officer had instigated the use of the cage (Beaumont 1988, 147, 224–226; Maynard 2014, 178). At Nakhon Pathom in Thailand in 1945, the Australian Chief Medical Officer was granted permission by the Japanese camp authorities to create a prison within the camp to discipline POWs, which was guarded by Allied prisoners. At Muntok, on Bangka Island in Sumatra, civilian internees set aside a special room to detain men who had been caught stealing (Beaumont 1988, 148). At Camp Bangkong on the island of Java, the civilian internees’ Dutch leaders and the Japanese camp staff worked together to deal with smugglers, passing apprehended smugglers back and forth between them for punishment. In one case, the guards caught a smuggler and sentenced him to fourteen days in prison; they then handed him over to Dutch leaders, who secured him in an improvised holding cell (Van den Heuvel 2008, 203). In some instances, evidence suggesting that Allied officers had colluded in war crimes was suppressed. On Hainan island in 1943, Scott, the Australian commanding officer, handed over a number of men to the Japanese camp staff for punishment after the prisoners had been found stealing or refusing to obey orders from their own officers. Some were made to stand to attention all day and others were given electric shocks; one was very severely beaten by Japanese camp staff (Beaumont 1988, 180–182). After the war, Australian war crimes investigators sought evidence about Japanese atrocities at the Hainan camp from liberated prisoners following their return to Australia. A sergeant from Sydney provided information in an interview, but thereafter repeatedly ignored requests to sign an affidavit, to the point where investigators gave up on him. A military investigator noted that before making his statement, the sergeant had said that he wanted to mention the actions of two Australian officers at the camp. As the investigator reported, ‘This Area [i.e., military office] would not agree to such action as it affected the reputation of the Officers and condoned the action of the Japanese’. The investigator concluded that the authorities’ refusal to include this aspect of the sergeant’s evidence was the reason he declined to co-operate in the end (Area Officer, Area 53C 1947). 114

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At a POW camp in Niigata, in Japan, some prisoners alleged that the senior officer, the American Major Francis K. Fellows, had mistreated fellow POWs and turned them over to Japanese camp staff. A 1948 U.S. war crimes trial in Yokohama went to great lengths to conceal these allegations, a cover-up that had serious legal consequences. One of the Japanese commanders of the Niigata camp, First Lieutenant Katō Tetsutarō, was convicted of the murder of an American prisoner who had attempted to escape, and the mistreatment of other prisoners. He was sentenced to death, but upon review of his death sentence, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, took the highly unusual action of ordering a retrial, on the grounds that there had been a major procedural error in Katō’s trial. Katō’s defence had attempted to introduce a document hundreds of pages long about conditions in the Niigata camp, but this document had been classified as secret and had not been read in open court; the relevant parts were heard in a closed session with only U.S. military personnel present, and even the defendant was not permitted to read them. The confidential document consisted of an official U.S. Army report, and it appears to have been suppressed because it contained affidavits by several former POWs implicating Major Fellows in the serious mistreatment of his fellow prisoners. On the basis that the defendant had been disadvantaged by not seeing the confidential file, Katō was retried and sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence that was immediately reduced to thirty years (Wilson 2015). The American prisoner who had been killed after escaping from the Niigata camp, Frank Spears, had a long history of indiscipline. According to Katō, Spears had not only been habitually insubordinate to his own commanding officer but had also threatened to bring a legal action against Fellows after the war because of his mistreatment of other prisoners. Katō claimed that Fellows had given up on the troublesome prisoner and now wanted the Japanese military to deal with him, and that Fellows had even implied that Katō should kill Spears. Katō’s defence maintained that the confidential document confirmed Katō’s claims about Fellows, and that affidavits in the document also indicated that Fellows had previously turned over another American prisoner to a previous camp commander. That prisoner had twice been caught stealing; on both occasions, after Fellows had handed him over, Japanese camp staff had tied him to a post in freezing weather while he was wearing summer uniform. The second time he was left there for several days and died as a result of his punishment (Wilson 2015, 96–97). The claims about Fellows must be treated with caution because they were made by the defence in an attempt to protect the defendant from punishment. Somewhat later, however, a U.S. war crimes prosecutor confirmed that Fellows had been investigated by American authorities after complaints by other prisoners and had ‘narrowly escaped prosecution because of his actions toward fellow POW[s]’ (Hagen, ‘Memo’ 1949).

Dealing with Sick Prisoners The treatment of sick prisoners was an especially sensitive matter in POW camps, p­ articularly those associated with work projects. Under pressure to meet unrealistic schedules for completion of the projects, Japanese camp staff often forced sick prisoners to work, sometimes on the assumption that the prisoners were not as sick as their leaders and medical officers claimed. Allied officers who assigned men to work parties were in an impossible position. They risked Japanese retaliation against all the prisoners if they failed to provide the number of men the Japanese camp staff required, but they also risked accusations of complicity from their own men if they decided for themselves who was fit enough for labour. In a post-war inquiry set up by the Australian army, two American POWs from the Tan Toey camp on Ambon island accused Australian officers of what amounted to collaboration with 115

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the Japanese in forcing sick men to work. The inquiry exonerated the officers of this charge. Some Australian POWs from Tan Toey, however, also complained that Australian officers had allowed very ill men to be sent out to work (Beaumont 1988, 144). A notable allegation of shared complicity in an action that was later deemed to be a war crime concerns the killing in 1943 of thirty sick Chinese prisoners of the Japanese army in the Rabaul region, on the island of New Britain, off New Guinea. In an Australian military trial in 1946, nine members of the Japanese military were held responsible for these deaths, which had occurred on two separate days. The only defendant who admitted to carrying out the murders, however, claimed that the prisoners had been shot in mercy killings, with the cooperation of other Chinese prisoners and even at the instigation of a Chinese officer (Trial of Matsushima 1946). In 1943, there were about 800 Chinese prisoners in Rabaul according to records from this trial. Originally captured in China, the prisoners had been brought to the Rabaul area by the Japanese military and assembled into large labour gangs to work on military projects (Totani 2016, 268–274). The Japanese military used civilian employees, some of whom were Taiwanese colonial subjects, to control the labour gangs. Relations between the Taiwanese subjects of the Japanese empire, employed by the Japanese army, and prisoners from mainland China, a region at war with Japan, were often tense. Conditions in New Guinea were very harsh, and the prisoners suffered from tropical ulcers, dysentery, malaria and malnutrition. Many of them were extremely ill. In the 1946 trial, two ethnic Japanese soldiers and seven Taiwanese labourers were prosecuted for the murder of the thirty prisoners. According to oral evidence given by three Chinese officers and written statements provided by another eleven Chinese witnesses, the accused men had compelled Chinese prisoners to dig mass graves and had then forced the sick prisoners into the graves and shot them. All the defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. The military authority who had to confirm the death sentences, however, expressed grave doubt about the guilt of the Taiwanese civilian employees, and five of them later had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment (Trial of Matsushima 1946). In court there was no dispute about the fact that the prisoners had been killed, though only one of the defendants, the Japanese Corporal Aizawa Harumoto, admitted to ­having carried out the shootings. All the Taiwanese defendants completely denied responsibility, claiming that the Chinese former prisoners had implicated them because they disliked Taiwanese people on principle. In the stronger words of the defence lawyer, the prosecution witnesses had ‘coloured the occurrence in their passionate hatred [of the Taiwanese d­ efendants]’ (Trial of Matsushima 1946, digital 118). Aizawa, too, said that he had acted alone in killing the prisoners, though Chinese witnesses stated that all the accused had participated. Aizawa, however, believed that he had committed no crime, as he had shot the prisoners on the direct order of a superior, and, further, the killing of the prisoners had been a reasonable act under the circumstances. Aizawa stated that in March 1943, the month in which the killings took place, the Japanese soldiers in Rabaul had received an order to prepare to move the prisoners. Some were clearly too sick to be moved, and, according to Aizawa, a Chinese officer, Major Lee, went to Aizawa’s superior. Major Lee told the commander that he could not have the heart to see dying Chinese labourers, that it was better for them and more human [sic] to be killed by Japanese as [they] were destined to die, and that he wanted [the commander] to kill them [all?].

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The Japanese commander then ordered Aizawa to kill the prisoners (Statement by Corporal Ayizawa [sic] 1946, digital 134). Aizawa went on to claim that other Chinese prisoners had willingly helped to dig the graves, carried the sick prisoners to the location and otherwise co-operated in the shootings. He also claimed that such actions were not unique to Rabaul: the Japanese military too, he said, had killed seriously ill or wounded soldiers on its own side in extreme circumstances. Aizawa cited the Guadalcanal campaign of 1942–1943 and the Japanese retreat under battle conditions in January 1944 from the Cape Gloucester region towards Rabaul in New Britain (Statement by Corporal Ayizawa 1946). Starvation and disease had been widespread among Japanese troops in both cases (Costello 1981, 351, 402). As Aizawa said in his petition to the authorities against his conviction and sentence, the killings were ‘carried out under the keen cooperation between Chinese and Japanese party concerned and … at that time it was accepted as a proper conduct’. If he stood accused, he said, so should be the Chinese prisoners who took part (Petition by Corporal Ayizawa [sic] Harumoto 1946, digital 20). Strongly conflicting evidence presented in this trial makes it difficult to be sure about what had happened at Rabaul. Scattered throughout the testimony, however, is the suggestion of a working relationship between the Japanese and Chinese authorities within the camp, evidence that was swept aside by the Chinese witnesses and judges. Such evidence, if true, does not exculpate the Japanese military for its treatment of POWs in Rabaul. But it does suggest that Chinese commanders and other prisoners may have been complicit in killing the sick Chinese POWs, a measure that was taken to end the suffering of critically ill prisoners and at the same time to try to maintain reasonable relations between the two sides and to deal with the circumstances thrust upon them by military orders.

Conclusion These examples of prisoners’ complicity in Japanese actions that Allied courts identified as war crimes blur the usual understanding of what constituted mistreatment of prisoners and when it might have been justified. Soldiers are routinely required to commit acts of violence in wartime. Those acts become war crimes only if they are judged to have been unnecessary, that is, not warranted by military goals or by the circumstances of the time. Many authorities, for instance, excuse the killing of civilians in aerial bombardment on the grounds of military necessity. The circumstances of captivity created especially complex dynamics between enemy forces, in which captives and captors might need to cooperate. Cooperation was sometimes a matter of mutual benefit in difficult conditions; even then, there was acute sensitivity after the war over the possibility that cooperation had strayed into collaboration. No wonder that evidence of cooperation was routinely suppressed in post-war trials and expunged from the publicly acknowledged collective memory of former prisoners. After the end of the Second World War, it was thus inconvenient and undesirable to admit that Allied prisoners had cooperated with their Japanese captors in actions that were then classed as war crimes. Cooperation with the enemy in crimes committed in detention camps no longer seemed defensible, and, moreover, it was relatively easily ignored because the actions in question had generally been transient and few witnesses were willing to come forward. Complicity in crimes in camps was much less conspicuous than working for the enemy, joining an enemy military or engaging in other acts of collaboration in occupied territories. Though the complicity of fellow detainees lived on in the memories of survivors, these betrayals were quickly wiped from the public record.

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Archival Sources Area Officer – Area 53C, ‘War Crimes Investigation NX65948 Sgt LEECH, R. J.’, 5 September 1947, SP459/1 573/1/689, National Archives of Australia, Sydney. ‘Furyo shori yōryō’, attached to Heitan sōkanbu yori Nanpōgun e tsūchō, “Nanpō ni okeru furyo no shori yōryō no ken” (5 May 1942), in Hayashi Eidai (ed.), Senji gaikokujin kyōsei renkō kankei shiryōshū, Vol. 1 (Tōkyō: Akashi shoten, 1990), 85–86. Hagen, George T., ‘Memo re Tetsutaro KATO’, 24 August 1949, RG331, SCAP Legal Section, Administrative Section, POW 201 file 1945–52, Box 1174, Kasama to Kawaguchi, folder: Kato, Tetsutaro, (U.S) National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD. Petition by Corporal Ayizawa [sic] Harumoto, in Trial of Matsushima Tozaburo and 8 Others, Rabaul, 10–16 April 1946, National Archives of Australia, A471.80915. Statement by Corporal Ayizawa [sic] Harumoto, in Trial of Matsushima Tozaburo and 8 Others, Rabaul, 10–16 April 1946, National Archives of Australia, A471.80915. Swedish Legation, Tokyo, ‘Re Transfer of Civilian Internees in Java to War Prisoner Camps’, 20 April 1945, Buitenlandse Zaken/Code-Archief 45–54, 2.05.117, inv. nr. 3461, Nationaal Archief, The Hague. Trial of Matsushima Tozaburo and 8 Others, Rabaul, 10–16 April 1946, National Archives of Australia, A471.80915.

Other Sources Agoncillo, T. A. (1984) The Burden of Proof: The Vargas-Laurel Collaboration Case. Metro Manila: University of the Philippines Press. Archer, B. (2004) The Internment of Western Civilians Under the Japanese 1941–1945: A Patchwork of Internment. London: Routledge Curzon. Bazyler, M. J. and F. M. Tuerkheimer (2014) Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust. New York: New York University Press. Beaumont, J. (1988) Gull Force: Survival and Leadership in Captivity 1941–1945. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Brook, T. (2005) Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Costello, J. (1981) The Pacific War. London: Collins. Drea, E. J. (2009) Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1853–1945. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Drumbl, M. A. (2016) ‘Victims who victimise’, London Review of International Law, 4: 217–246. Dunlop, E. E. (1986) The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop: Java and the Burma-Thailand Railway 1942–1945. Ringwood: Penguin. Flower, S. J. (1996) ‘Captors and captives on the Burma-Thailand Railway’, in B. Moore and K. Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and their Captives in World War II. Oxford: Berg, 227–252. Heuvel, J. van den (2008) ‘Crime and authority within Dutch communities of internees in Indonesia, 1942–45’, in K. Hack and K. Blackburn (eds), Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia. London: Routledge, 193-209. Kumagai N., trans. by D. Noble (2016) The Comfort Women: Historical, Political, Legal, and Moral Perspectives. Tokyo: International House of Japan. Lingen, K. von and R. Cribb (2017) ‘War crimes trials in Asia: collaboration and complicity in the aftermath of war’, in Kerstin von Lingen (ed), Debating Collaboration and Complicity in War Crimes Trials in Asia, 1945–1956. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-23. Maynard, R. (2014) Ambon: The Truth about One of the Most Brutal POW Camps in World War II and the Triumph of the Aussie Spirit. Sydney: Hachette Australia. Porat, D. (2019) Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. ‘Research Starters: U.S. Military by the Numbers’, The National WWII Museum, New Orleans. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 15 June 2022). Tanaka, Y. (2001) Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the U.S. Occupation. London: Routledge.

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Shared Complicity in War Crimes Totani, Y. (2016), ‘Crimes against Asians in command responsibility trials’, in Georgina Fitzpatrick, T. McCormack and N. Morris (eds), Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945–51. Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 266-290. Wilson, S. (2015) ‘War criminals in the post-war world: the case of Katō Tetsutarō’, War in History, 22: 87–110. Wilson, S. (2022) ‘Detention camps in the Japanese empire, 1941–1945’, in Robert Cribb, Christina Twomey and Sandra Wilson (eds), Detention Camps in Asia: The Conditions of Confinement in Modern Asian History. Leiden: Brill, 199–218. Wilson, S., R. Cribb, B. Trefalt and D. Aszkielowicz (2017) Japanese War Criminals: The Politics of Justice after the Second World War. New York: Columbia University Press. Wolf, R. (2017) ‘Judgement in the grey zone: the Third Auschwitz (Kapo) Trial in Frankfurt 1968’, Journal of Genocide Research, 9: 617–635. Xia, Y. (2017) Down with Hanjian: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Yap, F. (2012) ‘Prisoners of war and civilian internees of the Japanese in British Asia: the similarities and contrasts of experience’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47: 317–346.

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11 TRAUMA IN JAPAN’S HOPE David Leheny

Kobayashi Yumi’s chronicle of how she became a politician does not directly invoke ‘trauma’ but the book’s dustjacket and advertisements promoting the book do (Kobayashi 2020). Kobayashi, a young local council member in Tokyo’s Suginami Ward, briefly made national news in 2016 when she described gay, lesbian, and bisexual people ‘as exercising a matter of personal choice,’ distinguishing them from transsexual people who, she argued, were ‘disabled’ (Otake 2016). Her relatively unheralded 2020 book Kimigayo o utaenakatta watashi, seijika o mezashita wake (The Reason Why I, Who Couldn’t Sing ‘Kimigayo,’ Decided to Be a Politician) takes aim at a favourite bête noire among the Japanese Right: Japan’s strongly left-leaning public teachers’ union, members of which for years had struggled to prevent the compulsory singing of the country’s belatedly official national anthem (Kimigayo) because of its putative connection to emperor worship (see e.g. Aspinall and Cave 2001). In her ­telling, being stuck in classrooms with the mercilessly progressive scolds had led ‘hopes for the future to disappear from children’s hearts’ (Kobayashi 2020, 25). Her depictions of teachers who seem more committed to ruining children’s dreams—one female teacher insists on telling the school-age heroine that marrying your one true love is an unrealistic fantasy—than to promoting left-wing dogma provide a coherent, if not terribly convincing, e­ xplanation for her decision to enter politics as a conservative. Her publisher WAC, which focuses nearly exclusively on right-leaning books and magazines, makes the connections even more explicit, invoking trauma as the central element of this kind of superhero’s origin story. ‘The red-leaning, biased education from the Japan Teachers’ Union,’ reads the description on the publisher’s website, ‘wouldn’t let me sing the Kimigayo or have desires and dreams—and that’s why I became a conservative politician, to break free from that trauma!’ (WAC n.d.). ‘Trauma’ is not a term widely used by Japanese conservatives, appearing a bit forlornly only in a handful of other places, for example, on the publisher WAC’s website, itself a rich source of highly evocative vocabulary. After all, to the extent that trauma is a shared clinical term, it implies the requirement for therapeutic interventions that can help a victim ­overcome the lasting consequences of a prior mental scar and restore emotional health. When viewed in a more political vein, it implies subjectification, the recognition of often marginalized groups in part because of the acknowledgement of their otherwise contested humanity and specific needs. Neither is an entirely comfortable position for conservative voices even though they typically emphasize, as Kobayashi does in her book, the hope that 120

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young Japanese will overcome powerful, self-abnegating myths that have hindered the country’s ability to play the leading role it should. From this perspective, they are depicted as an afflicted community that needs to cast off the shackles that have prevented them from seeing themselves as they ought to be. That said, Kobayashi and WAC get an important element right in their depiction of her trauma; it fits within a narrative. Her story—which seems to be more about nursing and then indirectly acting on a long-term grudge than facing an unutterable, long-suppressed blow with lasting psychic consequences—does not take the form that theorists of trauma, from Dominick LaCapra (2016) to Cathy Caruth (1996), typically recognize (see the Introduction in this book). It is, however, undeniably a story, and in that it points to one of the areas in which trauma both explicitly and implicitly has become embedded in Japanese social and political debate. If trauma acts largely through a narrative form, in which a subject is allowed or encouraged to confront a painful episode from the past in order to transcend or to partly overcome its effects, we see a number of ways in which contemporary Japan grapples with related claims and representations. This chapter examines the politics of trauma in contemporary Japanese social debate, though with a primary focus on what it means to label something as traumatic or to avoid doing so even while relying on similar psychoanalytic and narrative appeals. After all, while trauma remains relatively uncommon as a diagnosis of communities (rather than of individuals), observers have commonly depicted the country as having endured blows leading to a damaging emotional and psychic closure, requiring a kind of national therapeutic ­intervention. And yet calling it trauma would raise questions about national agency and strength, while also begging one about how the trauma was caused.

Emotion, Narrative, Trauma Inspired in part by new developments in cognitive neuroscience, over the past two decades, political scientists have shown an increasing interest in the roles of emotion in politics. Much of this work has aimed to connect emotional stimuli and states to political behaviour, and therefore to the strategic uses of emotion by political actors (see, e.g., Albertson and Gadarian 2015). Other researchers have focused on the communicative and social aspects of emotion, and particularly the ways in which collective emotions are organized and expressed domestically and internationally, so that ‘we’ Americans/Japanese/Germans/women/young people can effectively be described as feeling something together: pride, fear, anger, remorse, outrage, or the like (see, e.g., Hall 2015; Ross 2013). Because this involves not just actual emotions but also specific political representations of them, a number of these scholars have turned to theories of representation to grasp what is being represented, how, and why. Trauma is in many ways central to this endeavour. As anthropologists like Didier Fassin have noted, recognition of a community’s trauma is part of the process of acknowledging them as political subjects (Fassin 2008). Political scientists at the forefront of studies of emotion have focused in part on how the identification and communication of shared traumas help to define the boundaries of a nation or other community. One of the key figures in the study of emotion in international relations, Emma Hutchison, shows, for example, how sensitivity to narrative formulation allows communities to interrogate the aftermath of an event, for example the 2005 Bali bombing, which was rendered in Australia as a national trauma despite it having taken place in a private establishment in another country (Hutchison 2010). In this sense, trauma is an inherently political topic in part because narratives about a community’s or nation’s background frequently emphasize shared shocks, harm, 121

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or challenges that emotionally bind its people and provide the foundation for a subsequent sense of common purpose. Trauma begets community less in the actual event and more in the production of a common story that emphasizes a collective memory through which members can interpret contemporary events and challenges. This is, of course, central to historiographical and political debates about trauma and what it means. Dominick LaCapra (2016), whose research on the Holocaust has been central to work on trauma and history, recognizes and argues for the legitimacy of trauma in the construction of collective identity, though he also seems to believe there needs to be some (unstated) limits on the circumstances that can be ethically depicted as collective traumas; ‘critically tested memory’ would need to be central to the depiction to avoid unsustainable stretching of the concept. The legal scholar Noa Ben-Asher (2020), for example, argues that social and cultural trauma are now sufficiently well recognized in American political and social debate, as a consequence of structural factors that have differential effects across ­communities, that it has become a central element of recent legislation and legal cases. The risk, they suggest, is that a focus on trauma emphasizes the weakness of the community and its members, denying their agency in pushing for necessary political change. Political scientists interested in emotion might gravitate toward trauma as a foundational element of community formation and collective interest but would be well-advised to consider the implications of doing so. Inseparable from narrative and rendered analytically legitimate in part through its putative connection to psychological processes, trauma achieves much of its power in identity formation from normative considerations about who has been wronged and how.

Recognizing Trauma in Japan Japan is, of course, no stranger to these processes by which traumas are rendered not just as collectively but as nearly defining aspects of the national community. The key trauma in this regard, of course, would be the one to which Japan can uniquely lay claim: two of its cities incinerated, with perhaps more than 200,000 people killed and countless more injured, sickened, or rendered homeless (Wellerstein 2020). Numerous factors—ranging from the postwar security alliance with the unapologetic US government that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the left-leaning political views of postwar leaders particularly Nagasaki, to the questions about whether and how to commemorate the Korean labourers killed in what have often been depicted as a singularly Japanese tragedy—have complicated public memories surrounding the bombings (see especially Yoneyama 1999). These, however, scarcely affect the key thrust of public commemorations or of field trips to the Hiroshima Peace Museum that represent a common experience for most Japanese schoolchildren. Several postwar events have also emerged, often problematically for the specific people or localities damaged, as nationally represented traumas, from small-scale calamities like the 2001 sinking of fisheries training boat by a US nuclear submarine or an epochal catastrophe like the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and nuclear disaster (Leheny 2018). In an important contribution to debates about war memory, history, and responsibility, the sociologist Kiyoteru Tsutsui (2009) refers to Japan’s ‘perpetrator’s trauma.’ For Tsutsui, this allows analysis of the stages through which the Japanese government and the public as a whole have encountered and dealt with increasing pressure, generated in part by shifts in global political power as well as the consolidation of global human rights norms, to acknowledge and to atone for the actions of the Japanese government during the colonial era and Second World War. Shifting chronologically from ‘denial’ to forms of acknowledgement, 122

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displacement, and contextualization, war memories in Japan become rendered as trauma in part because the postwar centrality of Japan’s experience as not just a defeated nation but one uniquely victimized by atomic weapons made it particularly difficult to acknowledge the trauma that Japan visited on others. In doing so, Tsutsui implicitly draws attention to the political complexities surrounding the use of the word ‘trauma.’ However, some scholars and professionals in the therapeutic community have identified it broadly, including references ranging to not only physical harm but also psychological or emotional threats to oneself or loved ones, or even to almost any event that leaves lasting psychological damage. The American Psychiatric Association itself has sponsored debates on the definition, including calls to broaden definitions to take account of a variety of potential cultural differences (Brown 2008). Indeed, its place in political debates about harm and responsibility is now so central that clinicians with a focus on social justice have proposed defining trauma in ways that refer specifically to marginalized people and communities (e.g. Mental Health America n.d.). Surely it is noteworthy that while numerous observers have reflected on social and economic challenges for working-class white men in the United States that led them to embrace a laughable game-show host as their president (e.g. Rosenthal 2016), only rarely are these challenges depicted as collective trauma. The term, however, is far more widely used to describe the experience of women, migrants, people of colour, and the LGBT community during the Trump candidacy and presidency (e.g. Holloway 2020). And so, Tsutsui’s use of the term in his paper seems counterintuitive, not because he applies a psychological term to a political process but rather because the political process seems to focus on Japan as a perpetrator of wartime violence rather than on the victims who have become especially central to trauma studies shaped in part by concerns about and for social justice. This tendency in the use of ‘trauma’ exists, if even more narrowly, in Japanese contexts as well. Scholars have applied the concept of historical trauma to indigenous people and others facing racial or gendered discrimination (e.g. Kitahara 2021; Takei 2013), but in public and administrative settings, the word is typically used to emphasize specific, individual, and widely acknowledged types of vulnerabilities. In Diet debates, for example, it is occasionally used almost in a conversational sense describing an intense moment of professional anguish, like diplomat Miyake Kunihiko’s reference to his own moment of trauma under the stress of trying to evacuate Japanese citizens from wartime Iraq (Kokkai gijiroku 2013, 2). On a few occasions, conservatives, like the short-lived Your Party’s Tanaka Shigeru, might refer to the trauma for the Japanese of the devastating defeat in the Second World War that led to lost pride in the nation, despite the country’s ‘phoenix-like’ rebirth and economic recovery: ‘I believe it’s our responsibility to reawaken citizens’ pride among our children and grandchildren’ (Kokkai gijiroku 2015, 12). Far more often, however, politically recognized trauma affects specifically women and children, particularly those who are victims of contested, if now widely acknowledged, social problems like bullying, sexual assault, and domestic violence. For example, in a wide-ranging 2019 plenary session of the Lower House, Japan Communist Party member Takahashi Chizuko contributed to a discussion that turned to provisions for care following child abuse, specifically invoking the trauma of victims (Kokkai gijiroku 2019, 16–17).

The Trouble with Trauma The entry of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) into Japanese clinical and administrative debates gives some hint at how logics surrounding trauma, and not just the traumatic 123

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cultural experiences themselves, are culturally constructed. Therapists and psychiatrists were of course aware of PTSD from debates overseas, and particularly from the United States, where the term had developed as an overarching diagnostic approach for Vietnam War veterans. But Japanese advocates for more attention to therapeutic approaches had laboured to bring it into Japan, where for many years the lasting consequences of profound, painful shocks were depicted as ‘traumatic neurosis’ (gaishōsei shinkeishō), a term that suggests even more clearly in Japanese than in English that this is an emotional disorder brought on by an external blow (Goto and Wilson 2003; Shimokibe 2011). Kim Yoshiharu (Kim 2006, 147–148) traces much of the interest in PTSD to the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, which killed more than 6,400 people mostly in Kobe and served as the pivotal event allowing advocates to bring PTSD into mainstream discourse. In part because of the collapse in public faith that many had had in Japanese infrastructure’s ability to withstand temblors, Kim argues, the disaster led to more concern for the care of victims, including in their PTSD symptoms, because of a realization that virtually anyone could be next. A year later, in 1996, when a rebel group took hundreds of hostages at an event at the Japanese ambassador’s home in Lima, Peru, the government initially had no psychological experts to assist with the victims in an early monitoring trip, but subsequently included PTSD specialists sent with the medical team that met and assisted the hostages after their violent liberation (Kim 2006, 148–150). PTSD rapidly became such a deeply embedded concept in Japanese administrative efforts that within a decade it served as a key focus of post-disaster relief in Japan’s development assistance programmes to countries struck by the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, especially in South and Southeast Asia (Leheny 2010). A concept that had barely existed in Japanese debates had, within a decade, become something it could offer and even teach lesser-­developed nations searching for their own best practices to care for victims. This way of telling the story of PTSD in Japan sits, of course, uncomfortably close to a familiar, straightforward narrative of modernization. That is, a number of especially enlightened professionals learn about a new therapeutic development from their Western counterparts and labour to bring it to Japanese officials who then use it, if a bit reluctantly at first, to provide relief to unfortunate victims. Japan, that great communicator of Western knowledge to the East, then embeds these practices in its own aid efforts for its Asian neighbours. But of course, the story is far more complex than that in large part because knowledge itself is culturally constructed. Even if its acknowledgement communicates something deeply human about the impulses to help those who have suffered terrible blows, it remains a controversial concept in part because critics from within the psychiatric community have argued it is too blunt, general, or unfocused a diagnosis for a wide array of symptoms that might be resolved with very different forms of therapeutic intervention (for an overview of one set of debates, see Marshall, Spitzer and Liebowitz 1999). Indeed, it is largely the impulse behind the diagnosis of PTSD that helps to explain how and why it has become such a widely valued concept. The medical anthropologist Joshua Breslau writes: PTSD is like a narrative tool that seamlessly connects observable psychiatric symptoms with particular antecedent events through the constitutive medium of memory. The disorder thus provides for expression of psychological suffering in terms that are consistent with the chartering motivation of much work in international health: direct response to the impact of particular events, be they natural disasters, wars, or other humanitarian crises. The narrative connection between events in the world and suffering inside 124

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individuals gives this disorder a special ability to stand as hard evidence of s­uffering backed with the credibility of medical science. (Breslau 2004, 116) Breslau, who has researched the spread of PTSD in Japanese social and cultural debate, is well aware that taking a stance that critically interrogates the concept of PTSD runs the risk of seeming callous to the victims of traumatic events. But because he recognizes that discussions of PTSD often mirror moral and political judgements—in which the diagnosis is reserved for the innocent victims of some kind of event, and not extended to perpetrators who might also exhibit similar symptoms post facto—his work signals the importance of approaching the topic with some distance if it is to have any analytical validity at all. And this is where its deepening and development in Japanese social and political discourse conveys powerful lessons about how events are imagined. As Kim (2006), who himself attended to victims of the Lima hostage incident, points out, attention to PTSD in Japan started with a natural disaster, moved to victims of terrorist incidents, and then became more widespread in debates about domestic violence and child abuse. In each of these cases, the victims themselves are understood to be blameless, with the assumption of PTSD as a ­consequence becoming nearly a diagnostic marker of obvious unfairness. One of Japan’s leading specialists on trauma, the psychiatry professor Miyaji Naoko, ­covers the spread of trauma in Japanese discussions in a popular shinsho, a short book from the major publisher Iwanami aimed at a wide audience. Miyaji’s depiction of the development of trauma as a distinctive category in Japan largely follows the pattern Kim identifies for PTSD: a focus on children, on victims of natural disaster and war crimes, on women as victims of domestic and sexual violence, and then more broadly of structural violence against women. She then moves into a discussion of trauma and ‘minorities,’ but in doing so focuses especially on Black and other communities in the United States, where of course claims about trauma have become increasingly salient elements of political communication, identification and activism. Starting with a focus on the psychiatric dimensions of trauma, Miyaji argues that trauma should be understood capaciously and openly, with attention to the social and cultural dimensions that underpin psychic blows to wider and larger communities (Miyaji 2013). In a subsequent and more scholarly account, however, Miyaji steers clear of broad community claims about trauma and instead argues that while women are, by dint of structural dimensions, perhaps more likely to be victims of certain forms of trauma, it is important to include men as potential victims as well (Miyaji 2020). Miyaji’s own writing reflects her disciplinary training, of course, but the limited application, a small number of scholars like Kitajima and Takei notwithstanding, of ‘trauma’ outside of individual victims of violence or damage (that might be partly structural) suggests that it has not become the expansive approach in theory or practice that it has in, for example, the United States.

Unstated Trauma And yet much of the rhetoric surrounding Japan’s political scene over the past two decades has proceeded from a logic that bears a strong resemblance to at least some versions of trauma, raising at least the question of why the term has been limited in its use. Indeed, a substantial amount of public and even scholarly discourse in Japan since the collapse of the 1980s ‘bubble economy’ has proceeded from the notion that the country and particularly its younger citizens have been dealt a psychological blow for which they need some kind of quasi-therapeutic help. For many conservatives, like Kobayashi, another culprit has been a 125

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nearly obsessive set of demands from leftists within Japan and from critics overseas that the country continue atoning for its wartime militarism and colonialism. In his highly anticipated, much-discussed comments on the seventieth anniversary of the end of Second World War, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō himself famously engaged this issue by discussing the burden that Japan’s war guilt (and, implicitly, the constant reminders of it) had placed on younger Japanese, in a manner resembling Tsutsui’s focus on ‘perpetrators’ trauma’: In Japan, the postwar generations now exceed eighty per cent of its population. We must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize. Still, even so, we Japanese, across generations, must squarely face the history of the past. We have the responsibility to inherit the past, in all humbleness, and pass it on to the future. (Abe 2015) For the most part, apologies are not particularly time-consuming, and if they require energy and focus, that is less because of the act of the apology than because of the kind of reflection and commitment to learn from one’s transgressions to which Abe committed the country. That is, the burden he claimed to want to remove from subsequent generations was really the emotional one: not the intellectual need to understand the past and to learn from it in considering future behavior, but rather the continued feeling of a need to apologize. Japanese, to this point, had been pressed into a constant position of global subordination and made to apologize for actions that most right-wingers considered exaggerated, overblown, or treated wrongly as if they were far worse than what Japan’s adversaries were doing in the same war. The late Mr. Abe frequently framed public policy initiatives and political interventions around the emotional needs of Japanese citizens, particularly young people. Some of this seemed consistent with globally relevant scripts. While the Japanese public, even before the onset of COVID-19, had shown markedly mixed feelings on Abe’s tireless efforts to lure the Olympics to Japan, he himself emphasized that one of their most important contributions was the way that the success of the athletes and the Games would bring hope to the people of Japan, particularly as the ‘reconstruction’ Olympics were ostensibly designed to help the Tōhoku region following the 2011 triple disaster (see, e.g., Prime Minister’s Office 2020). In defending his decision to hold the Games despite the widespread anxiety and even opposition to them, Abe’s successor, Suga Yoshihide, pointed to the need to support the ‘dreams and the hearts’ of children and young people to face the future (NHK 2021). This is, of course, boilerplate stuff for public pronouncements about the Olympics, which can hardly be called out by the host nation as a deeply corrupt enterprise plagued by inevitable mountains of scandal and accompanied always by nationalist chest-beating about the performances of one’s own athletes. But one could do it without implying that children face impediments to their ability to dream about the future, or at least the kind of impediments that might be allayed through a two-week-long collection of races, fights, and competitive artistic performances. On the occasion of his summit with President Barack Obama in 2015, Abe became the first Japanese prime minister to deliver an address to a joint session of the US Congress. Entitled ‘Toward an Alliance of Hope,’ Abe’s speech laid out a substantive plan to cooperate more deeply with the United States, primarily in strategical alignment that seems unmistakably to be against China despite not directly referring to it. Abe couched the speech in terms of personal and national stories about what America means to him: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the finest asset the U.S. has to give to the world was hope, is hope, will be, and must always be hope’ 126

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(Abe 2015). This might seem merely a smart rhetorical play when dealing with a ­president who had adopted ‘Hope,’ as had Bill Clinton before him, as a campaign theme. But Abe’s promotion of hope remained a central theme throughout his entire second tenure, nearly eight years, as prime minister. Late in that stretch, Abe delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in which he described what Japan was like when he entered office in 2012: At that time in my country, we saw a tall wall, on which many ‘saw the writing,’ ­thinking that Japan was doomed. Japan was losing population. The population was ageing. Japan could NOT grow….Or so the argument went. It was a wall of despair, a wall of Japan pessimism. (Abe 2019) This speech, ‘Toward a New Era of [sic] “Hope-Driven Economy,”’ was not entirely inaccurate about the public mood in Japan at that time, though Abe avoided any reference to the single event that likely had the greatest impact on public sentiment: the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, with its devastating tsunami and resulting nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Abe, after all, strongly advocated restarting Japan’s nuclear reactors despite lingering ­concerns among many Japanese about their safety. As a typically utopian, largely content-free Davos speech, Abe’s address laid out his commitments to the global environment but mostly in vague terms and without any reference to one of the ongoing implications of one of the world’s most devastating environmental calamities (see Kingston Chapter 15). Instead, the public mood was due to something else, something more nebulous, something about a Japan that had turned inward and had stopped engaging or even trying to engage the world. This particular representation of hope as the remedy for Japan’s problems was not simply a right-wing stance. The Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo—which had morphed from a staunchly leftist institution in the early postwar, crafting research based on the scientific logics associated with Marxian historiography, economics, and sociology, into a source of more typically liberal empirical research—had embarked on an institute-wide study called Kibōgaku, or ‘The Social Sciences of Hope.’1 Inspired originally by the work of labour economist Genda Yūji, the authors in the study series explored the methods for rebuilding hope in areas of declining population and economic prospects, focusing closely on the coastal city of Kamaishi in Iwate prefecture. Tracing the town’s history, its industrial and demographic profiles, the work of its city leaders and labour organizers, as well as the efforts of contemporary civic organizations and social movements, the authors pointed particularly to the networks created in part by younger people who had studied in major cities like Tokyo or Sendai but had returned to Kamaishi and created economic opportunities for themselves and other young people. These ‘weak ties,’ using a term created by the economic sociologist Mark Granovetter, enabled young people to imagine a world outside of the institutional features that had shaped much of postwar Japanese capitalism, including the longterm employment and regional subsidies that had declined in availability with the creation of neoliberal fiscal reforms and the rise of non-regular work patterns following the collapse of Japan’s stock and property bubbles in the early 1990s. That is, the authors firmly recognized the roles of crucial structural and institutional factors in shaping the environments in which younger people could plan for or dream about their futures and aimed to craft ways for those beleaguered young people to exercise some agency in creating new opportunities for themselves and their neighbours. The widely noted University of Tokyo project is important for any number of reasons, growing in its international recognition after Kamaishi itself became one of the cities most 127

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badly damaged in the 2011 tsunami, with more than 1,000 killed from among its 35,000 residents (Kamaishi City, 2018). Perhaps most compelling is the way in which it presented its recommendations, even if based on economic and political research guided in part by a commitment to sociological theory, as rooted in and driven by the emotional needs of its informants and, more broadly, Japanese themselves. That is, the problem facing Japan after two decades of slow economic growth, of looming fiscal problems associated with its declining birth rate, and of limited job opportunities due to structural changes in the Japanese economy as well as its position in global trade regimes is in part the effect that these myriad challenges have had on people’s emotional well-being. In a book opening with a quote from the novelist Murakami Ryū, who had written in one of his books that Japan had lost hope, the solution for Japan would to be about more than simply fixing its public and private institutions that help to move people from education into employment. The problem was that Japan had lost hope and would need to rebuild it. But what produced this hopelessness? After all, whatever its problems—and a glance at any daily Japanese newspaper will immediately summon reference to any number of them— Japan itself is, by global standards, a relatively decent place to live: comparatively wealthy, extremely safe, the world’s longest life spans, minimal infant mortality, exceptionally high literacy, and so forth. Indeed, among many young people, the expression ‘nihonjin to shite umarete yokatta’ (I’m glad to have been born as Japanese) has been sufficiently common to inspire a few news stories revelling in its soft nationalism. This does not make the University of Tokyo scholars wrong to have noted the issues surrounding hope, but it speaks to both a certain generational dimension—it is, of course, largely middle-aged Japanese noting that younger Japanese need hope—and a related logic. The issue is less that younger Japanese are miserable and more that the future of an endless economic miracle that had been anticipated for them, and probably to a lesser degree by them, had disappeared: that Japan was less likely to become a continually growing economic hegemon, admired and respected by other leading powers, and more likely to be a normal advanced industrial nation just like them, with challenges and problems not radically dissimilar to those in the country’s equally complex counterparts (Leheny 2018). Japan’s trauma was not a terrible incident that would need to be confronted through active engagement of memory; it was rather a vanished future that the country seemed condemned to remember.

The Trauma That Must Not Be Named In his annual New Year’s Day address in 2018, the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration, Abe pointed once again to the emotional challenges for Japanese, arguing that his ­economic policies had ameliorated them to some degree but that more work needed to be done—in particular by recalling who the Japanese used to be, before the post-Bubble gloom had set in: Six years ago, Japan was awash in pessimism towards the future….Everything depends on the aspirations and eagerness of us, the Japanese people. It all depends on whether or not we believe that we can change the future and are able to take action, as our ancestors did 150 years ago. (Prime Minister’s Office 2018) If Japan had lost its optimism and could be, through engagement with the past, reminded of the national agency necessary to clear through some emotional blockage, this seems almost 128

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like a paradigmatic expression of a particular form of collective therapy. But herein lies the rub of trauma itself. After all, it remains unclear who did or who could have put Japan in its emotional tailspin other than Japan itself. And so, a real engagement with the past would likely require the kind of ‘critically tested memory’ LaCapra promotes in considering identity and trauma. This kind of reflection, this kind of probing is almost certainly not what Abe or other leaders have in mind; indeed, a critical approach to one’s own memory might be, for political leaders, the most traumatic outcome of all.

Acknowledgement The author thanks Jeff Kingston and Tina Burrett for comments, encouragement, and eagleeyed editing, as well as Satsuki Takahashi for conversations that shaped this piece.

Note 1 In part because of the lingering consequences of the 2011 tsunami, the Kibōgaku researchers have continued to publish works from the project. Its central work, however, remains the 2009 four-volume Kibōgaku (Social Sciences of Hope) set published by the University of Tokyo Press. Their moving and incisive 2015 book ‘Mochiba’ no Kibōgaku, edited by Genda Yūji and Nakamura Naofumi under the auspices of the Institute, traces the relevant legacies of the 2011 disaster (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press).

Works Cited Abe, S. (2015) ‘Statement by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.’ Office of the Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet. 14 August. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 December 2022). Abe, S. (2019) ‘Speech by Prime Minister Abe at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting: Toward a New Era of “Hope-Driven Economy”.’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 19 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 June 2022). Albertson, B. and Gadarian, S.K. (2015) Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aspinall, R and Cave, P. (2001) ‘Lowering the Flag: Democracy, Authority and Rights at Tokorozawa High School,’ Social Science Japan Journal 4(1): 77–93. Ben-Asher, N. (2020) ‘Trauma-Centered Social Justice,’ Tulane Law Review 95: 95–142. Breslau, J. (2004). Cultures of trauma: Anthropological views of posttramautic stress disorder in ­i nternational health. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 28(2) (2004), 113-126. Brown, L. S. (2008) Cultural Competence in Trauma Therapy: Beyond the Flashback. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fassin, D. (2008) ‘The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,’ Cultural Anthropology 23(3): 531–558. Goto, T. and Wilson J.P. (2003) ‘Traumatic Stress Studies in Japan: From Traumatic Neurosis to PTSD,’ Trauma, Violence, and Abuse 4(3): 195–209. Hall, T.H. (2015) Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Holloway, K. (2020) ‘The Trauma of Trump’s Presidency Will Haunt Us,’ The Nation, 2 November. Online. Available HTTP: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-trauma-family-­ separation/> (accessed 30 June 2022). Hutchison, E. (2010). ‘Trauma and the Politics of Emotions: Constituting Identity, Security and Community after the Bali Bombing,’ International Relations 24(1): 65–86.

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David Leheny Kamaishi City. (2018) ‘Messages from Kamaishi – Kamaishi, Iwate.’ Pamphlet. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 June 2022). Kim, Y. (2006) ‘Current Perspectives on Clinical Studies of PTSD in Japan,’ in Kato, N., Kawata, M., and Pitman R.K. (eds.), PTSD: Brain Mechanisms and Clinical Implications. Tokyo: Springer: 147–154. Kitahara, M. (2021) ‘Rekishiteki torauma gainen no Ainu kenkyū e no dōnyū o saguru,’ Ainu senjūmin kenkyū 1: 7–34. Kobayashi M. (2020) Kimigayo o utaenakatta watashi, seijika o mezashita wake. Tokyo: WAC. Kokkai gijiroku (2013). ‘Sangiin kenpō shinsaikai’ (Lower House Commission on the Constitution), 4 March. Kokkai gijiroku (2015). ‘Shūgiin anzen hoshshō iinkai’ (Lower House Committee on Security), 28 May. Kokkai gijiroku (2019). ‘Shūgiin honkaigi’ (Lower House Plenary Session), 10 May. LaCapra, D. (2016). ‘Trauma, History, Memory, Identity: What Remains?’ History & Theory 55: 375–399. Leheny, D. (2010) ‘Conclusion: Remaking Transnationalisms – Japan and the Solutions to Crises,’ in Leheny, D. and Warren, K. (eds.), Japanese Aid and the Construction of Global Development. London: Routledge: 270–286. Leheny, D. (2018) Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marshall, R.D., Spitzer, R., and Liebowitz, M.R. (1999) ‘Review and Critique of the New DSM-IV Diagnosis of Acute Stress Disorder,’ American Journal of Psychiatry 156(11): 1677–1685. Mental Health America. (n.d.) ‘Racial Trauma,’ Mental Health America website, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 June 2022). Miyaji, N. (2013) Torauma. Tokyo: Iwanami. Miyaji, N. (2020) Torauma ni fureru: Shinteki gaishō no shintaironteki tenkai. Tokyo: Kongō Shuppan. NHK. (2021) ‘Suga shushō beinichi keizai kyōgikai to kaigi “Gorin, para de yume to kandō o”’ July 15. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 June 2022). Otake, H. (2016). ‘Tokyo Lawmaker Says Being Gay Is Matter of “Personal Taste,” Does Not Merit Taxpayer Support,” The Japan Times, February 23. Prime Minister’s Office. (2018) ‘New Year’s Reflection by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe [Provisional Translation],’ January 1. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 June 2022). Prime Minister’s Office. (2020) ‘Policy Speech by the Prime Minister to the 201st Session of the Diet [Provisional Translation]’ January 20. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 June 2022). Rosenthal, H. (2016). ‘Why Do White Men Love Donald Trump So Much?’ The Washington Post, September 8. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 June 2022). Ross, A. (2013) Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shimokibe, M. (2011) ‘Mōmoku to senkō: shikaku no byō to shite no torauma no genten wa bakuhatsu ga aru,’ Seikei daigaku bungakubu gakkai 15: 1–10. Takei, N. (2013), ‘Sabetsu – torauma, taieki, sei to kegare,’ Kōbe daigaku daigakuin ningen aihatsu ­kenkyūka kiyō 7(1): 1–13. Tsutsui, K. (2009) ‘The Trajectory of Perpetrators’ Trauma: Mnemonic Politics around the AsiaPacific War in Japan,’ Social Forces 87(3): 1389–1422. WAC Website (n.d.) Kimigayo o utaenakatta watashi, seijika o mezashita wake. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 June 2022). Wellerstein, A. (2020) ‘Counting the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 4. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 June 2022). Yoneyama, L. (1999) Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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12 OKINAWA The Trauma of Betrayal Alexis Dudden and Jeff Kingston

Okinawa yet again is navigating the riptide of regional geopolitics, caught between Tokyo, Washington and Beijing. Contemporary Okinawan perceptions inevitably draw on the collective trauma of the U.S. invasion and Japanese betrayal in 1945. Now these foes are allies, but a rising China and a threatening North Korea are thrusting Okinawa into the crosshairs of geo-strategic manoeuvring. U.S. policymakers often refer to Okinawa as the security keystone of the Pacific due to its location at the crossroads of competing claims in the East China Sea, sitting astride China’s naval gateway to the Pacific. In Okinawa, there is widespread awareness about the costs of being this keystone, based on wartime memories and current discontent about how the U.S.-Japan Alliance shifts so much of the burdens onto Okinawans without their consent. In 2022, Okinawans found little to celebrate in marking the fiftieth anniversary of ­reversion from American to Japanese control in 1972. There is widespread disappointment because of festering grievances, as Okinawa continues to bear a disproportionate base-hosting burden, employment opportunities remain limited and it is Japan’s poorest prefecture with income standing at about 70 per cent of the national average (Yamaguchi 2022). A 2022 poll found that 55 per cent of Okinawans are dissatisfied with the post-1972 ‘course of ­h istory’, although 94 per cent welcomed the reversion to Japanese rule after two decades under U.S. military administration (Kyodo 2022). The same poll found that 58 per cent favour significant downsizing of the bases, 14 per cent want them removed and just 26 per cent favour the status quo. The 72 per cent anti-base figure in this poll is similar to the island-wide referendum held in 2019 against building a new base in Henoko, a result that Tokyo has steadfastly ignored (McCurry 2019). Islanders’ views draw on what is viewed as serial betrayal.

Six Betrayals A profound sense of betrayal permeates Okinawan discourse about WWII and contemporary battles over hosting American military bases. At the Okinawan Prefectural Peace Museum, wartime Okinawa is depicted as a ‘breakwater’ for the nation, a battleground where the April 1945 onslaught of the U.S. ‘Typhoon of Steel’ was to be fended off. In a war that was already lost, the Battle of Okinawa was Tokyo’s desperate gamble on a strategy to compel DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-13

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Figure 12.1  Casualty Exhibit, Okinawan Prefectural Museum. Credit: Jeff Kingston.

the Americans to drop their insistence on unconditional surrender. The museum highlights the invasion’s senseless carnage to indict Tokyo’s ‘they were expendable’ tactics of wasted lives, including over 100,000 civilians killed, representing one quarter of the population, who were sacrificed for Japan’s main islands and the Showa (Hirohito) Emperor’s war (see Figure 12.1). Based on eyewitness reports, visitors also confront the story of group suicides by Okinawan civilians instigated by Japanese soldiers who distributed grenades and urged the islanders to kill themselves. On departing the prefectural museum, the inescapable conclusion is that Tokyo thrust Okinawans into the cauldron of war because it could not accept defeat and was putting off inevitable surrender. This is the core betrayal: being used as sacrificial pawns to buy time for wartime leaders to overcome their delusions and pride—especially as the American firebombing campaigns were already decimating Japan’s main islands. Adjacent to the museum is the Peace Memorial Park, a site frequented by school groups and relatives of those who died. As one surveys the phalanxes of granite walls engraved with the names of all the ­soldiers, conscripts and civilians who died in the Battle of Okinawa, including Allied soldiers and colonial conscripts, the devastating folly of war is grimly conveyed. This history is not forgotten and is a trauma at the heart of Okinawan’s collective identity, one barely ­acknowledged in the rest of Japan, and thus resented even more bitterly. To say nothing of a battle most Americans have never heard of or are required to learn about in their school textbooks. The second betrayal came in 1952 when Tokyo regained sovereignty over Japan’s main islands, putting an end to the U.S. Occupation in exchange for allowing the U.S. to retain 132

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administrative control over Okinawa and maintain military bases there. This trade was made on 28 April and is now commemorated by Okinawans as the Day of Humiliation. An elderly intellectual who worked for the U.S. administration at that time, and is now an anti-base activist, contends that Okinawans were eager to see the back of the Japanese military, and hopeful about the Americans that many welcomed as liberators (Interview 2018). But, as the U.S. military abandoned democratic values and suppressed political dissent, including the pro-reversion movement (reverting to Japanese administrative control), it sparked an anti-American backlash. Then as now, crimes committed by U.S. personnel periodically ignited the dry kindling of discontent. The third betrayal was the forced evictions in the aftermath of the Second World War that made room for the bases. The ‘bayonets and bulldozers’ approach to land grabs remains central to local perceptions about the illegitimacy of the U.S. presence. According to our octogenarian interlocutor, the fourth betrayal that exposed the U.S. as hypocrites was the ousting of a pro-reversion, anti-base politician in 1956. Senaga Kamejiro (1907–2001) had previously been jailed for two years in 1954 for ‘harboring blacklisted communist activists from Amami island’ (Tani 2007). Apparently, that was a crime under military rule in what Chalmers Johnson (1999) dubbed the Cold War Island. After Senaga won the 1956 Naha mayoral election, the Americans called him the ‘red mayor’ and he became a target of U.S. Cold War-era pressures (and, notably, similar smear tactics have pervaded Washington’s discourse concerning all who would question the p­ resence  of the American military). The U.S. Civil Administration (USCA) military government that controlled Okinawa froze the city’s assets, withheld U.S. subsidies and even turned off the water, finally pressuring the assembly into dismissing Senaga. The U.S. ­m ilitary authorities then prevented him from seeking re-election by barring anyone with a criminal record from running for office. These strong-arm tactics proved counterproductive, transforming him into a martyr while boosting anti-American sentiments. In 2017, a documentary entitled Beigun ga Mottomo Osoreta Otoko: Sono Na wa Kamejiro (Kamejiro, the man most feared by the U.S. military) was shown nationwide at movie ­theatres. Senaga was feared because of his charismatic speaking style and fearlessness in denouncing the American presence. Senaga was also a prominent advocate of reversion to Japanese administration. On 28 April 1960, the anniversary of the Treaty of San Francisco, local unions and the teacher’s association group launched the Okinawan Prefecture Council for Reversion to the Home Islands (Tani 2007, 83). Their goal was an end to the U.S. Occupation of Okinawa, ultimately achieved in 1972. This movement gained momentum as the U.S. shifted its troops to Okinawa from the main islands. Ambassador Edwin Reischauer (1961–1966) argued in favour of this shift as he worried that the American military presence was at risk of becoming overly politicized in Japan and would be politically less problematic if concentrated in distant Okinawa where Japanese needed travel permission during the period of U.S. control. As a result, the ratio of Japan-based U.S. troops stationed outside and inside of Okinawa went from 9:1 in 1952 to 1:3 in 1972 (Brasor 2017). This helped insulate most Japanese from the U.S. military presence, ensuring it never developed into an electoral issue in hondo (the rest of Japan) elections, just as the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) prefers. To this day, Okinawans differentiate their islands as a result, referring to the hondo as ‘Yamato’ in an off-colour slur. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) represents the fifth betrayal as Okinawans think it is overly protective of the rights of U.S. servicemen and enables them to evade accountability for the crimes they commit in Japan. Governor Denny Tamaki is the latest Okinawan 133

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leader to denounce the pact and call for revision (Mainichi 2021). A 2022 poll found that 71 per cent of Okinawans agree and support a fundamental revision of the SOFA (Ryuku Shimpo 2022). The Japan SOFA concluded in 1960 has been adjusted informally since a 1995 gang rape incident to allow local interrogation and prosecution for serious crimes, but U.S. military court-martials are the rule. Thus, there is some accountability, but Okinawans bristle at the persistence of extraterritoriality. Compared to other nations where the U.S. has SOFA such as Japan’s wartime allies Italy and Germany, the terms are decidedly less accommodating. In Europe, U.S. soldiers are subject to local laws and courts. There are strictly enforced rules on U.S. military flights, while local control is far more extensive than in Japan. Reversion was realized in 1972, but for many Okinawans it was a diplomatic deceit that constitutes the sixth betrayal as the continuing base presence meant that they only regained a semblance of sovereignty. Our octogenarian interlocuter said he was ‘skeptical that it ever really meant anything’. According to him, the disappointments have mounted as the transfer to Japanese governance provided few tangible benefits. As a result, anger was redirected towards Tokyo for not doing more to stick up for Okinawans.

Shared Values and Flawed Strategy While political leaders in Washington and Tokyo regularly cite shared democratic principles, Okinawans’ longstanding support for downsizing the US-military presence has been disregarded in bilateral security deals. Invoking the nostrum of shared values in public discourse provides background music while Washington pressures Tokyo to dance to its tune. Yet, this lack of democratic legitimacy for US-Japan security policies in the prefecture is more than a nuisance and unsustainable on both strategic and ethical grounds. The large subsidies the central government grants to Okinawa are the payoff for accepting the bases, a quid pro quo that exploits Okinawans’ lack of options and choice. Running roughshod over Okinawans and democracy on behalf of the alliance seems to expose the emptiness of shared values that Washington has been happy to go along with, averting its eyes from the unpleasant spectacle. Onaga Takeshi won the prefecture’s gubernatorial election in 2014 due to his predecessor Nakaima Hirokazu’s 2013 betrayal, granting the Abe government permission for proceeding with the Henoko base project in exchange for over US$20 billion over eight years (Chotani 2019). This deal was unexpected since Nakaima won elections in 2006 and 2010 by staunchly opposing the planned base. Onaga tried to block the Henoko reclamation work by rescinding his predecessor’s approval, but after extensive legal manoeuvring the central government prevailed in this David-versus-Goliath battle.

Burden Sharing The blueprint for reducing the U.S. military footprint in Okinawa, the so-called 1996 Roadmap, is a relic long on unfulfilled promises that has not eased the basing burden. Back in 1972, 58 per cent of the landmass occupied by US military forces in Japan was in Okinawa, but now that figure has risen to 70 per cent (Tajima, Nemoto and Kodama 2022). The U.S. military currently occupies 18 per cent of Okinawa Island, and the prefecture hosts nearly 30,000 active-duty military personnel, more than half the total based in Japan. In 2016, the U.S. finally returned a paltry 10,000 hectares of land used in their Jungle Warfare Training Center, 20 years after agreeing to do so, yet another gesture in the ‘too little, too late’ ­category (Letman 2016). 134

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The U.S.-Japan Alliance shifts so much of the physical burden of American overseas basing, training and environmental degradation onto Okinawans without their consent that there is little more than vigorous handwringing concerning longstanding grievances about sexual violence by American servicemen. Militarization of Okinawa prefecture continues apace with deployment of missile systems and radar stations in the islands closer to Taiwan, and American and Allied reconnaissance flights over North Korea regularly depart from bases on Okinawa. But strategic imperatives do not convince Okinawans that they need to do more (Mainichi 2022). Rather, it reinforces a sense that the rest of Japan has not done enough. On an NHK television special on reversion aired on 12 May 2022, Nozoe Fumiaki, a professor at Okinawa International University, noted that Okinawans’ main grievance is the unfair base hosting burden. In his view, rising regional tensions mean that the rest of Japan must shoulder more of the security burden and not continue to shift it to Okinawa. Even though crimes committed by American servicemen in Okinawa may have declined since reversion, he noted that in the context of accumulating frustration each new incident sparks outrage. Tokyo, he asserted, doesn’t really seem to understand why locals are so exasperated. Indeed, for many other Japanese, it is an ‘out of sight, out of mind phenomenon’, ensuring the central government only feigns concern. The problem is that building new bases outside Okinawa confronts determined NIMBYism (not-in-my-backyard) so the central government continues to back a risky concentration of U.S. bases. Overcoming NIMBYism in Japan faces determined resistance from defiant citizens contesting decisions made without their consent that put them in harm’s way (Lesbirel 1998). From a security perspective, the overconcentration of bases renders them vulnerable to an attack that would seriously impair how US forces could respond or make a difference in a regional conflict, ostensibly the reason for being in Okinawa. It makes more sense to disperse these military assets around the archipelago. That is unlikely to happen due to NIMBYism, path dependence and indifference, a default mode that stokes local opposition to not only the bases but also existing and pending missile deployments in the prefecture. Locals view the bases as tempting targets and thus believe that a worsening risk environment is all the more reason for the rest of Japan to step up. They understand why it was impossible for the central government to find any towns in mainland Japan willing to host the Aegis Ashore batteries in 2020 because they are likely targets (Kingston 2020). They also understand that a Taiwan contingency (China invading or sabotaging the island’s autonomy) is a Japan contingency looking for a solution in Okinawa, otherwise known as ‘frontline deterrence’ (Sakaguchi 2022). Miyakojima, very much on the front line in the westernmost chain of islands in the archipelago closest to Taiwan, now hosts Self-Defence Force (SDF) missile batteries with a 200 km range and future deployment of U.S. intermediate-range missiles there is probable. It also appears that SDF aircraft will be deployed at the island’s Shimoji airport although the government promised it would never deploy military planes there when it was built (Kelly 2022). The February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has provided political cover for breaking this promise, as do Chinese naval patrols off the coast of Miyakojima. On Ishigaki Island there are plans for SDF missile deployment in 2023, another diktat from afar that lacks democratic legitimacy. Prospects for a regional conflict centre on hyped-up concerns that China is soon to invade Taiwan, making Washington and Tokyo’s security experts even more eager to maintain and augment America’s presence in Okinawa and expand that of the SDF. As Nicholas Szechenyi at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington DC-based thinktank explains, ‘Okinawa is an extremely important location for the U.S.-Japan alliance to evolve, 135

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Figure 12.2  Protestors decorate fence adjacent to Henoko construction site. Credit: Jeff Kingston.

together. Because that jointness is our greatest strength’ (Sakaguchi 2022). Alas, Okinawans are on the outside looking in on this ‘jointness’. When security experts speak of the need to creatively manage local opposition to this agenda, it doesn’t mean altering such plans but rather figuring out a way to proceed. Opponents are an irritant to overcome, a side-lining well within Washington’s and Tokyo’s comfort zone. Public works spending is one way that Tokyo compensates Okinawa for the troubles associated with the US bases. The second segment of NHK’s special on reversion (13 May 2022) found, however, that massive funding of infrastructure projects has not generated much economic momentum, and instead Tokyo has nurtured a subsidy addiction and, since the 1990s, squandered vast sums on a slew of white elephant projects.

Henoko Unwanted The Henoko project now under construction as a replacement facility for the Futenma U.S. Marine Corp Air Station located in densely populated Ginowan City is one of these white elephants, one that Tokyo is imposing on Okinawa. Back in 1996 the government decided to build a V-shaped runway on reclaimed land in Oura Bay (Henoko) on top of a coral reef in pristine waters adjacent to Camp Schwab where U.S. Marines are based. Okinawa islanders oppose this plan because it’s not immediately obvious why reducing the U.S. military footprint requires building an additional new military facility in the prefecture rather than somewhere else. Okinawa’s political leaders have tried various means to block the project but to no avail. 136

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In a series of elections and public opinion polls, Okinawans have rejected the Henoko plan, but the democratic will of the islanders has been subordinated to the alliance (see Figure 12.2). Denny Tamaki won a landslide victory in the 2018 gubernatorial elections by promising to continue the fight against Henoko, yet another embarrassing setback for the Abe government. Team Abe was further displeased by Tamaki holding an island-wide referendum in February 2019 in which 72 per cent of Okinawan voters gave the thumbs down to the Henoko relocation plan (McCurry 2019). Subsequently, in a nationwide poll conducted by Kyodo in March 2019, 69 per cent said the central government should respect the results of the referendum while only 19 per cent said there is no need to do so (Kyodo 2019). Even so, the Abe administration’s successors have bulldozed ahead, dumping rocks and sand into the bay and by doing so killing the coral and degrading the marine environment. The geology of Oura Bay, however, is unsuitable for the runway project as a government survey in 2016 found the sea bottom has the consistency of mayonnaise, ensuring higher construction costs and further delays (Fujiwara 2020). In the keystone of the Pacific, this is the deeply flawed bedrock of the alliance where expediency trumps shared values. The local Ryuku Shimpo fumed, ‘The Japanese government has trampled the will of the people of Okinawa with an iron fist in order to build a base for the U.S. military’ (Ryuku Shimpo 2018). The least-bad temporary solution still appears to be shifting Futenma’s operations to the massive Kadena Air Base, but intra-service rivalry is blocking this. In 2011, Senators Carl Levin, Jim Webb and John McCain backed that plan, dismissing Henoko as ‘unrealistic, unworkable and unaffordable’ (BBC 2011). While a 2019 East-West Center study finds somewhat more positive attitudes overall about the U.S. military presence among younger Okinawans, they also express strong resentment about the disproportionate base-hosting burden. The study concludes that ‘the construction of a replacement base at Cape Henoko is widely regarded as a betrayal of Okinawa to broader Japanese interests and prejudices’ (Morrison and Chinen 2019). Robert Eldridge, an academic who served from 2009 to 2015 as an advisor to the U.S. Marines, was a prominent advocate for the bases who has since recanted. In his view, the Henoko base relocation project ‘does not meet the requirements of a 21st century alliance or even a modern-day relationship with local citizens’ (Eldridge 2018). His apostasy on the bases is a damning indictment by an insider sympathetic to the U.S. presence.

Side-Lining Dissent The Japanese government jailed Okinawan anti-U.S. base activist Yamashiro Hiroji from October 2016 to March 2017 on trivial charges, keeping him in solitary confinement. Yamashiro heads the Okinawa Peace Movement Center and it is obvious why he was ­t argeted. He is the Senaga Kamejiro in twenty-first century Okinawa, a charismatic speaker who revs up crowds with his fiery rhetoric and inspires by his fearlessness. In a situation many deem hopeless he gives hope. As Lawrence Repeta argues, ‘The extended detention of Hiroji Yamashiro is a shocking display of raw government power….it appears that Japan’s government will put aside the most basic human rights protections in order to crush protesters like Yamashiro’ (Repeta 2017). He adds, ‘arbitrary detention is a standard tool used by authoritarian governments to silence critics throughout the world’. It is hard to reconcile what is going on in Okinawa with the alleged ‘shared values’ that are frequently invoked by American and Japanese leaders as the cornerstone of the alliance. 137

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Unwelcome Guests One of the many crimes committed by American personnel in Okinawa involved the 2016 rape and murder of a twenty-year-old local woman by a U.S. contractor (a former Marine) employed at the U.S. Kadena Airbase. Sadly, this horrific crime fits into a larger pattern of sexual violence that has become all too familiar to Okinawans and inflamed local antipathy towards the U.S. military bases. Some 65,000 people turned out to mourn her killing and to protest an alliance that shifts a disproportionate hosting burden on Okinawa. It was a grim ceremony commemorating the dangers of having so many soldiers stationed in Okinawa that stir resentments against both Tokyo and the U.S. It highlights the nexus of indignity that links the original sin of the Battle of Okinawa, the 1952 abandonment of the prefecture to U.S. administration until 1972, the heavy-handed suppression of the anti-base movement during that era, and the rapes and killings that have continued since reversion. Okinawan Governor Onaga apologized to the deceased woman for failing to protect her, recalling the horrific 1995 gang rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three American servicemen. This incident forced the U.S. and Japan to commit to a reduction of the U.S. military presence in Okinawa as outlined in the 2006 Roadmap. How has it been possible to sustain the U.S. military presence over the decades given Okinawans’ longstanding opposition? Ignoring the will of the people is one compelling answer. Sarah Kovner argues that Tokyo and Washington try to insulate Japanese society from the negative impact of U.S. bases, including literally soundproofing nearby homes and schools and otherwise discrediting and marginalizing anti-base protests and grievances (Kovner 2016). And most mainland Japanese enjoy the soundproofing of distance, ensuring that Okinawa’s burden is out of earshot and out of sight.

Commemorating Trauma Okinawans, however, have ensured that their traumatic history can’t be silenced, reverberating loudly among a people whose memories are consecrated in museums, monuments, rites of collective commemoration and family lore ( Junkerman 2015). The lamp of war memory burns bright across the prefecture because elders have recounted their tragic and grisly experiences to relatives, passing them down to younger generations that ensures their saga remains a visceral and embedded presence among Okinawans, not something only honoured periodically at gravestones or memorials. As Figal reminds us, rituals and sites of commemoration can be numbing, pointing out that ‘Public monuments run the risk of ironically lulling one into forgetting that which they were designed to keep in mind’ (Figal 2018, 144). Adding, In the case of memorials to the war dead, physically manifesting a marker onto which memory is deposited can serve to liberate the living from the burden of actively and continually remembering the dead—the act of remembrance is always already done with, neatly taken care of by the physical monument and perhaps a ritual event. (Figal 2018, 144) Okinawans’ attention to the past, however, has not been dulled by time or routinized rituals. Figal examines how they activate the wartime past and contest representations of it rather than simply engaging in war remembrance. For example, at the Cornerstone of Peace, the 138

Okinawa: The Trauma of Betrayal

Figure 12.3  Cornerstone of Peace, Itoman, Okinawa. Credit: Jeff Kingston.

names of combatants from both sides and Okinawan civilians are inscribed on 116 upright granite slabs (see Figure 12.3). Figal explains that Japanese soldiers are grouped in the same section as foreign war dead in the southern half of the monument, othering the mainlanders and enshrining them with labourers, soldiers and comfort women conscripted from the former colonies of Taiwan and Korea (Figal 2018, 146). In his view, this signals a ‘willingness— even boldness—among Okinawans to insist on a fuller accounting of the war than anything imaginable at a public memorial on mainland Japan and almost anywhere else in the world’ (Figal 2018, 147). This boldness also subverts and confronts the school excursions, prosaic ceremonies and well-rehearsed, oft-repeated speeches brimming with the platitudes of peace that tend to dull critical historical awareness. The lingering and extensive presence of the American military also plays a key role in activating war memory. This noisy and prominent presence inspires grassroots’ efforts to teach the history of the war and to keep it relevant for younger generations, facilitated by ‘a concrete everyday reality of an unwanted postwar militarisation of the island that is the direct result of the war that produced the dead being memorialised’ (Figal 2018, 150). The bases, often built on seized land, serve as memorials to war history and the sacrifice and indignities imposed on Okinawans by mainlanders as well as Tokyo’s complicity in ­concentrating the burdens of the alliance on them. This abiding trauma highlights the causal connections and contemporary risks facing the keystone in a highly militarized space. The surge in tourism that has engulfed post-reversion Okinawa also stimulates war ­memory activism in response to the concerted efforts to marginalize sites of commemoration from package tours and avert visitors’ gaze from this sanguinary past (Figal 2012). 139

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Tourist officials, travel agencies and tropical resorts market the beaches and pristine ocean, insulating visitors from grisly wartime memories and legacies. Ironically, by doing so the leisure ­industry generates a local backlash from war memory activists, stoking the embers of resentment and giving them more reason to battle on and organize tours that educate tourists about the Battle of Okinawa. Historical revisionists have also added fuel to the fire. In 2007, the largest twenty-first-century protest in Okinawa attracted 100,000 ­participants to condemn the Ministry of Education’s directive to secondary school textbook publishers, requiring them to refrain from suggesting that Japanese military forces instigated Okinawan group suicides in 1945 (Onishi 2007). This revisionist whitewashing during Abe’s first stint as premier disregarded eyewitness testimony by survivors documented at Okinawa’s Prefectural Peace Museum. It smacked of Tokyo trying to erase a memory that is part of islanders’ collective identity, adding another layer of betrayal. They remembered this insult in 2015 when Prime Minister Abe attended the ceremony marking the seventieth ­a nniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa, lustily heckling and jeering him in front of the dignitaries, participants and the mass media, an unprecedented public humiliation for a prime minister in Japan. For Okinawans, the arc of history linking Tokyo’s monstrous sacrifice of Okinawa in 1945 to current preparations for war with China stokes memories of betrayal. The current concentration of US bases there, and the ongoing expansion of military capacity across the prefecture, looks ominous. The failure of Tokyo to spread the burden of security in Japan yet again is making this Okinawans’ problem.

Conclusion The U.S. military presence in Japan has lasted nearly eighty years, an encroachment that remains the unfinished business of the Second World War and a constant reminder to Okinawans of their shared nightmare in 1945 and the ongoing dangers of being strategic planners’ keystone in the Pacific. During this prolonged occupation, no amount of soundproofing can quell the high decibel reality of subjugation and discrimination that serve as a counterpoint to the ‘shared values’ of the alliance. For many Okinawans, reversion in 1972 was a diplomatic deceit that constitutes a profound betrayal as the continuing base presence means that they only regained a semblance of sovereignty. The question confronting policymakers is whether it is wise to make Okinawa an inviting target by concentrating U.S. forces there and whether riding roughshod over local sentiments is a sustainable model consistent with so-called shared values. Engaged and sustained commemoration of Okinawa’s wartime trauma contests Japan’s collective amnesia about this reckless squandering of life and Tokyo’s contemporary strategy of outsourcing the burdens of deterrence to the prefecture. Contemporary pacifism and anti-base sentiments draw on local rancour about what can go wrong when Okinawans get caught between larger, distant forces pursuing agendas at odds with their own interests. Now that tensions with China ratchet up, these concerns have gained a whole new gravity as many islanders feel as though they are being put in harm’s way once again. What is rationalized as a sensible deterrence policy in Washington and Tokyo provides no reassurance to Okinawans who feel like their prefecture is the designated battleground, while the rest of Japan shirks. The economic inducements of base hosting are needed by Japan’s poorest prefecture, but this dependency also rankles. Given the immense potential for tourism and Japan’s rapidly aging population, accelerating the reduction in military bases could open attractive 140

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opportunities for a Florida scenario of resorts, golf courses and retirement communities. This would be more appealing to locals and probably generate greater economic b­ enefits. Yet ­ prospects for such a transformation appear remote as Tokyo and Washington still regard  Okinawa as an indispensable platform for projecting military might and policymakers remain deaf to the democratic voice of Okinawans who know what it feels to be expendable.

Works Cited BBC (2011) ‘US senators urge rethink on Okinawa base plan’, BBC News, 12 May 12. https://www. bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-13372194 (Accessed 11 June 2022). Brasor, P. (2017) “No one else wants Okinawa’s U.S. bases” Japan Times, September 2. Chotani, V.M (2019) ‘Bearing the Burden: An Okinawan perspective on US bases’, Tokyo Review, 22 February. https://www.tokyoreview.net/2019/02/bearing-the-burden-an-okinawan-­perspectiveon-bases/ (accessed 22 June 2022). Eldridge, R. (2018) “The Four Mottainai in Okinawan Affairs,” Japan Times, February 13. Figal, G. (2018) ‘The treachery of memorials: beyond war remembrance in contemporary Okinawa’ in P. Finney, ed., Remembering the Second World War. Abingdon: Routledge. 143–157. Figal, G. (2012) Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Fujiwara, S. (2020) ‘Geologists say Henoko site at risk due to soft state of seabed’, Asahi Shimbun, March 4. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13185831 (Accessed 11 June 2022). Johnson, C., ed. (1999) Okinawa: Cold War Island. Cardiff, CA: Japan Policy Research Institute. Junkerman, J. (2015) ‘The Afterburn.’ Siglo Films. Online information at http://www.cine.co.jp/ english/works/e_urizun/ (Accessed 11 June 2022). Kelly, T. (2022) ‘Japan’s Okinawa may be on the front lines again as it marks anniversary of U.S.  ­handover’ Reuters, 12May. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-defence-­okinawaidAFKCN2MY02F (Accessed 11 June 2022). Kingston, J. (2020) ‘Abe the gamechanger stumbles to exit under a cloud’, Australian Outlook. 4 September. https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/abe-the-gamechangerstumbles-to-exit-under-a-cloud/ (Accessed 11 June 2022). Kovner, S. (2016) ‘The soundproofed superpower: American bases and Japanese communities, 1945– 1972.’ Journal of Asian Studies 75, no. 1 (February): 87–109. Kyodo (2022) ‘55% of Okinawans unhappy with 50 yrs since reversion to Japan: poll’, Kyodo News, 24 April. https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/04/0323d62dc7bc-55-of-okinawans-unhappywith-50-yrs-since-reversion-to-japan-poll.html (Accessed 11 June 2022). Kyodo (2019) ‘Abe support rate falls; 69% want Okinawa vote on base issue respected’, Japan Times, 10 March. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/03/10/national/politics-diplomacy/abe-­ support-rate-falls-69-want-okinawa-vote-base-issue-respected/#.XIkNPyhKjic (Accessed 11 June 2022). Lesbirel, S. Hayden (1998) NIMBY Politics in Japan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Letman, J. (2016) ‘US military returns land to Japan, but Okinawa isn’t celebrating’, Truthout, 21 December. https://truthout.org/articles/us-military-returns-land-to-japan-but-­okinawa-isn-tcelebrating/ (Accessed 11 June 2022). Mainichi (2022) ‘Okinawa seeks Tokyo’s help lowering tensions with China’ Mainichi, 6 May. https:// mainichi.jp/english/articles/20220506/p2g/00m/0na/070000c (Accessed 11 June 2022). Mainichi (2021) ‘Japan-US forces pact ‘inconsistent with the times’ needs drastic reform: Okinawa governor’, Mainichi, 29 September. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210928/ p2a/00m/0na/028000c (Accessed 11 June 2022). McCurry. J. (2019) ‘Okinawa referendum rejects new US military bases but Abe likely to press on’ The Guardian, 24 February. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/24/okinawa-referendumrejects-new-us-military-base-but-abe-likely-to-press-on (Accessed 11 June 2022). Morrison, C. and D. Chinen (2019) ‘Millennial+ voices in Okinawa’, Honolulu:East-West Center, https://www.eastwestcenter.org/system/tdf/private/okinawamillennial.pdf ?f ile=1&type= node&id=37074 (Accessed 11 June 2022).

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Alexis Dudden and Jeff Kingston Onishi, N. (2007) ‘Okinawans protest Japan’s plan to revise bitter chapter of World War I’, New York Times, 7 October. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/world/asia/07okinawa.html (accessed 22 June 2022). Repeta, L. (2017) “The silencing of an anti-U.S. base protester in Okinawa”, Japan Times, 4 January. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/01/04/commentary/japan-commentary/silencinganti-u-s-base-protester-okinawa/ (Accessed 11 June 2022). Ryuku Shimpo (2022) ‘In joint survey conducted by the Ryukyu Shimpo and Mainichi Shimbun, 61% of Okinawans think the concentration of bases in Okinawa “unfair,” while only 40% of people nationwide agree’, Ryuku Shimpo, 29 May. http://english.ryukyushimpo.jp/2022/05/12/34661/ (Accessed 11 June 2022). Ryuku Shimpo (2018) ‘Editorial: The Japanese Government suing to allow land filling is a reckless trampling of democracy’, Ryuku Shimpo, 18 October. http://english.ryukyushimpo. ­ jp/2018/10/25/29448/ (Accessed 11 June 2022). Sakaguchi, Y. (2022) ‘When it comes to deterrence, Okinawa sits in the right place’, Nikkei Asia, 15 May. https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/When-it-comes-to-deterrence-Okinawasits-in-the-right-place (Accessed 11 June 2022). Tajima, Y., R. Nemoto and S. Kodama (2022) ‘Okinawa, 50 years after return, still heavily in U.S. defense playbook’, Nikkei Asia, 14 May. https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/ Indo-Pacific/Okinawa-50-years-after-return-still-heavily-in-U.S.-defense-playbook (Accessed 11 June 2022). Tani, M. (2007) Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa. Abingdon: Routledge. Yamaguchi, Y. (2022) ‘EXPLAINER: Why frustration lingers in Okinawa 50 years later’, Associated 01228cb1c35ff2748f4cbef Press, 14 May. https://apnews.com/article/japan-tokyo-world-war-ii-­ b1e280340 (Accessed 11 June 2022).

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13 IGNORING THE HISTORY OF FOREIGN FORCED LABOUR AT JAPAN’S ‘SITES OF THE MEIJI INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION’ David Palmer Controversy has engulfed Japan’s ‘Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding, and Coal Mining’ since their UNESCO World Heritage inscription in 2015. During the Second World War, the most significant of these sites in Kyushu used thousands of Korean and Chinese forced labourers, along with thousands of Allied POWs as slave labourers. The Japanese government refused to fully acknowledge this history between 2015 and 2021 in its public historical displays, ignoring its 2015 agreement to do so and subsequent criticisms raised by South Korea and other affected nations. This chapter focuses on the sites most crucial to Japan’s development of heavy industry where forced and slave labour was used: the Takashima and Miike coal mines, Nagasaki Shipbuilding complex, and Yawata Steel Works. Japan’s ‘Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution’, inscribed as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage site in 2015, has deeply divided Japan and South Korea. Japan has maintained that the sites symbolize the rise of modern Japan. The government’s description on the website for the sites praises ‘Meiji Japan’s transformation into an industrial nation in the second half of the 19th century [that] was a phenomenon at that time unique in [sic] history’ (Department 2015). South Korea’s criticism has focused on the refusal of Japan to portray the complete history of these sites, in particular where Korean forced labour was used in the Second World War. These contrasting narratives reveal the deep cultural trauma for most Koreans that is a consequence of Japan’s optimistic, uncritical public presentation of key sites and the Japanese government’s failure to acknowledge subsequent criticisms from the international representatives on the UNESCO World Heritage Committee (ICOMOS 2021). By 2021, this criticism was extended further to include the absence of the history of how Allied prisoners-of-war and Chinese forced labourers were used by Japan’s largest companies – Mitsubishi and Mitsui – during the Second World War (Palmer 2021). This criticism targets the Japanese government’s public historical presentations in descriptions at the sites and the official Information Heritage Information Centre in Tokyo. The core argument of the Japanese government is highly contradictory. On the one hand, the title of the inscription with its focus on the Meiji era is related to the claim that Japan had completed its ‘industrial revolution’ by exactly 1910. This periodization eliminates the Second World War as part of the historical narrative. Nevertheless, the public historical DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-14

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portrayals by Japan have extended to the post-WWII era, while Japan continues to claim that Koreans were conscripted as part of the wartime emergency and were not victims of forced mobilization or forced labour when taken to Japan and put to work at Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki Shipyard and Hashima Coal Mine, the Yawata Steel Mill, or Mitsui’s Miike Coal Mine (Palmer 2016a, 2018, 2021). The criticism of this argument by Koreans has been that the full history of those who worked at these sites – Koreans – is missing, with only token testimonies from a few Koreans who deny there was forced labour ( Johnsen 2021a, 2021b).

Two Contrasting Narratives of the ‘Meiji Sites’ – Japan versus South Korea The ‘Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution’ consist of eleven sites with twenty-three ­‘component parts’ based in eight locales (Sites 2015). The Japanese government publicity on the local sites views them as examples of a singular national accomplishment, making Japan a recognized equal in the industrialized world by 1910. Unlike China, Japan maintained not only its independence but rose to become an international economic power. Promotion of national pride in the country’s historical accomplishment in industrializing runs through the entire narrative as presented at these sites. The emphasis is on rapid technological development in heavy industry and Japanese skills in accomplishing this, and is confined to the Meiji era. Periodization of the sites contrasts with the description of these sites as being ‘Meiji’. Fifteen of the twenty-three ‘component parts’ at the sites were established in the last decades of the Bakumatsu period (1850–1867) of the Tokugawa Shogunate (see Table 13.1). This earlier inclusion is justified as ‘The Period of Self-learning’ that was ‘Before [the] Modern Period’. The Meiji era ended in 1912, not 1910, but the nomination document that Japan submitted to UNESCO uses 1910 as an end date because of the country’s new international fame from displaying its manufactured items at that year’s Japan-British Exhibition. Nevertheless, even the Japanese government mentions the importance of ‘heavy ­industry’ – shipbuilding, steel, and coal – as contributors to Japan’s wars during the Meiji era, but this is justified as preventing Japan from being colonized by Western powers and Japan becoming an equal to Western powers in Asia. The nomination document focused on technology and machinery while it omitted discussion of labour that used this technology. The publicity at the sites, however, highlights Japanese workers in the postwar era when prosperity returned to Japan. Managers and owners are featured prominently as leaders in industrialization: The Series spans the range of chronological developments in technology that characterize Japan’s Meiji industrialization, demonstrating the rapid evolution from proto-industrial sites of the clans and Shogunate during the 1850s, to transplanted, fully-fledged, large-scale Western industrial ensembles of the beginning of twentieth century. The component parts evidence the key stages in the development of the iron and steel, ­shipbuilding and coal mining industries. (Department 2015) The Japanese government’s outlook frames the ‘Meiji industrial revolution’ sites as a unique national achievement in Asia:

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Ignoring the History of Foreign Forced Labour Table 13.1  Late Tokugawa World Heritage Industrial Sites Location

Prefecture

Component Parts Year Began Year Ceased Function

Area 1 – Hagi

Yamaguchi

Hagi reverbaratory furnace

1856

1856

Ebisugahana Shipyard

1856

1860

Ohitayama Tatara Iron Worksa Hagi Castle Town Shōkasonjuku Academy

1855

1867

1604

1874

1842

1859

Shuseikan

1853

1863

Terayama Charcoal Kiln

1858

1863

Sekiyoshi Sluice Gate of Yoshino Leat Nirayama Reverberatory Furnaces Hashino Iron Mining and Smelting Site Mietsu Naval Dock

1852

1863

1855

1864

Furnace for casting iron cannons

1858

–

Iron furnace/smelting

1858

1871

Ship repair, shipbuilding, dock with adjacent warehouses

Area 2 – Kagoshima

Kagoshima

Area 3 – Nirayama

Shizuoka

Area 4 – Kamaishi

Iwate

Area 5 – Saga

Saga

Dutch design copy of reverberatory furnace (iron) – for ships, munitions Ship construction – Western style timber warships Iron manufacturing for ship fittings Castle and surrounding town Academy teaching Western technology and thought – linked to Choshu clan intending overthrow of Tokugawa Reverberatory furnaces, spinning machines – munitions; burned down in 1863; machine shop linked to spinning mill revived later with British assistance Produced fuel from charcoal for Shuseikan industrial shops Water power for Shuseikan

Sources: Department of Industrial Heritage (2015); ‘Ohitayama Tatara’; ‘Hagi Castle’; Rubinger (1982); Kanno (2016); Smith (1955); Yonekura (1994); ‘Shūseikanjigyō’, Wikipedia (in Japanese) https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9B%86%E6%88%90%E9%A4%A8%E4%BA%8B%E6%A5%AD. a Ohitayama had three periods when iron was produced: 1751–1764, 1812–1822, and 1855–1867. This last period is the one featured in the ‘Meiji Sites’ listing because it involved application of Western engineering knowledge that contributed to later development of Japan’s iron industry during Meiji.

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This transfer of Western industrialization to Asia was unique in not being controlled by external colonial or economic powers, with foreign advisors hired on contract and who trained Japanese to build the infrastructure needed to industrialize. In just 50 years traditional Japan, little changed for centuries, was rapidly transformed into an industrial society on its own terms…. Through industrialization Japan was able to profoundly influence the nation’s social, economic and strategic prospects. This established Japan’s position irrevocably in its own geo-political orbit and ultimately its place on the world stage…. The extraordinary achievement was characterized by a forthright process and adapting Western technologies, especially in the heavy industry sectors of iron and steel, shipbuilding and coal mining. The component sites demonstrate all key historical phases of this unique process. (Department 2015) In contrast, criticisms by the Center for Historical Truth and Justice (Republic of Korea) and the Network for Fact Finding on Wartime Mobilization and Forced Labour ( Japan) focused on Japan’s not telling the history of how these sites are related to the conquest of the empire and using Koreans for forced labour: The NGOs in both Korea and Japan have been critical of the decision and demanded that the sites should reveal the dark history to be remembered, such as Japanese wars of aggression, colonization, forced mobilization and forced labor. The question is whether the principles and values of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention are embodied at the ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution’…. [T]he World Heritage Committee recommended particularly that the Japanese government should prepare an interpretative strategy for the presentation of the Sites which allows an understanding of the ‘full history’ of each site. (Center for Historical Truth 2017) The South Korean government criticized Japan for failing to display information on Korean forced labour at the Tokyo Information Centre after it opened in 2020: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Japanese Ambassador to Seoul Koji Tomita, June 15, to meet with Second Vice Foreign Minister Lee Tae-ho, who expressed displeasure at the way Japan handled the matter…. [T]he ministry issued a statement… ‘The government expresses its strong protest over the fact that the contents of the exhibition at Japan’s Industrial Heritage Information Center in Tokyo, which was made public on June 15, show[s] that the Japanese government neither implemented the ­recommendation made by the World Heritage Committee (WHC) nor took the ­follow-up measures that it promised… In particular, the Japanese government had promised to establish an information center as a measure to remember the victims who were forced to work. It is deeply concerning and disappointing that no efforts to pay tribute to the victims are evident at the newly opened center. (Kang 2020) The South Korean Ministry objected to the Japanese government’s failure to abide by the agreement reached on this issue at the 2015 World Heritage Committee. As Nikolai Johnsen has observed, ‘The condition agreed upon by Japan, South Korea, and the UNESCO World Heritage Committee prior to inscription of the Sites was that Japan must acknowledge that 146

Ignoring the History of Foreign Forced Labour

‘a large number of Koreans and others […] were brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940s at some of the sites.’ Japan stated it was ‘prepared to incorporate appropriate measures into [an] interpretive strategy to remember the victims such as the establishment of [an] information center’ ( Johnsen 2021a). Japan’s final compromise wording, agreed to by South Korea as a side agreement in 2015, was that ‘Koreans were forced to work’ (‘hatarakasareta’), but even this meagre concession vanished from the Tokyo Centre’s presentation (Palmer 2018, Johnsen 2021b). The Japanese government had tacitly promised to respond to the Korean criticisms, but failed to follow through in any of these commitments. Its persistant distortion of Japan’s industrialisation history in fact went beyond omitting the existence of Korean forced labour at the major sites (coal mining, shipbuilding, steel), but it also omitted the wider use of forced labour that included Allied prisoners-of-war and Chinese during World War II. By claiming that Japan’s industrialisation was complete by the end of the Meiji era, which is historically false, the Japanese government could create a nationalist myth focused on development without mention of the role of brutal labour practices. Even Japanese convict labour has been excluded from this version of Meiji industrialisation.

Bakumatsu and Meiji Contrasting Sites – Accurate ‘Industrialization’ History? The ‘Meiji Industrial Revolution’ sites consist of two very different types (see Tables 13.1 and 13.2). One group can be characterized as sites where pre-Meiji industrial initiatives were tried but failed to develop into modern enterprises, producing only limited iron cannons and other basic metal items linked to defence. Included in this group are other light industry initiatives, as well as samurai-oriented schools (‘academies’) on basic Western technology and philosophy. These sites utilized earlier knowledge of metallurgy used in traditional Japanese crafts but based their knowledge of Western technology on Dutch books taught in special school in Nagasaki. Some historians’ claim that these early schools provided a basis for later knowledge that contributed to the development of heavy industry (Morris-Suzuki 1994, Yonekura 1994) is exaggerated and is a claim made at the World Heritage sites. These academies focused on modern Western institutions and knowledge (Rubinger 1982), but not on advanced technical knowledge that could be applied to modern shipbuilding or machinery construction, crucial to industrialization. An exception was Nagasaki, where a training school in the last years of the Bakumatsu was run by Dutch instructors and linked to the government’s newly established shipyard (Burke-Gaffney 2009, Palmer 2016b). Later during Meiji, foreign experts controlled technical operations at the shipyard, but when Mitsubishi bought the yard in 1884 it promoted Japanese trained engineers who gradually replaced them. Many of the new Japanese engineers were trained overseas, but on-the-job training was also significant (Fukasaku 1992). Nagasaki Shipyard was one of the few enterprises in the Bakumatsu-listed group that did not fail or disappear after a number of years of production. The Bakumatsu sites before the Meiji Restoration of 1868 are Area 1 – Hagi (in Yamaguchi prefecture); Area 2 – Kagoshima (in Kagoshima prefecture); Area 3 – Nirayama (in Shizuoka prefecture); Area 4 – Kamaishi (in Iwate prefecture); and Area 5 – Saga (in Saga prefecture). Both Kagoshima and Saga are in Kyushu, and it is Kyushu that is the real focus of the World Heritage sites. But neither Kagoshima nor Saga were locations at the heart of Japan’s industrialization in heavy industry, much less extensive steam-powered factory production, especially the spinning mills that drove Japan’s exports, which emerged in the Kantō (Tokyo) and Kansai (Osaka) regions at the end of the nineteenth century (Lockwood 1954, Tsurumi 1990). Economic historians generally consider that Japan’s industrialized economic ‘take 147

David Palmer Table 13.2  Meiji Era World Heritage Sites (Group 2) Location

Prefecture

Site

Component Parts Year Began

Year Ceased

Function

Area 6 – Nagasaki

Nagasaki

Nagasaki Shipyard

Kosuge Slip Dock

1869

?

Nagasaki Shipyard Nagasaki Shipyard

Mitsubishi No. 3 Dry Dock Mitsubishi Giant Cantilever Crane Mitsubishi former pattern shop Mitsubishi Senshokaku Guest House

1905

Continues

1909

Continues

Scottish slip dock for ship repairs, steam powered Construction shipway Scottish import, electrical powered

1898

1985

1904

Continues

Nagasaki Shipyard Nagasaki Shipyard

Takashima Takashima 1869 Coal Mine Coal Mine Hashima Coal 1890 Mine Glover – 1863 House and Office

Area 7 – Miike

Area 8 – Yawata

Fukuoka

Miike Coal Miike Coal Mine and Mine Miike Port Miike Port

Kumamoto Misumi West Port Fukuoka Imperial Steel Works, Japan

1974

Coal mine

Public museum

House/office of engineer and entrepreneur Glover – linked to Nagasaki industries Coal mine

1872/1899a 1997

1908 1887

Imperial Steel 1901 Works, Japan: buildings – First Head Office; Repair shop; Forge Shop Onga River Pumping Station

1986

Pattern shop, converted to museum Shipyard Director’s house, later as corporate functions venue Coal mine

1910

Continues

Port – used by Mitsui for coal 1903 Port – used by Mitsui for coal Modernized, Integrated iron and steel old sites ceased mill – W.H. ‘component parts’ are auxilary buildings, office only Continues Pumped water to Yawata 11 km away

Sources: Hashimoto and Telfer (2017); Yonekura (1994); Palmer (2018, 2021). a Purchased by Mitsui from Meiji government.

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off’ occurred in the two decades after 1880, but was led by light industry rather than heavy industry (Landes 1965, Nakamura 1966), while the full establishment of industrialization in heavy industry occurred during the WWI era commencing in 1915 and accelerating until 1920 (Morikawa 1997, Palmer 2021). Only by this later period did Japan achieve a high degree of self-sufficiency and was not mainly dependent on imported machinery and materials (Fukasaku 1992, Yonekura 1994). The Bakumatsu era sites all have a link to military defence, whether in munitions or ships useful for protecting coast lines. Inclusion of ‘Hagi Castle Town’, however, indicates how the intrusion of promoting tourism distorts this approach to ‘industrial heritage’, as the town itself has no direct link to proto-industry, except for remains of the nearby Hagi reverberatory furnace and Ohitayama iron works. The Shokasonju Academy is famous for Yoshida Shoin attending as he was involved with the Choshu rebels who overthrew the Shogunate. But these historical figures and their actions have no substantial link to the foundation of Japan’s steel industry at Yawata in 1901, a half century later. The case for inclusion of Kumamoto’s Shuseikan is stronger for ‘industrialization’ but not for ‘heavy industry’. The reverberatory furnace was used to create light industry machinery that powered cotton weaving, pottery, and glass works at this site, but this advance did not play any role in the founding of Japan’s steel industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. The distinction of the second, far more significant group is that all the sites, except Yawata Steel Works, were linked to the two most powerful zaibatsu from late Meiji through the post-Second World War era: Mitsubishi and Mitsui. The Meiji government owned Yawata, but it was broken up after WWII, privatized, and eventually owned by a merger of Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metals. The Takashima island undersea coal mines – including Hashima Coal Mine (Gunkanjima/Battleship Island), the Nagasaki Shipyard, Miike Coal Mine, and Yawata Steel Works – were all large, successful enterprises with production spanning most of the twentieth century. In contrast to the first group, all those in the second group achieved economies of scale, had internal training schools, and by the 1920s had hierarchical modern management that has defined the modern corporation (Chandler et al. 1997). The problem of historical trauma related to the ‘Meiji sites’ in this second group is because these sites relied on Korean forced labour during WWII. But the issue of ‘trauma’ goes beyond just Koreans and that war and relates to the broader question raised by sociologists concerned with collective trauma and historical memory (Saito 2006). Related to this collective trauma but not addressed in Japan’s lengthy nomination to UNESCO is the way the attendant controversies have revived this historical memory of Japanese colonization among Koreans. Year 1910 was the very year that Japan supposedly achieved full self-sufficiency in industry, but for Koreans that year was when they were conquered by Japan and they lost their independence.

Mitsubishi’s Industrial Complex in Nagasaki and the Shipyard A starting point for understanding the forced labour controversy is to analyse Mitsubishi’s industries in Nagasaki City and in surrounding parts of Kyushu. There are nine ‘component parts’ of the ‘Nagasaki Site’, more than any other ‘Site’ location. The Nagasaki City region also has the most diverse range of component parts. But these are somewhat misleading regarding Mitsubishi’s broad impact on Nagasaki City between the 1880s through Second World War. By the Second World War, Mitsubishi had many industries linked to shipbuilding and munitions throughout the city. The centrality of Nagasaki to Japan’s modern development extends back to the early seventeenth century when Nagasaki became Japan’s 149

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most important link to the West after the Tokugawa Shogunate closed the country to all Westerners except Dutch traders. The Dutch were confined to the small artificial island of Dejima, just steps from the city of Nagasaki. All European knowledge came through this tiny location, but this ‘Dutch Learning’ provided Japan with sources of information on science, medicine, and munitions. After Japan was compelled to open its ports to the West, following Commodore Perry’s ships entering Edo Harbour in 1853, European engineers and entrepreneurs could work with local Japanese in Nagasaki City. Nagasaki also had been open to Chinese traders during the centuries of seclusion, which made it an important trading port in the early Meiji years (Palmer 2016b). The most important of the early Europeans of this era was Thomas Glover, a Scottish engineer who was instrumental in building the first mechanized slip way in Japan (one of the ‘component parts’ of the ‘Nagasaki Site’), which later was purchased by the Meiji government for its newly established shipyard. Glover also brought mining equipment from England for the Takashima coal mine off Nagasaki Bay. Glover’s house and office, which have been a major tourist attraction for decades, are part of the World Heritage sites in Nagasaki for this reason. Early ship repair operations at the Kosuge Slip Dock also led to its inclusion, but based on the author’s personal visits to this site almost no tourists visited the site before its World Heritage inscription given its obscure location off a highway south of the city (Burke-Gaffney 2009). In 1881, Mitsubishi purchased the Takashima mine, as it diversified from being primarily a shipping company into mining and industrial assets. The Hashima Coal Mine, popularly known as Gunkanjima/Battleship Island, was later developed as part of the Takashima mining operation owned by Mitsubishi. It is by far the most popular tourist draw among the ‘Meiji’ sites, and has been featured in movies, including a cameo in the James Bond film Skyfall. But Hashima reveals how labelling these sites as ‘Meiji era’ is misleading. All the ruined buildings that tourists come to see, which seem like a ghost city, were built in the years after the Meiji era, except one red brick facade still standing, which was one of the original offices on the island. The inscription was granted partly for this facade, but also for the stone wall embankment surrounding the island, as well as for an opening that was an original pit. This focus on particular, obscure remaining physical structures and objects is characteristic of other sites in the World Heritage inscription, but based on the author’s own visit to the island and discussions with a number of Nagasaki activists, tourists do not understand the architectural history of Gunkanjima (Palmer 2018). Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki Shipyard was more than just shipways for constructing hulls. All major shipyards in industrialized countries had large shops for plate, machining, carpentry, turbine construction, and so on (Palmer 1998), and Nagasaki Shipyard followed this system of organized production. The shipways were only one section of the yard, while other key parts of shipyards included, and still include, many auxiliary buildings involved in manufacturing the wide range of parts and materials that go into ships. The Kosuge Slip Dock on the opposite side of the harbour was purchased by Mitsubishi but was not part of the main shipyard and soon became obsolete. The structures that were designated as ‘component parts’ of the shipyard include No. 3 Dry Dock and the ‘Giant Cantilever Crane’. The crane was installed in 1909, meaning that its functional use extended beyond 1910. It is largely a symbolic piece of equipment, still in use but not central to ‘industrialization’ and was imported from Great Britain, not built in Japan. The dry dock, however, is significant because it indicates that capital ships were finally being produced in Japan, not at overseas shipyards. But Japan’s large naval ships were all produced overseas until the Battleship Kirishima was built at the Nagasaki yard, with a keel laid down in 1912 and completed in 1915 (Fukasaku). 150

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Other shipyards played just as important a role in the first construction of ships in Japan, including the Kawasaki Shipyard in Kobe and the Kure and Yokosuka government naval shipyards, but Nagasaki was Japan’s largest yard before the Second World War when the entire shipbuilding complex is taken into account. But armour plate for naval vessels still came from Great Britain as the Yawata Steel Works did not have the technological capability to produce quality armour plate until the First World War, when imports vanished during the ‘steel famine’ in Japan and pushed Yawata to adapt (Evans and Peattie 1997). The former pattern shop at the Nagasaki yard is an important historical structure and has been a museum since the 1980s, but has never been open to the general public. The problem with not including other significant buildings that were part of the turn of the century shipbuilding complex is that most of those north of the shipways were destroyed in the 1945 atomic bombing. The Mitsubishi Shipyard Guest House that is not open to visitors may have heritage significance, but it played no real role in the ‘industrial revolution’ in technological and production terms. This selective history of the Nagasaki Shipyard contributes to a distorted view of Japan’s shipbuilding industrialization, and this in turn contributes to a distortion of the yard’s labour history and the use of forced labour – Korean and Allied prisoners-of-war – during the Second World War. The World Heritage focus on ‘conservation’ without a broader analysis of how shipyards operated has led to accepting a misguided view of industrial history that does not apply adequately to industrial sites generally. It also conveys no sense of the work required in steel shipbuilding, which has had a wide range of highly skilled craft jobs, along with sophisticated engineering operations and construction of huge machines such as turbines. Furthermore, existing museums that do provide a broader view of industrial history in Kyushu are not part of the ‘Meiji’ sites. These include the outdoor steel works museum centring on Yawata’s blast furnace built in 1901 in Kokura (Palmer 2018) and the Tagawa City Coal Mining Museum (Nishida 2014), which focuses on Chikuhō coal field miners who worked in mines linked to Yawata and that included large mines owned by Mitsubishi and Mitsui. The many Chikuhō coal mines in northern Kyushu that powered steam engines were crucial for Japan’s railroads and factory production. None of the World Heritage Yawata sites are open to the public, in contrast to these museums that provide actual detailed history of the industries where visitors can learn about Japan’s industrialization, even though both these museums neglect to mention wartime use of Korean and Chinese forced labourers in all those mines.

Coal Mine Labour at Mitsui Miike and Mitsubishi Hashima – Ignoring Forced Labourers Overall, Hashima and Miike coal mines were among the most advanced in late nineteenth century Japan, but this related primarily to modern winding machines above shafts used for raising coal and sending miners underground, as well as ventilation systems and pumps for removing water from underground tunnels. The Nagasaki Shipyard machine shops built this equipment for Hashima and Mitsui’s Miike coal mines (Mitsubishi 1956, 1985) The use of modern mining machinery underground did not develop in any substantial way until the 1920s, and even then, the technology of digging coal remained at a relatively primitive level in comparison to the introduction of new machinery underground that mechanized work for miners in the United States and Western Europe. Coal mining during the Meiji era was the most labour-intensive of all ‘heavy industries’ that were developing in Japan because of this lag in underground mechanization (Minami 1986, Nishida 2014, Palmer 2021). None of this 151

David Palmer

history of slow mechanization underground is covered in the official museum ­presentations on these two mines, and this omission relates to the broader problem of the character of mine work and who the miners were. Miike Coal Mine used regular waged Japanese miners but also used Japanese convicts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only gradually phasing them out in the first decade of the twentieth century in response to new government regulations. Until the First World War, the mine still used husband and wife teams doing gruelling work by hand (Nishida 2014, Arents and Tsuneishi 2015). The Great War changed much of this labour-­intensive work, but mechanization underground at Miike became standard only in the 1920s, even though horses for hauling underground were not eliminated until the end of that decade (Palmer, 2021). Koreans migrated to Japan to take up labouring jobs in Japan, following colonization of Korea in 1910. This migration was driven by poverty as land in Korea became increasingly concentrated under Japanese owners and wealthy Korean landlords, and opportunities seemed better in Japan as well. The jobs in Japan for Koreans, however, were often no better, with workers confined to crowded dormitories (takobeya – or ‘octopus rooms’). Full-scale war in China by 1937 led to labour shortages as Japanese were recruited into the Army to fight on behalf of Japan’s expanding Asian empire. By 1939, Koreans were conscripted forcibly under Japan’s new laws. Once in Japan, the conscripts could not leave when their contract expired. With the onset of the Second World War in the Pacific – 1941 – the Japanese government and colonial authorities escalated methods of forced mobilization (Palmer 2016a). World Heritage sites where Korean forced labour was used – Hashima Coal Mine, Mitsui Coal Mine, Nagasaki Shipyard, and Yawata Steel Works – have increased popular anger in Korea and led to protests, as well as continued publications of the history of these sites and oral histories of Koreans who worked there. The starkest contrast in Japanese and Korean views has been over Hashima/Gunkanjima (Battleship Island). For tourists, both Japanese and international, the interest in Gunkanjima is that it is an eerie site, a ruined and abandoned town on a small island with the silhouette of a battleship. But for Koreans aware of the wartime history of the coal mining island city it represents forced labour. Hashima’s isolation as an island undersea coal mine meant that Koreans and Chinese who were forced to work there could not freely come and go as Japanese workers and their families who lived on the island could. Koreans conscripted by 1939 were separated from their families, and the island mine became a prison from which they could not escape. The Japanese government and its supporters dismiss the view that Koreans were forcibly mobilized from 1939 to 1945 and used as forced labourers in Japan. They state that the wartime emergency meant that all eligible subjects of Japan could be conscripted under law (Palmer 2016a). They further contend that Koreans were not treated differently from Japanese and that Korean claims are false and, in some cases, fabricated. In the case of Gunkanjima, the Tokyo Information Centre presents testimony of a single Korean, Ku Yŏnch’ŏl, who is alleged to be making exaggerated statements about his experiences. According to Johnsen, the Director of the Meiji Industrial Revolution Sites, Katō Kōko, ‘derisively claims that while Ku Yŏnch’ŏl described Korean forced labourers as slaves, Japanese people who lived on Hashima during the war fondly remember studying, playing, and toiling at work together with their ‘friends from Korea’. She … suggests that Ku Yŏnch’ŏl’s testimony is part of a communist conspiracy, declaring that she cannot leave Ku Yŏnch’ŏl’s ‘allegations’ alone because she believes they are ‘not only inaccurate, but also possibly hiding a political agenda’ ( Johnsen 2021b). Many other Korean testimonies of former Gunkanjima workers making similar claims as Ku are ignored and none are displayed (Nagasaki Zainichi Chyōsenjin 152

Ignoring the History of Foreign Forced Labour

2011). The extent of politicization by the Abe government of the World Heritage ‘Meiji Sites’ and later distortion of the sites’ histories under the direction of Katō Kōko has been well documented by Johnsen (2021a, 2021b). Koreans dispute the argument about conscription and equal conditions for Koreans in Japan based on four main bodies of evidence: oral testimonies of former Korean workers at these sites; detailed historical accounts from documents and stories from that time; evidence that Koreans were not paid wages owed them, nor were their families paid the 50 per cent supposedly sent to them; and the legal argument that Japan’s colonial law was illegitimate because so was Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945, making conscription illegal, especially given evidence that force was used in mobilizing workers (Takeuchi 2013, Palmer 2016a). A major problem regarding evidence of forced labour, which includes calculating actual numbers of Koreans used at these worksites, determining whether or not wages were paid, and determining causes of deaths of Koreans at these sites, particularly in dangerous coal mines, is that the two major Japanese companies that ran these sites – Mitsubishi and Mitsui – have refused to fully open their company records to historians and legal authorities for review (Augustine 2011, Takeuchi 2013). In contrast, major German companies that profited from foreign forced labour under the Third Reich opened their archives for historians. Settlements for compensation to forced labour victims under Nazi Germany through the ‘Foundation Remembrance Recognition and Future’ could not have been completed without these companies allowing historians access to their wartime records ( Jansen and Saathoff 2009). The Japanese government has also not been forthcoming in opening all government records, releasing only some of these. It has been particularly difficult to determine the exact numbers of forced labourers (Korean and Chinese only) at Gunkanjima, but for the other major coal mine – Miike, run by Mitsui – there is better evidence, in part because there were many Allied prisoners-of-war at the Miike Coal Mine. This mine became evidence for prosecution of abuses against POWs during the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and Class B and C trials. This evidence, in turn, has helped shed new light on the overall abuses by guards and supervisors working for Mitsui at that mine, and raises serious questions about Mitsui’s upper management and authorities in the wartime government regarding abuses. Table 13.3 lists the approximate number of workers at the mine complex, which includes some POWs who worked at the smelter connected to the mine. For POWs the numbers are exact because of Allied government records in Australia, the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands. But for Koreans and Chinese we must rely on less reliable sources primarily from the Japanese government and only minimally from companies. Nevertheless, POW accounts of abuse, torture, and even deaths through malnutrition and disease at worksites tend to validate claims by Koreans that they received similar treatment at the Miike Mine. Furthermore, there was strict segregation of work groups based on ethnicity and separation from contact with Japanese miners, but not Japanese supervisors and guards. Each forced labour group worked apart from other forced labour groups. Non-Japanese workers underground were compelled to work in the worst and most dangerous parts of the mine, which contributed to accidents and terrible working conditions (Palmer 2021). Between 1939 and 1945, the South Korean Commission on Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism calculated that 798,043 Koreans were conscripted for forced labour inside Japan. Of these Koreans, 356,995 were used as forced labourers in coal mines, wartime work-places with the highest death rates (Commission on Verification). The Miike and Takashima (Hashima/Gunkanjima and Takashima islands) Coal Mines therefore are a crucial part of explaining this controversy. 153

David Palmer Table 13.3  Mitsui Miike Coal Mine Workforce (Approximate for 1945) Workers

Total Number

Deaths (1939 to Sept. 1945)

Japanese Korean Chinese POW Total Allied Forces American Australian British Dutch Other Total Forced Labour (Koreans, Chinese, POWs) All workers

11,398 1,683 564 1,910 829 440 268 355 18 4,157

? 50 47 138 59 20 18 41 – 235

15,555

?

Sources: Tanaka (1990); Tanaka (2012); Takeuchi (2013, 2015); Center for Research: Allied POWs; Palmer (2021).

Identifying Koreans’ Cultural Trauma – Responses to ‘Meiji Industrial Revolution’ Sites Koreans’ anger over the ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution’ has encompassed four aspects of Japan’s history in relation to Korea and Koreans. First has been the use of forced labour of Koreans from 1939 to 1945, but also the view among many Koreans that this abuse of Korean workers preceded the war and was related to discrimination against Koreans in Japan, and also that this discrimination has persisted since then. The many testimonies of former Korean workers who have told their personal stories of forced labour have reinforced this outlook. For many Koreans, it has become a personal and family issue, both in South Korea and in the Korean communities in Japan. Activists in Japan who have advocated for the truth of this history have assisted in publishing these testimonies, but also have created memorials and museums dedicated to the memory of Korean forced labourers. In Nagasaki, Japanese and Korean activists established an independent museum – the Oka Masaharu Peace Memorial Museum – dedicated to countering the official Japan government narrative by displaying publicly the history of forced labour and publishing accounts of this history. They have been the most vocal advocates of changing how Gunkanjima’s history is presented. Another significance of Nagasaki in this alternative history has involved Korean atomic bomb survivors, former forced labourers at Mitsubishi Shipbuilding, who went to court to obtain hibakusha medical benefits that the Japanese government denied them. They related their work experiences as part of the evidence that they were in Nagasaki at the time of the atomic bombing, and this brought out further evidence of how Koreans were used as forced labourers. Companies were held responsible, and Mitsubishi was at the heart of these claims (Palmer 2016a). Related to Koreans being used for forced labour in Japan has been Japan’s wartime ‘comfort women’ system, using Korean women for sexual slavery. This practice existed not only in the military but also in coal mine brothels in Japan (Takeuchi 2013, 2015). While former

154

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Korean women subjected to this system have won court cases in South Korea, the Japanese government has refused to recognize these women as former sex slaves, labelling them instead as prostitutes. Koreans generally view the ‘comfort women’ and forced labour systems as part of the larger system of oppression that Japan practised in wartime against their people. A second aspect of Korean collective trauma has been memories and accounts of forced mobilization – conscription by compulsion – that uprooted Koreans from their families and homeland. This experience remains particularly traumatic for relatives of young Korean men who died at forced labour sites in Japan, because neither their deaths nor the cause of their deaths were officially acknowledged, much less compensated by either the Japanese government or the companies responsible (Takeuchi 2015). Third has been the broader issue of Japan’s colonial control of Korea, something shared by almost all Koreans and a constant issue in Korean society and Korean/Japanese government relations. South Korea’s most important national holiday is National Day, held on 15 August, which was the date in 1945 when Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule. Japan’s hegemony over Korea began in the 1890s, especially when China lost influence in Korea when it was defeated in the first Sino-Japanese War. This was followed by international recognition of Japan’s dominance in Korea by the West, following Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Finally, full colonial control in the 1910 annexation made Korea a subordinate part of Japan, and Koreans were made ‘subjects’ of Japan, forcing name changes to Japanese, compelling worship of the Emperor, and teaching Japanese, not Korean, in schools. Mitsubishi and Mitsui profited from this new regime in Korea. The ‘Meiji Sites’ have become symbolic for Koreans of this colonial history and the Japanese government’s and companies’ refusal to openly acknowledge the sordid history connected to the sites. Finally, there is the larger issue of the economic and social exploitation of Korea that involved theft of resources and exploitation of Koreans as a people. Mitsubishi and Mitsui controlled coal and iron ore mines in Korea, built factories using Korean cheap labour, and forced labour in wartime. The politicization of the ‘Meiji Sites’ nomination, distortions about working conditions presented at museums, the absence of historical signage at the World Heritage sites, and subsequent failure to respond to World Heritage Committee criticisms about Japan’s violation of its agreement with South Korea about the signage have further angered many Koreans and led to regular criticisms by the former Moon Jae-in government (2017–2022) in South Korea. The role of Mitsubishi and Mitsui in this politicization potentially corrupts the UNESCO World Heritage inscription process ( Johnsen 2021a, 2021b). Far more research is needed to investigate the full history of Japan’s complex industrialization identified with the ‘Meiji Sites’. The World Heritage locations would benefit from moving beyond simplistic periodization categories, the narrow focus only on buildings and some machinery, and nationalist narratives that glorify Japan’s ‘unique success’ while ignoring the actual social history of workers – whether negative or positive – at these worksites. The role of all workers who contributed to the industrialization process would give a more valid account of this history and would counter perceptions that Japan is using these sites to promote nationalist propaganda. Museums and site presentations with more accurate history could enhance a better understanding not just of this history but also as a way to improve relations between Koreans and Japanese by showing genuine concern in addressing the grievances of Koreans.

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Works Cited Arents, T. and N. Tsuneishi (2015), ‘The Uneven Recruitment of Korean Miners in Japan in the 1910s and 1920s: Employment Strategies of the Miike and Chikuhō Coalmining Companies’, International Review of Social History, 60, 121–143. Augustine, M.R. (2011) ‘Restitution for Reconciliation: The U.S., Japan, and the Unpaid Assets of Asian Forced Mobilization Victims’, Journal of Northeast Asian History, 1, 5–37. Burke-Gaffney, B. (2009) Nagasaki: The British Experience, 1854–1945. Kent: Global Oriental. The Center for Historical Truth and Justice, Republic of Korean, and Network for Fact Finding on Wartime Mobilization and Forced Labor, Japan (2017) Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution and Forced Labor: Korea-Japan NGO Guidebook (Seoul, Korea / Kobe, Japan). Center for Research: Allied POWs under the Japanese, spreadsheet linked to ‘Fukuoka POW Camp #17 Omuta’. Online. Available HTTP: POWs include miners and smelter workers connected to Miike Mine. Few Americans or Australian worked in the smelter. This number is most accurate for 1945 because that was the year with most number of POWs (accessed 30 May 2022). Chandler, A.D. Jr., F. Amatori, and T. Hikino (eds.) (1997) Big Business and the Wealth of Nations, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea, Republic of South Korea (2016), Final Report of the Commission’s Activities: Summary (trans. Jimin Kim), June. Department of Industrial Heritage World Heritage Inscription (2015), ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution – Kyushu Yamaguchi and Related Areas: World Heritage Nomination, Japan’, Tokyo: Government of Japan, Cabinet Secretariat, Regional Revitalization Bureau. Submission to UNESCO World Heritage Conventions, Documents. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 19 May, 2022). Evans, D.C. and M.R. Peattie (1997) Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887–1941. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Fukasaku, Y. (1992) The Technology and Industrial Development in Pre-War Japan: Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard, 1884–1934. London: Routledge. ‘Hagi Castle’, Wikipedia. Online. Available HTTP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagi_Castle (accessed 22 May 2022). Hashimoto, A. and D.J. Telfer (2017) ‘Transformation of Gunkanjima (Battleship Island): From a Coalmine Island to a Modern Industrial Heritage Tourism Site in Japan,’ Journal of Heritage Tourism, 12:2, 107–124. ICOMOS (International Commission on Monuments and Sites) (2021) ‘Report of the UNESCO ICOMOS Mission to the Industrial Heritage Information Centre Related to the World Heritage Property ‘Sites of Japan’s Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining’ ( Japan) (C1484) – 7 to 9 June 2021’, 2 July 2021. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 May 2022). Jansen, M. and G. Saathoff (eds.) (2009) A Mutual Responsibility and a Moral Obligation– The Final Report on Germany’s Compensation Programs for Forced Labor and other Personal Injuries, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnsen, N. (2021a) ‘Katō Kōko’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Forgetting Forced Labor to Celebrate Japan’s World Heritage Sites – Part 1’, The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus, 19:23, 1, Dec. 1. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 May 2022). Johnsen, N. (2021b) ‘Katō Kōko’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Forgetting Forced Labor to Celebrate Japan’s World Heritage Sites – Part 2’, The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus, 19:24, 5, Dec. 15. Online. Available HTTP: < https://apjjf.org/2021/24/Johnsen.html> (accessed 30 May 2022). Kang S.W. (2020), ‘Japan Fails to Recognize Victims of Korean Forced Labor,’ Korean Times, 17 June. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 19 May 2022). Kanno, T. (2016) World Cultural Heritage—Solving 10 Mysteries of Nirayama Reverberatory Furnace. Shizuoka: Kimura Chuzosho Co., Ltd. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 22 May 22 2022). Landes, D.S. (1965) ‘Japan and Europe: Contrasts in Industrialisation’, in W.W. Lockwood (ed.) The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan: Essays in the Political Economy of Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Ignoring the History of Foreign Forced Labour Lockwood, W.W. (1954) The Economic Development of Japan: Growth and Structural Change, 1868–1939. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Minami, R. (1986) The Economic Development of Japan: A Quantitative Study. London: Macmillan Press. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., Nagasaki Shipyard & Machinery Works (1985), “Museum” (guidebook in English), Nagasaki. Mitsubishi Jūkōgyō Kabushiki Kaisha (1956) Mitsubishi Jūkōgyō Kabushiki Kaisha shi. Tokyo: Mitsubishi Jūkōgyō Kabushiki Kaisha. Morikawa, H. (1997) ‘Japan: Increasing Organizational Capabilities of Large Industrial Enterprises, 1880s-1980s’, in A.D. Chandler, Jr., F. Amatori, and T. Hikino (eds.) Big Business and the Wealth of Nations. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. pp.307-335. Morris-Suzuki, T. (1994) The Technological Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the TwentyFirst Century. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Nagasaki Zainichi Chyōsenjin no Jinken o Mamorukai (2011) Gunkanjima ni mimi o sumaseba. Tokyo: Shakai Shyōron Sha. Nakamura T. (1966) ‘The Modern Industries and the Traditional Industries – at the Early Stage of the Japanese Economy’, Developing Economies, 4(4): 567–593. Nishida Y. (2014) Yamamoto Sakube to yama no kiroku. Tokyo: Heibonsha. ‘Ohitayama Tatara seitetsu iseki (Ohitayama Tatara Iron Manufacture Historic Ruins)’, Wikipedia ( Japanese version). Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 22 May, 2022). Palmer, D. (1998) Organizing the Shipyards: Union Strategy in Three Northeast Ports, 1933–1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Palmer, D. (2016a) ‘Foreign Forced Labor at Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki and Hiroshima Shipyards: Big Business, Militarized Government, and the Absence of Shipbuilding Workers’ Rights in World War II Japan,’ in M. van der Linden and M. Rodriguez Garcia (eds.) On Coerced Labour: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery. Leiden: Brill. Pp.159-184 Palmer, D. (2016b) ‘Nagasaki’s Districts: Western Contact with Japan through the History of a City’s Space,’ Journal of Urban History, 42(3): 466–507. Palmer, D. (2018) ‘Gunkanjima / Battleship Island, Nagasaki: World Heritage Historical Site or Urban Ruins Tourist Attraction?,’ The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus, 16:1, 4, Jan. 1. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 May 2022). Palmer, D. (2021) ‘Japan’s World Heritage Miike Coal Mine – Where prisoners-of-war worked ‘like slaves’,’ The Asia Pacific Journal/Japan Focus, 19:13, 1, July 1. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 May 2022). Rubinger, R. (1982) Private Academies of the Tokugawa Period. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Saito, H. (2006) ‘Reiterating Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma’, Sociological Theory, 24:4, 353–376. ‘Shūseikanjigyō’, Wikipedia (in Japanese). Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 31 May 2022). ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining Inscribed on the World Heritage List’ (2015), Directed by Koko Kato (government website, no further identification). Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 19 May 2022). Smith, T.C. (1955) Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan: Government Enterprise, 1868– 1880. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Takeuchi, Y. (2013) Chōsa: Chōsenjin kyōseirōdō 1, tankō hen. Kyoto: Shakaironhyōsha. Takeuchi, Y. (2015) Senji chyōsenjin kyōsen rōdō chyōsa shiryōshu: zōho kaiteihan – renkōsen ichiran – zenkoku chizu – shibōsha meibō. Kobe: Kobe Student Youth Center. Tanaka, H. (1990) Chūgokujin kyōsei renkō no kiroku: Shiryō. Tokyo: Kōeibunkasha. Tanaka, T. (2012) Miike Tankō tanjin bakuhatsu jiko ni miru saigai fukushi no shiza: seikatsu mondai to shakai seisaku ni nokosareta. Kyoto: Bukkyo University. Tsurumi, E.P. (1990) Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yonekura, S. (1994) The Japanese Iron and Steel Industry, 1850–1990. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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14 MEMORIES AND DISPLAYS OF JAPAN’S EARLY INDUSTRIALISATION THROUGH THE PRODUCTION OF SILK Tomioka Silk Mill, Nomugi Pass and WWII Propaganda Tets Kimura

UNESCO World Heritage designation is coveted by nations around the world to gain international recognition and boost tourism. This designation is also subject to political influences and diplomatic manoeuvring as nations vie for the UNESCO imprimatur for their sites and narratives. As East Asia’s trauma wars have escalated in the twenty-first century, the disputes have spread from textbooks, museums and statues to new battlegrounds such as World Heritage designation (Palmer 2018) and inclusion in UNESCO’s Memory of the World project (Vickers 2021). In 2015, Japan’s bid for UNESCO World Heritage designation for Meiji-era industrial sites was contested by South Korea but a compromise was reached with Seoul supporting the bid, contingent on Japan placing signage at these sites recognising the contributions of Koreans forced to work in those mines and factories. As of 2022, Japan has not honoured this quid pro quo. In this context, it is interesting that the Tomioka Silk Mill has not stirred much controversy despite the documented history of exploitation of women who worked in the silk industry. Their key role in producing Japan’s most important export commodity and source of revenues to pay for Japan’s modernisation is widely acknowledged. However, Tomioka conveys a selective glorifying narrative that overlooks the abuses and trauma experienced, one that aligns with the agenda of historical revisionists like Prime Minister Abe Shinzo (2006–2007, 2012–2020) who seek to rewrite and rehabilitate Japan’s modern history to nurture pride in nation.

Silk in Japanese History and the Establishment of Modern Silk Mills Silk originated in China thousands of years ago, and its production is believed to have been introduced in Japan as early as the late second century, becoming a taxable currency by the 158

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eighth century (The Dainippon Silk Foundation n.d.). The quality of Japanese silk increased during the peaceful Edo period to meet growing demand, consumption and the desire for luxury goods. When Carl Peter Thunberg visited Japan for the Dutch East India Company from 1775 to 1776, he noted the high quality of Japanese manufacturing goods including silk: ‘They (the Japanese) work extremely well in iron and copper and their silk and common manufactures, and sometimes even excel, the production of other Eastern countries’ (Thunberg 2005/1795, 220). Silk production was encouraged by the Tokugawa shogunate to reduce Japan’s trade debt with China. By the late Edo period, mills established by rural elites were profitable for their rural communities (Gordon 2014a, 94). Due to the silk production infrastructure built before the Meiji Restoration, the light industry of silk, as opposed to the heavy coal industry, had an early kick-off. In the 1860s, the silk industry in Europe, especially in France and Italy where the production level was high, suffered a devastating outbreak of silkworm diseases (Reischauer & Albert 1979, 148; Tomioka Seishijo Sekai Isan Dendoshu Kyokai 2011, 10–12). Furthermore, there was a decline in Chinese raw silk production due to the Taiping Rebellion and the battle between the Qing dynasty and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom that followed (Ishii 1991, 95). Due to such external influences, the demand for Japanese silk in the global market increased (Tomioka Seishijo Sekai Isan Dendoshu Kyokai 2011, 12–13). This booming silk export sector was supported by existing production of cocoons that were ‘raised in small sheds on family farms’ (Gordon 2014a, 94). However, to capitalise on this advantage, Japan still needed to modernise its silk production processing. The European silk sector was already recovering by 1868, and the quality of Japanese silk was declining as a consequence of overproduction (Ishii 1991, 95). Japan already had rural community silk mills that could be transformed into small modern factories with the latest Western technologies. According to Slade (2009, 3), who studies the modernity of Japanese fashion, ‘nineteenth-century modernity was imperial as much as it was industrial.’ Newly established Imperial Japan decided to expand in the global silk market by adopting modern technologies (Wittner 2007). Due to social values and structures established during the long-lasting Tokugawa shogunate however, ‘scientific and technological advances and social and economic reforms created anxiety’ (Slade 2009, 4). Nonetheless, the modern silk production of Meiji Japan had a significant impact on Japanese industrial history. It soon became essential for Japanese economic growth as it remained the most profitable export commodity until the 1930s, earning vital foreign exchange. In just three decades from the 1860s to the 1890s through the modernisation programme of the Meiji Restoration, Japan came to be the ‘workshop of Asia’ (Gordon 2014a, 93). Hundreds of silk mills, including the leading Tomioka Silk Mill, were established during the Meiji era. The raw silk production of Japan almost quintupled from 1868 to 1893, from 2.3 million pounds to 10.2 million pounds, and further quadrupled from the 1890s through to the eve of WWI in 1913 (Gordon 2014a, 94–95; see also Gordon 2011). As with most Japanese export commodities in this era, prices for silk were unstable; for example, the ­ owever, price fell by almost half from 1880 to 1884 due to overproduction. Inopportunely, h Japan had no other exports to count on; thus, it continued relying on demand from Europe and the United States to sustain its silk industry and generate export revenues. In the first ­twenty-five years of the Meiji period, silk was responsible for at least 42 per cent of total Japanese export revenue (Gordon 2014a, 94), although some estimates pegged it at over 60 per cent (Yamamoto 1968, 12) or even 86 per cent (Bunkazai Kenzobutsu Hozon Gijutsu Kyokai 2006, 9). Silk exports continued to be the leading source of revenue for Japan until 1937 (Yamamoto 1968, 12). For the resource-poor nation of Japan, silk was a valuable 159

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commodity that was produced entirely from domestic inputs—mulberry leaves, silkworms and labour—­generating the revenue needed to realise the Meiji oligarch’s ambitions of fukoku kyohei (enriching the nation, strengthening the military). In Yamamoto’s (1968, 56) view, the glory of Meiji Japan’s achievements, including victory in the Russo-Japanese War, was made possible by hardworking silk mill workers, because without the export revenue from silk, Japan would have been unable to pay for modernising its economy and military. In the brutal power game of nineteenth-century international politics, there was no option for Japan’s survival other than to establish a strong military. The establishment of the Tomioka Silk Mill was a project led by the Meiji elite, notably Ito Hirobumi, Okuma Shigenobu and Shibusawa Eiichi, who approached French diplomats to seek advice (Yuki et al. 2012, 4–5).1 In 1870, two years after the Meiji Restoration, the French oyatoi gaikokujin (foreign advisors to teach the latest Western technologies and knowledge in Japan) Paul Brunat decided on the location for a modern silk mill in Tomioka where the land was unsuitable for farming due to poor-quality soil (Imai 2006, 44–45). The people of Tomioka all agreed that the available land, with its easy access to water and coal, which was earmarked for building residences, should be used for the mill instead (Bunkazai Kenzobutsu Hozon Gijutsu Kyokai 2006, 9). Being the first Japanese state silk mill, Tomioka was established not just for production but also for training and education, and thus could even be labelled as the ‘Women’s University of Technology’ (Maeda 2019, 29). As many workers went to Tomioka to learn the latest production skills and methods, they played a key role in disseminating their knowledge and new technologies after returning to their hometowns where smaller scale mills were being built (Imai 2014, 179). Making profit was certainly not the primary objective of Tomioka. Led by the Tomioka Silk Mill and smaller mills established later on—such as the Shinmachi Spinning Mill in Gunma, as well as those in Saitama, Yamanashi, Nagano, Fukushima and western Tokyo (part of Kanagawa prefecture until 1893)—silk was mostly produced in Eastern Japan, symbolising a new era in which the traditional areas of Kyoto and Western Japan were no longer leading the nation. As silk reeling became increasingly mechanised and systematised to produce much finer quality silk, by 1880, around 30 per cent of Japanese silk exports were machine-reeled and were more valued than the hand-reeled silk of other Asian countries (Reischauer & Albert 1979, 149). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the price of raw silk and cocoons went up dramatically due to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, and by 1911 Japan officially became the world’s leading producer of raw silk (Kodaira City Library n.d.). In tandem with this boom, working conditions did not improve and workers were subject to stricter controls imposed by factory managers eager to boost productivity and production of silk.

The Trauma of Young Female Workers at Silk Mills Due to silk production’s heavy contribution to the Japanese economy, Yamamoto (1968, 14) argues that modern Japan was built by female labour; data from 1896 reveals that there were 593,809 females involved in silk production, compared to only 32,571 males. Female workers continued to dominate the industry in the early-twentieth century; the findings from 1911 suggest that over 85 per cent of workers in textile mills, engaged in cotton or silk spinning or weaving, were females (Gordon 2014a, 98–99). The study of Meiji history has conventionally focused on what ‘great men’ achieved, thus the daily affairs of ordinary Meiji people have largely been ignored; the examination of common people and those socially disadvantaged, including factory workers, only belatedly became the focus of academic inquiry (Huffman 2007, 140–143). The economic 160

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modernisation of Meiji Japan was a stunning achievement, but as Gordon (2014a, 93) observes, ‘the immediate impact of the industrial revolution was disastrous for many people in Japan.’ Huffman (2007, 142) also finds that there were negative consequences of Meiji modernity including the working conditions of teenagers at the spinning mills and little impact on improving the social status of girls and women. Those who were already socially disadvantaged, such as small-scale rural farmers, experienced further hardship. Many daughters of poor farmers had no choice but to work as labourers in ‘the thread mills, the weaving sheds, the match factories, and the expanding number of brothels in the new Japan’ (Gordon 2014a, 93). As there was an increased demand for Japanese silk and a shortage of labour, silk mills recruited female workers from all over Japan including some as young as twelve or thirteen who were weaving raw silk that they could never afford to wear (Kodaira City Library n.d.). Wages were based on production output, but due to sex discrimination female workers were generally paid 50–70 per cent of their male counterparts (Gordon 2014a, 99). Management imposed strict controls on female workers, and not only at work. Some workers were even locked in at the company’s dormitory after work to prevent them from running away or getting into trouble, a situation that sometimes led to the tragic loss of life in fire (Gordon 2014a, 99). Furthermore, Gordon (2014a, 101) argues that ‘the fact that the women lived in tightly supervised company dormitories made it difficult for them to organize protests or link up with social activities outside the factory walls.’ In 1900, the Public Order Police Law was passed to make legal protesting more difficult (Gordon 2014a, 103), as this law ‘barred women from all forms of political life—not only voting, but joining political organizations, speaking at political meetings, and even attending such meetings’ (Gordon 2014b). Many women quietly endured the poor working conditions because they could not afford to lose a paying job that they and their families depended on. In fact, a job at the mills was probably the second best paid job for unskilled young women after prostitution (Gordon 2014a, 100). According to Tsurumi (1990, 99), if or when female workers had opportunities to complain about the work, they spoke with their families, not the company. Despite the tough work environment, many of them still found life at the mill better than life at home where a shortage of food due to poverty was the norm. The equal treatment of women in Japan was rarely discussed in a serious manner in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Women in South Australia already enjoyed the right to vote and the right to stand for election to parliament in 1896 (Parliament of South Australia n.d.). South Australia was the first electorate in the world to provide equal political rights to both genders, whereas Japanese women had to wait until the post-WWII era when the Allied Occupation changed the law. Records of how individual Japanese women were disadvantaged are rare to find. For instances, details from the mills only became widely known after Hosoi Wakizo’s non-fiction book Joko Aishi was published in 1925. The book was based on his experiences at mill factories and those of his common-law wife Toshiwo. Its publication had an impact on society at that time; but being poor was the norm for ordinary working-class Japanese in the early-twentieth century. Toshiwo, for example, could only go to school for three months and began working at a mill when she was ten; there a combination of long working hours and low-nutrition meals left many labourers ill due to malnutrition (Kubo 2003, 16–18; Sawada 2015, 19). In the post-WWII era, drawing on extensive oral history interviews, Yamamoto Shigemi’s famous Aa Nomugitoge (1968) provides more details and valuable insights into the lives of young female workers at silk mills in Meiji, Taisho and early Showa Japan. At the time of the interviews, Japan was already enjoying its so-called post-war economic miracle. Yamamoto (1968: 381) discovered that mill workers in Hirano Village (today’s Okaya City) 161

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in Nagano prefecture endured long working hours—about 14.5 hours a day in 1900, s­ tarting at 5.40 AM and finishing at 9 PM with only a few short breaks. Among mill ­workers, such long hours were common throughout Japan, and even in relatively quiet periods work lasted twelve hours a day (Saito 2014, 167). Located next to Lake Suwa, Hirano Village and its surrounding area—producing as much as 35 per cent of Japan’s total silk production in 1924—were suitable for silk production because of easy access to water, transportation (the Chuo Line to Tokyo was built in the early-twentieth century) and desperate labourers (for five months a year, winter made the land unsuitable for farming) (Takabayashi 2016). Daughters of poor families were recruited, many of them from the Hida region of Gifu Prefecture who travelled by foot through Nomugi Pass (elevation of 1,672 metres) in the Japanese Alps, hence the title Aa Nomugitoge. Contracts for these workers were usually from February to December, enabling them to spend the precious shogatsu new-year holidays at home (Yamamoto 1968, 253). Until the railway to the Hida region was built in 1934, the mountain trail through Nomugi Pass was the only pathway connecting Lake Suwa and Hida (Yamamoto 1968, 9–11). Longing for home and family, young female workers walked in snow and on ice along steep cliffs, and some died along the route (Asai 2015, 138). They were not wearing shoes—which they could not afford—but instead waraji sandals made of straw. Mill work could also be dangerous as 13 out of 1,000 workers died every year on the job, while an additional 10 out of 1,000 died at home once they left the mills after falling ill poorly ventilated factory conditions (Yamamoto 1968, 155). Tuberculosis was responsible for 40 per cent of deaths at the mills, and 70 per cent of deaths at home, in an era when tuberculosis was equivalent to a death sentence (Yamamoto 1968, 155). When workers died, sake in a one-sho bottle (approximately 1.8 litres) and a few blocks of tofu were provided as solatium by the silk mill to family members (Yamamoto 1968, 111). Through interviews with former mill workers, Yamamoto (1968, 80) discovered that they were largely unaware of the contract that was signed between their parents and the employer, very similar to the cases of parents selling their daughters to brothels. According to Hazama (1978), some female workers were forced to move between factories, treated as chattel with no say in the matter. Even if it was their own choice, data from 1898 reveal that 70 per cent of female factory workers had never attended school, meaning that they could not read and understand the contract even if they saw it (Yamamoto 1968, 183). The written contract was quite harsh towards workers; for example, while tetsukekin payment in advance to parents was 1 yen, the penalty for breaching the contract was 20 yen, and the employer had the right to terminate the contract at any time (Yamamoto 1968, 76–79). Furthermore, mill workers’ wages were based on how much they produced, so less productive workers, including those who were ill or unable to endure the difficult conditions, earned less. For poor farming households, sending their daughters off to work provided some relief because it meant one less mouth to feed (Yamamoto 1968, 16). Many returned home with debts they could not pay, leaving their families even more destitute (Saito 2014, 167). In fact, a quarter of the women who walked back home through Nomugi Pass had debts to pay (Yamamoto 1968, 201). According to Yamamoto’s (1968, 337) field research, even though 90 per cent of workers from Hida found their experiences at the mills tough due to the strict inspection of the silk they produced, an equal number were satisfied with the overall work conditions at the mills and also claimed that they found the meals provided tasty. At any rate, some food was certainly better than going hungry at home. The traumatic experiences of silk mill workers were popularised because of the screen productions drawing on Yamamoto’s (1968) famous book. Based on his non-fiction book, two movies, Aa Nomugi Toge (1979) and Aa Nomugi Toge: Shinryokuhen (1982), and a TV 162

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drama series, Aa Nomugi Toge (1980), were released. The first film, the most commercially successful, was the second most watched Japanese film of that year (Kinema Junposha 2003, 238–239). This 1979 film features Masai Mine, a real-life thirteen-year-old girl who had six siblings and who, as the oldest daughter of the family, was required to make money in a mill, rather than studying at school in her hometown of Hida. After waking up at 4.30 AM in the mill’s dormitory, she quickly went to the bathroom to wash her face and pee. During her fifteen-hour workday, she had breakfast and lunch breaks, only for ten minutes each, while standing. The temperature at her mill sometimes reached 40 degrees Celsius, as the mill lacked ventilation. With steam from the machines, her working place was the perfect breeding ground for tuberculosis bacteria. Masai eventually contracted tuberculosis and developed severe meningitis. After being kept in a quarantine hut, her older brother Tatsujiro came to pick her up, carrying her back home, but she passed away at Nomugi Pass. Due to the success of this poignant narrative, in the popular imagination Japanese silk mills have been associated with trauma for decades but the similar experiences of Korean mill workers are not widely known (Kin 1977).

Workers’ Paradise? Lives at Tomioka Silk Mill and Wada Ei’s Tomioka Nikki Despite the significant contributions of young female workers in Japanese industrial history, the museum Nomugi Toge no Yakata in Hida permanently closed in March 2022 due to declining numbers of visitors (Kato 2022). Thus, there is no longer a dedicated institution commemorating the experiences of female mill workers and their slave-like working conditions. Silk-growing regions existed all over Japan, and even though this industry was an undeniably important factor in modern Japanese history, the Tomioka Silk Mill is the only Japanese World Heritage site to showcase the history of Japanese silk production and is one of the few World Heritage sites commemorating the industrial history of modern Japan. The other World Heritage sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining (in Iwate, Shizuoka, Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, Kumamoto, Saga, Nagasaki and Kagoshima prefectures) were registered by UNESCO in 2015, a year later than Tomioka (see Palmer Chapter 13 in this volume). Registered in 2014 as the eighteenth Japanese World Heritage site (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2021), Tomioka Silk Mill ‘illustrates Japan’s desire to rapidly adopt the best mass production techniques and promotion of sericulture and the Japanese silk industry in the last quarter of the 19th century’ (UNESCO 2022). According to UNESCO (2022), the site was ‘the centre of innovation for the production of raw silk and marked Japan’s entry into the modern, industrialised era, making it the world’s leading exporter of raw silk, notably to Europe and the United States.’ Tomioka was not selected by UNESCO due to its dark history of exploiting women workers, but rather became a World Heritage site as an example of technological progress through the adoption and adaptation of the latest Western/French technologies in the Japanese workplace (Matsuura 2013, 6). The site remained in operation until 1987; the original buildings were constructed in early Meiji period and remained intact because they did not become a target of American firebombing during WWII due to its remote location at the edge of the Kanto Plain. Thus, the site was still in a good shape when it opened for tourists in 2005. Within two years, the site became the third most visited tourist attraction of Gumma prefecture, with annual visitors in excess of a quarter of a million people (Kuwashima 2009, 133–134). When it became designated as a World Heritage site in 2014, Tomioka attracted over 1.3 million visitors annually, featuring the legacy of modern factory buildings and silk spinning machinery to highlight the achievements of Meiji Japan. 163

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Under French managers, the working situation at Tomioka, especially in the early years, was more worker friendly than other mills. The working hours were set at 9.5 hours a day from 7 AM to 4.30 PM, with an hour-long lunch and shorter breaks both in the morning and in the afternoon, and Sunday was a rest day (Saito 2014, 167). Furthermore, not just housing and meals but medical expenses were also freely provided to workers (Imai 2014, 176). There were also recreational activities such as plays to watch (Wada 2014, 53) and a company-sponsored hanami picnic in April to appreciate spring and cherry blossoms (Wada 2014, 57). As such, Sataki (2013, 54) argues that the Tomioka site serves as a symbolic turning point in Japanese labour history. However, the record from 1933 reveals that the working conditions at Tomioka deteriorated (Niigataken Joko Hogo Kumiai Rengokai 1933, 78). The shift went for eleven hours from 6:30 AM to 5:30 PM, and workers only had two Sundays per month as days off. There was no longer a medical specialist at the site, not even a nurse. In addition, the percentage of sick workers was high due to conditions at the dormitory where mill workers slept at night. The typical workers’ dormitory had small windows to protect against the cold weather, and this meant it had limited ventilation, thus creating an ideal environment for mass infections. The mill was privatised and managed by a succession of companies, Mitsui (1893–1902), Hara (1902–1939) and Katakura (1939–1987), but this period is not covered at the World Heritage site because UNESCO did not require it do so to gain its World Heritage status. Under the Mitsui management, for example, just like other private mills, there was a production-based payment system, instead of daily wages under state management. Wages of most workers were reduced, leading to an outburst of discontent among the mill workers; this even led to a strike, but the harsh payment system was maintained, ostensibly to enhance productivity (Mitsui Public Relations 2015). This darker side of the Tomioka history is missing from the World Heritage site because UNESCO designation tends to focus on preserving tangible objects and materials rather than intangible social conditions, here overlooking the exploitation of young female workers and the trauma they endured as cogs in the machine. The best record of a ‘cog’ is Wada Ei’s Tomioka Nikki (2014/1931), who worked at Tomioka from 1873 to 1874 under French management. According to her record, a typical breakfast was soup (presumably miso soup) and tsukemono pickles, lunch was nimono of simmered ­potatoes and dinner was dried fish. Sekihan red rice and salmon, a favourite meal of Wada and her colleagues, were provided three times every month (Wada 2014, 55). Her colleagues were daughters of a distinguished shizoku (formally samurai) class or highly respectable commoners (Wada 2014, 87), typically aged between twelve and twenty-six years (Wada 2014, 57). Wada’s family even had a maid (Wada 2014, 105), suggesting a relatively wealthy background. In fact, Tomioka was one of the nation’s leading silk mills with cutting-edge technologies and also played a critical educational role in training workers, who spread their knowledge when they returned to their local areas. Ex-Tomioka workers were highly valued because of their experience and skills (Wada 2014, 109). Unlike workers of other smaller mills who concentrated on earning income for their families, Tomioka workers were responsible for learning and promoting efficient production processes in the silk weaving industry. For this reason, Wada acknowledges that work was tightly supervised in Tomioka, and she was not even allowed to speak to her fellow workers while working there (Wada 2014, 23). Tomioka workers were recruited at the behest of the Ministry of Finance, which ordered each prefecture to send workers to Tomioka (Saito 2014, 164). Parents of many elite were against the idea of sending their daughters, as it was partially seen as a type of national service, and also there was a rumour that French people drank human blood because the red wine they drank resembled blood. However, it was after all seen as a privilege for the young 164

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females to work there and gain skills for their local communities. As such, Japan’s most ­v isited and famous former mill site does not exhibit any signs of trauma, presenting a positive counter-narrative even though the silk industry at large was responsible for ­t raumatic experiences and unnecessary deaths of their workers. They were sacrificed for Japan’s national goal of economic modernisation. As more workers gained training at Tomioka they spurred the rapid development of the silk industry all over Japan, boosting demand for female factory workers. This entailed a shift from the daughters of elite families to the commoners, who had no choice but engage in virtual slavery to make ends meet to support their families. By contrast, Tomioka commemorates the positive achievements of the spinning industry and how it contributed to Japan’s modernisation, seeking to displace the negative narrative of harsh working conditions and exploitation that prevailed elsewhere in this sector. Here, UNESCO World Heritage designation has been conscripted into contemporary Japan’s efforts to glorify the past and divert attention away from the more traumatic history of silk spinning. This rewriting and rehabilitation of Japan’s history is the focus of twenty-first century revisionists who promote a valorising and exculpatory wartime narrative under the leadership of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, whose government applied for World Heritage status for Tomioka and subsequently various Meiji industrial sites to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration in 2018. Ironically, during wartime Japan, the suffering endured by women in the silk mills, and perseverance in the face of harsh working conditions, now whitewashed, was once highlighted by the militarists to inspire factory workers during the Pacific War as follows.

Wada Ei as a WWII-Time Idol Wada Ei a.k.a. Eiko, (1857–1929) seemed to have a relatively ordinary life; thus, the vast majority of what she did is unknown other than her experiences at Tomioka. There is certainly nothing indicating she would be posthumously cast as a factory heroine by the military propaganda machine just as defeat loomed in the Pacific War. However, this happened in April 1945 when Horiba Masao’s (1945) fourteen-page-long feature article on Wada was published in the women’s magazine Senji Josei. At a time when material shortages were worsening towards the end of WWII, magazines were becoming thinner, printed with less colour on lesser quality, thinner paper, and it was extremely rare to find any article with so many pages. In Horiba’s (1945, 46) article, Wada was labelled the ‘Pioneer of the Women’s Volunteer Corps,’ which was established in August 1944. The corps were mainly composed of unmarried women, who were forcibly reassigned to work as manual labourers at various workplaces amid Japan’s wartime labour shortage (Hata 1999, 369; National Archives of Japan 1944). The feature article praised Wada for her willingness to contribute to her local community, as she went to Tomioka to bring back new knowledge and skills to her hometown, a personal sacrifice made to boost Meiji-era nation building efforts. Even though she was born in a prestigious samurai family, she sacrificed herself to work as a silk factory labourer to advance national interests (Horiba 1945, 46). The war-time propaganda article emphasises that Wada and other Meiji girls and young women had hoko no kokoro (spirit of devotion) (Horiba 1945, 53). This story was meant to inspire young women in wartime Japan, asking them to be just as dutiful and self-sacrificing. However, the original diary written by Wada provides no basis for the myth of her hoko no kokoro spirit; it was a propaganda invention. Tsurumi (1990, 99), who has studied girls and women working in the thread mills of Meiji Japan, notes that these female workers did not show much enthusiasm for service to the nation simply because ‘they were busy surviving.’ 165

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The ethos of perseverance and patriotic sacrifice is extolled to encourage wartime women to follow the example, knowing others had already suffered for the empire. As one patriotic apologist explained at the time, ‘the Greater East Asia War is a decisive battle of a world restoration that should succeed in order to realise the ideals of the Meiji Restoration on an Asian scale’ (Horiba 1945, 59 – translated by the author). The fabricated narrative of Wada’s feelings at Tomioka was invented and invoked to help others endure the traumatic catastrophe of a reckless war the ruling elite had catapulted them into. During the war, many factories in Gumma prefecture were converted into aircraft production plants, and Tomioka was converted to produce parachutes to take on this role ( Japan Center for Asian Historical Records n.d.), another part of its history not on display at the World Heritage site.

Conclusion The Tomioka World Heritage site emphasises that the Tomioka Silk Mill was established for the advancement of all Japan, not just for Tomioka or Gunma, and thus encourages visitors from all over the nation to feel proud of their modern national history. However, behind the advancement of Japan’s modern silk production lurk generations of young female labourers who were treated as disposable and their negative experiences are ignored at the site. Thus, Tomioka is a place where a selective and glorifying history is presented, commemorating the advances and benefits of silk production without acknowledging the trauma. As Palmer argues in Chapter 13 of this volume, UNESCO World Heritage sites often gloss over the awkward and troubling details of the history they commemorate, sacrificing a more complex narrative on the altar of nationalism. Tomioka does not contest the troubling problems of the women workers at Japan’s spinning mills, but instead sidelines them to convey a more uplifting narrative in line with the views of Japan’s current revisionist leaders and their agenda of nurturing pride and patriotism. Acknowledgement: Field research in Tomioka was conducted in March 2022 during my Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship.

Note 1 These Meiji elite took roles of political and economic leaderships. For example, Ito served as the prime minister for four times, 1885–1888, 1892–1896, 1898 and 1900–1901; Okuma served as the prime minister for two times in 1898 and from 1914 to 1916; and Shibusawa is known as the ‘father of Japanese capitalism,’ his role including the head of the National Printing Bureau and the founder of the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, which is today’s Mizuho Bank.

Works Cited Aa Nomugi Toge (1980) Directed by Morikawa Hikisato. Tokyo: Tokyo Broadcasting System Television. Aa Nomugi Toge (1979) Directed by Yamamoto Satsuo. Tokyo: Toho. Aa Nomugi Toge: Shinryokuhen (1982) Directed by Yamamoto Satsuo. Tokyo: Toho. Asai, K. (2015) Nihon no Doro ga Wakaru Jiten. Tokyo: Nihon Jitsugyo Shuppansha. Bunkazai Kenzobutsu Hozon Gijutsu Kyokai. (2006) Kyu Tomioka Seishijo Kenzobutsugun Chosa Hokokusho. Gumma: Tomiokashi Kyoiku Iinkai. Gordon, A. (2014a, 3rd edition) A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Memories and Displays of Japan’s Early Industrialisation Gordon, A. (2014b) ‘Social Protest in Imperial Japan: The Hibiya Riot of 1905’, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 12: 29: 3, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 May 2022). Gordon, A. (2011) Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hata, I. (1999) Ianfu no Senjo to Sei. Tokyo: Shinchosha. Hazama, H. (1978) Nihon Romu Kanrishi Kenkyu. Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobo. Horiba, M. (1945) ‘Wada Eiko: Joshi Teishintai no Senkusha’, Senji Josei (April). Hosoi, W. (1925) Joko Aishi. Tokyo: Kaizosha. Huffman, J. (2007) ‘Restoration and Revolution’ in W. Tsutsui (ed.), A Companion to Japanese History. Malden: Blackwell: 140–143. Imai, M. (2014) ‘Tomioka Seishiba: Kindai Seishigyo no Top Runner’ in E. Wada, Tomioka Nikki. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo: 174–183. Imai, M. (2006) Tomioka Seishijo no Rekishi to Bunka. Maebashi: Miyama Bunko. Ishii, K. (1991, 2nd edition) Nihon Keizaishi. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (n.d.) ‘Senzen no Josei tte Shakai de Hataraite itano?’, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 14 June 2022). Kato, Y. (2022) ‘Joko no Honto no Sugata Tsutae rareta: Takayama Nomugi Toge no Kan Raigetsu de Heikan’, Chunichi Shimbun, 22 February. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 May 2022). Kin, S. (1977) Kaze no Dokoku. Tokyo: Tabata Shoten. Kinema Junposha. (2003) Kinema Junpo Best Ten Zanshi: 1946–2002. Tokyo: Kinema Junposha. Kodaira City Library (n.d.) ‘Tama no Kinu no Michi’, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 May 2022). Kubo, S. (2003) Kosho Hakken: Onna tachi no Hon wo Otte. Tokyo: Kageshobo. Kuwashima, Y. (2009) ‘Tomioka Seishijo no Hozon to Sono Kasseika ni Muketa Machizukuri ni Miru Shomondai’, in Takasaki Keizai Daigaku Fuzoku Sangyo Kenkyujo (ed.), Gunma Sangyo Isan no Shoso. Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyoronsha: 124–144. Maeda, T. 2019. ‘Tabunka Kyosei, Josei Katsuyaku Shakai no Senshinchi’, Nippon Kinu no Sato Kiyo, 22: 25–30. Matsuura, T. (2013) ‘Tomioka Seishijo to Kinu Sangyo Isangun no Sekai Isan Toroku nitsuite’, Nippon Kinu no Sato Kiyo, 16: 5–8. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2021) ‘Waga Kuni no Sekai Isan Ichiranhyo Kisai Bukken’, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 May 2022). Mitsui Public Relations (2015) ‘Tomioka Seishijo to Mitsui’, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 14 June 2022). National Archives of Japan (1944) ‘Joshi Teishintai Seido Kyoka Hosaku Yoko wo Sadamu’, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 14 June 2022). Niigataken Joko Hogo Kumiai Rengokai (1933) ‘Seishi Kojo Gaikyo: Joko Shokai Shiryo: Showa 8 nen 11 gatsu Chosa’, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 14 June 2022). Palmer, D. (2018) ‘Gunkanjima / Battleship Island, Nagasaki: World Heritage Historical Site or Urban Ruins Tourist Attraction?,’ The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus, 16: 1–4, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 May 2022). Parliament of South Australia (n.d.) ‘Women and Politics in South Australia’, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 May 2022). Reischauer, E. and Albert, C. (1979) Japan: Tradition & Transformation. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin. Saito, M. (2014) ‘Kaisetsu: Kindai no Joshi Rodoshi kara Mita “Tomioka Nikki”’, in E. Wada, Tomioka Nikki, Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo: 163–171. Sataki, Y. (2013) ‘“Sangyo Isan” no Shiten kara Mita “Tomioka Seishijo to Kinu Sangyo Isangun”’, Nippon Kinu no Sato Kiyo, 16: 51–54.

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(accessed 2 May 2022). The Dainippon Silk Foundation. (n.d.) ‘Yosan no Rekishi’, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 May 2022). Thunberg, C. P. (2005/1795) ‘A description of Japan and the Japanese, II’ in T. Screech (ed.), Japan Extolled and Decried: Carl Peter Thunberg and the Shogun’s Realm, 1775–1796. London: Routledge, pp. 174-209. Tomioka Seishijo Sekai Isan Dendoshu Kyokai. (2011) Tomioka Seishijo Jiten. Gumma: Jomo Shimbunsha. Tsurumi, E. P. (1990) Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. UNESCO. (2022) ‘Tomioka Silk Mill and Related Sites’, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 May 2022). Vickers, E. (2021) ‘Slaves to Rival Nationalisms: UNESCO and the Politics of “Comfort Women” Commemoration’, The Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus, 19: 5: 5, Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 14 June 2022). Wada, E. (2014/1931). Tomioka Nikki. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. Wittner, D. (2007) Technology and the Culture of Progress in Meiji Japan. London: Routledge. Yamamoto, S. (1968). Aa Nomugitoge: Aru Seishi Kojo Aishi. Tokyo: Asashi Shimbunsha. Yuki, M., Okano, M. and Imai, M. (2012) Heisei 23 nendo Tomioka Seishijo Sogo Kenkyu Centre Hokokusho. Gumma: Tomiokashi Kyoiku Iinkai.

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15 FUKUSHIMA’S TRAUMATIC LEGACIES Jeff Kingston

In March 2011, a massive tsunami pulverized the Tohoku coastline of northeastern Japan, transforming towns and villages into mountains of rubble, leaving almost 20,000 dead or missing, and triggering three nuclear reactor meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi plant. The swath of destruction displaced tens of thousands of people, derailed lives and left families traumatized by loss and grief. This chapter focuses on Fukushima, a significant part of the wider catastrophe along the Sanriku coast and the ­painful memories it evokes (Birmingham and McNeill 2012; Lloyd-Parry 2017). About 160,000 inhabitants of Fukushima were displaced by the three hydrogen explosions and reactor m ­ eltdowns; 86,000 evacuated by government order from the twenty kilometre exclusion zone and 74,000 relocated ‘voluntarily’ due to fears related to radiation (IRSN 2016). The legacies and lessons of Fukushima are contested terrain as different actors and institutions seek to promote competing narratives about the nuclear accident. Soon after the ­d isaster, the prevailing discourse emphasized the dangers of nuclear energy and the negligence of TEPCO and the government. There was overwhelming support for idling reactors and phasing-out nuclear power and in 2012 there were large-scale anti-nuclear demonstrations prompted by the government’s decision to restart two reactors. There were three major investigations into the accident published in 2012 that all refuted TEPCO’s self-exonerating report issued in June 2012, forcing the utility to issue a retraction in October 2012 acknowledging its shortcomings in safety practices (Cabinet 2012, Diet 2012, Lukner and Sakaki 2013, McCurry 2012, RJIF 2014). At the time, it seemed the entire fleet of fifty-four reactors was headed for decommissioning, but as of 2022, twenty-one reactors are being decommissioned, three are under construction, thirty-three remain viable, and of those ten are approved to operate by the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) that replaced the discredited Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) (Inajima and Oda, 2022). The safety guidelines enacted since the 2011 disaster make it difficult to accelerate restarts. In addition, the erosion of trust in nuclear safety, the utilities and the government further complicates efforts to secure support from hosting towns (Rich and Hida 2022). In 2014, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo reinstated nuclear energy into the national energy strategy, setting a target of generating 20–22 per cent of Japan’s electricity output from nuclear energy by 2030 (Kingston 2014). It appears that the nuclear village of pro-nuclear energy advocates in government, industry and finance has prevailed, weathering the perfect DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-16

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storm until public outrage ebbed and media attention drifted to other issues and scandals (Kingston 2021). While the acute memory of 3.11 fades across the archipelago, for denizens of Fukushima the nuclear accident remains a haunting shared trauma that is the wellspring of a collective identity embraced by many of those directly affected by the accident, but also rejected by many others in the prefecture who worry that the legacy of radiation taints their brand and would thus prefer to let the memory subside. Like Chernobyl, Fukushima has become an enduring marker of disaster, an enveloping cloud that some wish would go away while others seek compensation, restitution and commemoration of what was lost and accountability for perpetrators. There is a simmering rancour and sense of outrage tempered somewhat by the recognition that TEPCO jobs and government subsidies are crucial to the prefecture’s future. Monolithic representations of Fukushima’s people are misleading in other ways too, as the prism of trauma includes criticism of the towns that hosted the reactors because they were complicit, benefitting most from nuclear jobs and subsidies, and cooperating with national entities in welcoming danger into the region without ensuring effective risk management and safety compliance.

Safety Myth Shattered Soon after the reactor meltdowns the government ordered mass evacuations, an expanding exclusion zone that grew to a twenty kilometre arc from the stricken reactors that eventually involved some 160,000 people. Early on the government reassured residents that the situation was under control and downplayed the severity of the accident for two months before acknowledging the three reactor meltdowns that had been reported in the international media since mid-March 2011. The chaotic exodus of nuclear refugees was improvised, a result of no planning or evacuation drills due to faith in the myth of 100 per cent safety propagated by the government and TEPCO. Town leaders were cajoled and mislead into hosting nuclear reactors, promised that nothing could go wrong and offered large subsidies that appeared to be a lifeline for depopulating and ageing communities (Onitsuka 2012). In retrospect it is stunning to imagine that top scientists endorsed this myth of failsafe technology and that government regulators did not mandate evacuation drills or, indeed, rigorously enforce safety guidelines. Japan is a seismically active archipelago, and the Fukushima reactors were located on what is known as the tsunami coast due to a history of monster tsunami that struck as recently as 1933 and 1896. Based on in-house research, TEPCO was aware of the risk of a fifteen-metre wave inundating the plant that might render the backup generators inoperable, but this tsunami hazard risk assessment was ignored. According to Synolakis and Kânoğlu (2015), TEPCO was unjustifiably optimistic about tsunami risk and the accident was due to a ‘cascade of engineering and regulatory failures’. TEPCO researchers were aware of serious flaws in the Fukushima Daiichi’s tsunami defences, but management ignored their recommendations. TEPCO knew that the back-up generators were vulnerable to inundation and could have relocated them to safer higher ground for hundreds of thousands of dollars but failed to do so (Synolakis and Kânoğlu 2015). Had TEPCO done so there would not have been a station blackout and no reactor meltdowns, saving ­taxpayers some $600 billion to cover decommissioning over the next four decades ( JCER 2019). Instead, TEPCO tried to evade responsibility by asserting that the tsunami was a black swan event, sotegai (beyond what could have been anticipated), but the media and three major investigations into the nuclear accident demolished this narrative, forcing TEPCO to recant. Since the 2011 nuclear accident, pro-nuclear advocates insist that 170

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nobody died from Japan’s Chernobyl, but as of September 2020 an estimated 2,329 residents of Fukushima died from disaster-related causes and the incidence of thyroid cancer in the prefecture is abnormally high (Asahi 2022b). The myth of safety turned out to be a fairy tale with an unhappy ending.

Nuclear Refugees In the wake of the March 2011 hydrogen explosions, many of the residents from the towns that had thrived on nuclear power were relocated to Iitate village about forty kilometres northwest of the stricken reactors. A month later, however, the government discovered that this village was a dangerous hotspot where the radiation was blown due to the strong March winds. Thus, the nuclear refugees in Iitate were uprooted again and relocated, a disruption that many experienced over and over as they moved out of temporary evacuation centres to temporary housing, waiting until temporary exclusion orders from their former ‘difficult to return’ hometowns were lifted. Many of the nuclear refugees also faced a powerful stigma due to widespread anxieties about radiation. Blameless victims of a nuclear accident that left many evacuees quite concerned about their own health, they faced the added stress of being ostracized and bullied wherever they relocated because of their unfortunate association with the nuclear disaster and illogical concerns about the risk they posed. Despite such challenges, jobs and healthy environs ensured many younger refugees raising families decided to stay in their new locations, realizing that contrary to the nostalgia of older exiles there really was no home, or

Figure 15.1  Mural in front of Futaba train station. Credit: Jeff Kingston.

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jobs, to return to. What was a sensible choice for them only reinforced ongoing trends of an ageing, depopulating and less resilient Fukushima (Figure 15.1).

Going Home? The town of Futaba co-hosted the Fukushima Daiichi plant and in 2011 was subject to mandatory evacuation. In preparation for the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics (postponed until 2021 due to the corona pandemic), Futaba’s newly renovated train station was opened and in the immediate surrounding area numerous Olympic banners fluttered in the wind. Shopfronts of closed stores were decorated with colourful art and graffiti by artists invited from Tokyo to convey a semblance of vibrance and normalcy surrounded by a vast n ­ o-entry zone (Ide 2020). The Potemkin village they helped to create for the Olympic torch relay and media hoopla radiated in an arc extending a few hundred metres or so around the station, including a large colourful mural declaring, ‘HERE WE GO!!! FUTABA ART DISTRICT’, but on walking in any direction one confronts the grim reality of a town hastily abandoned, empty of residents. The signs of decay abound, as dust and cobwebs gather in shop windows and crumbling houses lurk behind overgrown gardens. Former residents of Futaba waited until mid-2022 for government permission to move back home, but by this time it was a ghost town, and the easing of restrictions applies to only 10 per cent of the municipality’s land area. Nobody in 2011 imagined that it would take eleven years to reopen a sliver of the town to former residents. Now, a 5.5 square km area around Futaba train station that had been part of the town’s ‘difficult to return zone’ (i.e. residents were barred from living in their homes) was redesignated as a ‘Specified Reconstruction and Revitalization Base’ area. As of mid-2022 this enclave features a frenzy of dismantling, demolition and construction, including a new town hall in front of the station and a housing/shopping complex behind it. Former residents are allowed to return and live in central Futaba without restrictions, but out of the pre-disaster population of nearly 8,000 residents just fifty people from twenty-nine households had applied to do so (Asahi 2022a). There are still nearly 27,000 evacuees from Fukushima Prefecture living outside the prefecture, while others have resettled in the larger inland towns of Koriyama and Aizu Wakamatsu, having acclimated to their new environs (Nippon 2022). The sad tale of Futaba’s nuclear refugees is told in the 2012 documentary Nuclear Nation (Futaba Kara Toku Hanarete) directed by Funahashi Atsushi. He follows some of Futaba’s evacuees and documents the demoralizing dislocation they experienced. In the film, e­ vacuees lament how radiation slowed the disaster response and delayed reopening the town, leaving them in limbo. The mayor acknowledges in the film that he had agreed to hosting a third nuclear power plant to stave off bankruptcy with construction set to begin in April 2011— now that site has been repurposed as a solar farm.

Ranch of Hope For some Fukushima residents, it has been important to return precisely because they want to rebuke the government and TEPCO for disrupting lives, families and careers, and for not owning the problems they inflicted on a prefecture that hosted a total of ten nuclear reactors at two plants to ensure a steady supply of electricity for Tokyo. Yoshizawa Masami is a renegade rancher who defied government orders to cull his cows and he now cares for a herd numbering about 200, including ones that were left to roam by other ranchers. In his trailer he displays photographs of emaciated carcasses tethered in their stalls, testifying to a slow 172

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and painful death by starvation that haunts former ranchers and propels their r­esentment regarding what they see as a colossal betrayal. He raises about $75,000 a year for feed despite knowing they can never be sold due to the Fukushima nuclear accident (Interview March 2021). For more than a decade he has looked after these enormous cud-chewing s­urvivors, protesting the irresponsibility of TEPCO and the government for foisting the nuclear reactors on Fukushima and not operating them safely. The herd of irradiated cattle serves to commemorate the disaster and express Yoshizawa’s opposition to nuclear power. They are also a reminder of the government order to euthanize livestock in the twenty kilometer exclusion zone and the authorities’ callous disregard for life, bovine and human. His ranch serves as a poignant reproach to the proponents of nuclear power who he says carelessly put lives at risk and avoided taking responsibility for their negligence. As memories fade and people move on, Yoshizawa keeps the cows alive to keep the trauma alive. Outside his office he has erected what looks like a typical railway station sign indicating the preceding, current and next stations depicted respectively as (1) The Past when the risk of nuclear power was not understood, (2) 2011.3.11 and (3) The Future, a time when so much that has been lost can never be recovered. Here he transforms a ubiquitous feature of the Japanese commuting-scape into a symbol of the lingering trauma and uncertainty ahead. He is not only contesting how the disaster is being commemorated but also resisting how it is slowly ebbing from the collective consciousness and marginalized in energy policymaking as pro-nuclear energy advocates regain the initiative. This is the unfolding trauma for many of Japan’s citizens opposed to nuclear energy. Some have resorted to the courts to seek accountability and keep the trauma in the limelight.

Court Challenges In January 2022, a group of five young men and one woman filed a class-action lawsuit in Tokyo District Court against TEPCO, seeking 616 million yen (about $4.6 million) in damages from the utility (Mainichi 2022). This is the first class-action suit by residents who were minors at the time of the accident. The plaintiffs claim that they developed thyroid cancers due to radiation exposure following the three reactor meltdowns. There is considerable controversy over the connection between high thyroid cancer rates and the nuclear accident (Mainichi 2016). Thyroid check-ups for children in Fukushima began six months after the nuclear disaster and two health experts concluded that the number of cases was thirty times the expected number based on national levels. Some experts believe the unprecedented mass screening is the reason for a spike in cases. While the screening effect might explain the large number of cases in the initial check-ups, it cannot account for the large and growing gap between expected cases based on national data and confirmed cases since then (Rosen 2021). In March 2022, Iida Kenichi and Kawai Hiroyuki, the lawyers for the plaintiffs, argued that the burden of proof should be on TEPCO and the state to prove that the unusually high rate of thyroid cancers in the prefecture is not related to the nuclear accident (FCCJ 2022). In other cases of industrial pollution like Minamata, there is a precedent to place the burden of proof on the polluter to prove there is no causal relationship between the contamination and the illness suffered by plaintiffs. Other plaintiffs displaced by the nuclear crisis have sought accountability and compensation in the courts, filing some thirty class-actions suits. In March 2022 the Supreme Court rejected TEPCO’s appeal of a lower court ruling and ordered the utility to pay damages of 1.39 billion yen (about US$10 million) to nearly 3,682 people involved in three class-action 173

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suits filed in Fukushima, Gunma and Chiba whose lives were harmed by the nuclear disaster (Kyodo 2022a). This is the first of some thirty class-action suits filed by evacuees where the utility’s liability for damages has been finalized. Overall, the Supreme Court has rejected TEPCO’s appeals in six cases and increased the amount of compensation above government standards. The utility must have been relieved, however, that in 2019 the Tokyo District Court ruled that three top former TEPCO executives were not guilty of professional negligence resulting in death and injury ( Johnson, Fukurai and Hirayama 2020). Nonetheless, the prosecution proved invaluable because, ‘this criminal case revealed many facts that were previously unknown, concealed, or denied, and it clarified the truth about the Fukushima meltdown by exposing some of TEPCO’s claims as nonsense’ ( Johnson, Fukurai and Hirayama 2020). Media coverage also kept the issue of TEPCO’s culpability and negligent decisions in the limelight. In June 2022, a divided Supreme Court let the government off the hook, ruling that the state is not liable for damages plaintiffs demanded related to the Fukushima disaster and deciding that the accident could not have been avoided due to the scale of the tsunami. Although the Chief Justice sided with the majority, he also wrote a separate opinion suggesting that the government should compensate the victims and bear more responsibility than power companies in the event of accidents (Stars and Stripes 2022).

Duelling Museums The nuclear disaster is featured in two museums in Fukushima Prefecture: the TEPCO Decommissioning Archive and the prefectural government’s Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum. The contrast is stunning if not predictable. The TEPCO Archive opened in late 2018 in the town of Tomioka, about ten kilometres south of the crippled reactors. Its stated purpose is to ‘preserve the memories and records of the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, and to share the remorse and lessons learned, both within TEPCO and with society as a whole’ (Nippon 2020). Up to a point this is correct, but the remorse and lessons learned are overshadowed by the detailed exhibits and explanations about nuclear energy technology and the decommissioning ­process. The pamphlet suggests that ‘TEPCO has a keen sense of its responsibility to record the events and preserve the memory of the nuclear accident’, but this is a selective memory that is more evasive than forthright about the unfolding consequences of the three meltdowns. One exits the museum knowing more about how TEPCO and its workers were traumatized by the nuclear accident than how it affected the people living in the vicinity. Indeed, the workers on site at the time of the meltdowns had to cope with fears of radiation contamination and uncertainty about how to bring the situation under control due to poor training. The hydrogen explosions that ripped apart secondary containment structures and released significant amounts of radiation occurred because TEPCO managers dithered on venting and workers discovered that the station blackout meant that they had to operate the manual venting system but did not know how to do so (Akiyama 2016). Alas, in the end, the system did not function properly, and hydrogen gas built up until it exploded. One can only imagine how stressful and traumatizing this experience was for these professionals, part of the trauma narrative of 3.11 that is not prominently featured in public discourse because they are not seen as victims of this disaster but rather those responsible for the accident. As the cascading disaster unfolded, many plant workers drove away from the site and retreated to the Fukushima Daini Plant about twelve kilometres away. The causes of this 174

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exodus are controversial, but it appears that the plant manager Yoshida’s instructions may have been misinterpreted (Asahi 2014). At any rate those who remained at the plant have been immortalized in the film Fukushima 50, a tedious melodrama that focuses on how their heroic self-sacrifice saved the nation from what could have been a much more serious calamity (Asahi 2014). It is striking how the nuclear accident has been transformed into an uplifting story of bravery and self-sacrifice, a welcome narrative for pro-nuclear advocates. The Archive is perhaps most noteworthy for what is missing. The collective and ongoing trauma of the nuclear refugees forced out of their homes, and the gutted communities and abandoned towns left behind, are not covered in the exhibits. The shared sense of betrayal among the displaced is not on display nor are the profound human consequences experienced by them and by Japanese throughout Japan who are now anxious about living in the shadow of nuclear power plants. Wandering on the first floor, visitors encounter a progress report on decommissioning and the challenges of doing so. However, there is no reference to the spiralling cost to ­t axpayers now estimated to exceed $600 billion over the next four decades. The imposing F Cube in the centre of the spacious room presents a video explaining what decommissioning work is and the status of that effort while other panels assert that there is steady progress dayby-day. It is an encouraging message that contradicts a steady stream of media reports about limited progress a decade on and various setbacks (Yamaguchi 2021). Still on the first floor, a video display discusses measures for treating contaminated water that TEPCO is storing on the plant site in over 1,000 large tanks. There is considerable controversy associated with this radiated water and what to do with it. Back in 2013 when Tokyo was bidding for the 2020 Olympics, Prime Minister Abe assured the International Olympic Committee that the water situation at Fukushima was under control, but it was untrue then and continues to be misleading now. The famously expensive $325 million ice wall installed to halt the flow of water passing down from adjacent hills through the reactors into the ocean has not worked as planned (Sheldrick and Foster 2018). So too there have been numerous problems with the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS)—water decontamination system that is supposed to remove all but trace amounts of tritium so that the water can be safely discharged into the ocean. In 2018 TEPCO suddenly announced that the treatment of stored water had to be redone because the system had malfunctioned, a confidence-sapping measure that further undermined confidence in TEPCO and its touted expertise (Asahi 2021b). Fukushima’s beleaguered fishermen are unhappy about the government-approved plans to dump TEPCO’s contaminated water into the ocean starting in 2023 because the accident has shattered consumer confidence in the safety of fish from the prefectural waters (Kyodo 2022b). There was hope these concerns would ebb over time, but this has not happened due to the high-profile dispute over ocean dumping that includes criticism from many Japanese citizens and domestic NGOs, international environmental experts and Japan’s neighbours (South Korea, China and Taiwan). In the Tohoku coastal towns of Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi, 60 per cent of mayors are also opposed to the ocean disposal ( Asahi 2022c). The government has allocated JPY30 billion (US$245 million) to support the local fisheries industry, but this inducement has not convinced fishermen that the discharge of contaminated water won’t further tarnish the brand and reduce their income (Imaizumi, 2022). The International Atomic Energy Agency’s review of the government decision to discharge the contaminated water has little credibility among critics because its mandate is to promote nuclear energy and there are a lot of unanswered questions about the plan and its possible consequences for safety and consumer trust (Brown 2021). 175

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On the Archive’s second floor, the space labelled Zone Two: Memory and Record/Reassessment and Lessons promises much more than it delivers. Visitors ascend the staircase to confront a clock-shaped pedestal of 3.11 remembrance where the damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami is commemorated. The video displayed nearby does open with an apology and ­d ispassionate acknowledgement of responsibility that is an attempt to convey a level of remorse not evoked effectively by the other exhibits. But much of the video focuses on the seismic event and TEPCO’s response to the accident, highlighting the sudden rupture of routine and the tensions associated with taking countermeasures. There is acknowledgement that workers were not adequately trained in using emergency equipment or in coping with a complex disaster, and there are expressions of remorse about the consequences without explicitly detailing the nature or extent of those consequences. In detailing decommissioning efforts, there is no examination of related controversies such as the more than $600 billion estimated costs over the next thirty to forty years or local opposition to the building of a ‘temporary’ nuclear waste storage facility. Visitors learn that ‘Faithfully facing up to the accident we were unable to prevent, we are determined to increase the level of safety, from yesterday to today and from today to tomorrow’. Left out is any discussion of the damning factors pinpointed by the three major investigations as the reasons why TEPCO was unable to prevent the accident and scant detail on how TEPCO is increasing safety other than expressing an earnest desire to do so. Media reports about continued safety lapses and submission of falsified data in relation to TEPCO’s application to restart its Niigata plant cast a shadow over just how committed the utility is to learn the lessons of Fukushima and respond accordingly (Nikkei 2021). TEPCO has lost public trust (Rich and Hida 2022) and has shown limited capacity to regain it, even earning a stunning public rebuke from the NRA chair Tanaka in 2017 when he proclaimed the utility was unfit to operate a nuclear power plant ( Japan Times 2017). Just before one descends the stairs to the exit there is an illuminating message from TEPCO asserting that ‘We will pass on the genuine feedback received from the staff members who worked for the response to the accident, as “real voices,” to future ­generations’. Here the museum is positioned as a site commemorating the trauma experienced by TEPCO’s employees and its mission of ensuring that their experiences are not overlooked. By h ­ ighlighting the difficulties endured by plant workers and the trauma they share with local residents, the Archive encourages a more sympathetic view of TEPCO. It is a sanitized and selective narrative that elides the damning findings of public investigations and the media but creates the basis for ‘reasonable doubt’ in the court of public opinion, especially as the details fade from collective memory. Close to the exit one passes a sign indicating that TEPCO employs 4,170 locals in Fukushima, an explicit reminder of how important the utility is to the prefecture’s e­ conomy. TEPCO has invested lots of money in this facility and other PR efforts to improve its image and shape the 3.11 narrative. This was never going to be easy, and challenges remain, but the Archive makes the best of a difficult situation and is what one would expect. It’s one of the Fukushima tour sites, not far from the museum discussed below, and a new memorial at the Ukeda Elementary School that will attract visitors and provide an opportunity to disseminate different information, challenge damning narratives and influence public attitudes and memories. In contrast to TEPCO’s Archive, Fukushima Prefecture’s Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum opened in 2020 highlights the wider human consequences of the events of 3.11, including the tsunami devastation and nuclear accident. This sleekly designed glass-walled facility located on a barren tsunami-swept area close to the 176

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coast is part of the government’s lavishly funded Fukushima reconstruction and recovery effort. Inside, the displays in the spacious three-storey museum focus on the derailment of people’s lives, the ruination of once vibrant communities, and the fear and uncertainty generated by the nuclear disaster. It too emphasizes lessons for the future but draws different ones than TEPCO and emphasizes the upheaval people experienced at the time and the dispiriting aftermath that lingers. Just past the entrance an introductory short video on a massive screen shows the ­t sunami sweeping through towns and pulverizing communities with footage of the hydrogen ­explosions at the Daiichi Plant that reminds visitors just how serious the situation was. In  terms of public memory, the radioactive plumes bursting from the reactor buildings launched the Fukushima nightmare. The day after the third explosion, Emperor Akihito appeared in a televised address on 16 March, perhaps as a gesture of reassurance but also, given how extremely rare such appearances are, ramping up anxieties. The footage of the hydrogen explosions and tsunami is repeated elsewhere in the museum. Prominent symbols of the radioactive consequences of 3.11 are also displayed such as a hazmat suit typically donned by workers where there are high levels of radiation and one of the ubiquitous large black plastic bags where contaminated soil is stored. As one ascends the circular ramp to the second floor, there is a series of photographs and text displayed that provide a chronology from the initial safety agreement between the prefecture and TEPCO in 1969 until the thirteen-metre tsunami that struck at 15:37 on 3.11 and the loss of AC power at 15:41, along with a detailed timeline of the expanding evacuation zone. One learns of a bewildering and contradictory series of orders for evacuations within a ten kilometre radius of the plant at 5:44 AM on March 12 and about two hours later a shelter-in-place order for a ten kilometre radius. The next image shows Unit 1 after the hydrogen explosion at 15:36 PM later that day and a reissue of the evacuation order for those living within the ten kilometre radius at 17:39 PM, expanded to twenty kilometres at 18:25 PM. One can only imagine how local residents were processing these disconcerting, rapidly shifting directives. Then on 14 March there was a second hydrogen explosion at Unit 3 followed by another early on 15 March at Unit 4, a reactor that was not even in operation at the time. Later that morning a shelter-inplace order was issued for a twenty-to-thirty kilometre radius from the reactors. The chaotic government response to the unfolding compound disaster of earthquake, tsunami and major nuclear accident amplified the trauma, conveying uncertainty and incompetence at a time when the anxieties of affected people were already spiking. Unlike the TEPCO Archive, the Museum provides a harsh assessment of the response to the nuclear accident as residents were given conflicting information and instructions and relocated from evacuation centres several times, adding to the stress and trauma that still haunt the nuclear refugees. Overall, the Museum examines the unfolding disaster in a more visceral and emotive set of displays than at the TEPCO Archive. The Museum was opened in September 2020 and updated in March 2021 just before my first visit. The updated displays were in response to criticisms from locals and the media. The enhanced exhibits modify information on four specific issues: (1) the use of the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI), (2) the botched evacuation of the Futaba Hospital and related deaths, (3) mandatory euthanasia of livestock and (4) inadequate precautions and a poor emergency response due to radiation. The updates were based on feedback from questionnaires filled out by visitors, opinions of prefectural residents and issues raised in media reports. Altogether more than seventy panels, photos and display items were added (Asahi 2021a). A new panel mentions that government officials failed to utilize SPEEDI data for residents’ evacuation, an oversight that relocated many 177

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evacuees to the hot zone of Iitate village for an entire month, increasing their radiation exposure and anxieties. The Fukushima Prefectural Disaster Response Headquarters is accused of failing to make use of the data on radiation dispersion in any systematic way and of deleting sixty-five of the eighty-six emails it received with SPEEDI updates. However, in a spiral-file folder just in front of that sign, there is an added explanation entitled ‘SPEEDI Not Usable in Evacuation’, detailing how it is not useful for conducting evacuations. Elsewhere I met a retired prefectural official who was closely involved in the disaster response, and he too questioned how useful SPEEDI really is and said it was not possible to use the data to plan evacuations. There is also added text about the problems of long-term evacuations, including isolation, loss of community, fears of ‘dying alone’ in temporary housing and the ongoing process of restoring lives and livelihoods. Perhaps the saddest addition refers to the ‘harsh evacuation’ at the Futaba Hospital that caused the deaths of at least forty patients during and after the ordeal due to poor planning, prolonged delays and miscommunication (Nakagawa 2021). Taking measure of the nuclear crisis in ways that the TEPCO Archive avoids, the museum’s misery index also includes panels on ‘living with anxiety everyday’ due to radiation concerns and restrictions on rice planting and the shipping of vegetables and the ‘collapse of communities’. Another panel claims 2,329 disaster-related deaths as of 30 September 2021 due to radiation impeding rescue efforts and delaying evacuations, and the negative health effects of evacuations and prolonged living in shelters. In addition, there is a panel on the ‘agonizing decision’ to accept the construction of Interim Storage Facilities on the Daiichi site. Agonizing because the prefecture was given little choice and because locals resent that they endured a nuclear disaster due to hosting a plant that only existed to generate electricity for Tokyo. Now, on top of a battered economy and reputation, it is also saddled with TEPCO’s nuclear waste for at least two-to-three decades to come, if not longer, perhaps becoming the de facto radiation dump. Also added in March 2021 is a replica of the iconic pro-nuclear sign that once spanned Futaba’s main street, declaring ‘Nuclear Power: Energy for a Bright Future’. It became a fixture of reporting on the nuclear accident, an ironic rebuke to the nuclear village of nuclear energy advocates. The sign was removed from Futaba in 2016 partly because the pillars had rusted but also because it was an awkward reminder that seemed to mock TEPCO, the government and the townspeople who had naively embraced nuclear energy. It now serves to remind visitors of how strong pro-nuclear sentiments were, and the appalling risks of their blind faith in TEPCO and official safety reassurances. Oddly, the sign is displayed on an outdoor terrace at the rear of the museum, ostensibly because of its size, but staff acknowledge there are places inside or in front of the building where the sign would fit. Whatever the reason, placing this iconic symbol on a remote back terrace that is difficult to see from inside the museum is curious curation. In early April 2022, next to the still deserted street in Futaba where the iconic sign had been displayed, I spotted a small poster featuring Onuma Yuji, the student who came up with the winning catchphrase in praise of nuclear energy back in 1987. In the poster he is wearing a hazmat suit with his arms stretched upward holding a placard that blocks part of the original sign. The poster is an indictment of the naïve boosterism of his youth and the bright future based on nuclear energy that he and other townspeople had once believed in. Now, as altered by the strategically placed placard, the iconic sign reads: ‘Nuclear Power: Radioactive Ruins Future’. Superimposed on the image is a poem expressing Onuma’s anguish about the great betrayal, and what was lost. He laments, ‘Oh, if only there was no nuclear

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Figure 15.2  Futaba sign revised. Credit: Jeff Kingston.

accident’. Until 3.11 the sign had been a source of personal pride, but he changed his mind after the accident. In 2016 Onuma protested the removal of the pro-nuclear sign, wanting it to remain as a stark reminder of the misguided policy and wishful thinking that prevailed (Tanaka 2016; Figure 15.2). Visitors may wonder if the crushed mini fire engine displayed next to the iconic sign on the Museum’s back terrace is a metaphor suggesting TEPCO’s inadequate disaster emergency preparedness or the government’s undersized safety countermeasures. The bright red twisted heap was found in the vicinity of the museum and serves as a reminder of the heroic first responders who paid a heavy price in lives lost in the effort to rescue others along the tsunami-pulverized Tohoku coast. I was told that the Japanese Self-Defence Forces offered one of their full-size fire engines that provided water for cooling the reactors and spent fuel pools during the Fukushima crisis. Apparently under pressure from TEPCO, the museum declined to display this reminder of the nightmare that almost was: had all the water evaporated from the spent fuel pools, there could have been a massive explosion releasing so much radiation that an evacuation of Tokyo might have been necessary (Figure 15.3). Controversially, the media has reported that the local storytellers at the Museum who relate their experiences during and after the disaster are instructed, at the risk of losing their jobs, not to criticize TEPCO or the prefectural or central governments when talking to visitors. A prefectural official told the Asahi, ‘We believe it is not appropriate to criticize a third party such as the central government, TEPCO or the Fukushima prefectural government in a public facility’ (Asahi 2020). Some of the guides are puzzled and angry at being muzzled

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Figure 15.3  Crushed fire engine in front of Futaba’s pro-nuclear sign. Credit: Jeff Kingston.

since these organizations have been implicated in investigations into the nuclear disaster and indeed in exhibits at the Museum. The Asahi points out that Committees set up by the Diet and central government to investigate the cause of the Fukushima nuclear disaster issued reports that called it a ‘man-made disaster’ and said TEPCO never considered the possibility that the Fukushima plant would lose all electric power sources in the event of an earthquake or tsunami because it stuck to a baseless myth that the plant was safe. (Asahi 2020) Guides are asked to submit scripts of the remarks they intend to give that are reviewed and edited by museum staff who also must approve any changes to the script or media interviews. If directly asked by a visitor about TEPCO’s responsibility for the accident, guides were told to avoid directly responding and refer visitors to facility staff. I was unable to confirm this censorship in April 2022 but did chat at length with staff who were forthright in expressing critical opinions of TEPCO and government organizations. As of March 2022, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum has welcomed over 100,000 visitors since opening in late 2020 compared to the 80,000 visitors to the TEPCO Archives since 2018, but the pandemic has limited the number of visitors. Unlike the Archive, it is a stunning building in an expansive space that

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is more appealing for tourists and school excursions. In addition to providing extensive coverage of the tsunami’s impact, it engages various nuclear-related controversies that the Archive does not cover. Overall, the displays convey a damning indictment of TEPCO and government institutions and as such will powerfully influence collective memories of the traumas ­experienced and perceptions of the organizations responsible for the human-made nuclear crisis that blighted Fukushima while etching its place in global memory alongside Chernobyl.

Works Cited Akiyama, N. (2016) ‘Political leadership in nuclear emergency: Institutional and structural constraints’, in Sagan, Scott and Edward Blanchard (eds), Learning from a Disaster: Improving Nuclear Safety and Security after Fukushima. Stanford, CA: Stanford Security Studies, pp. 80–108. Asahi (2022a) ’Partial lifting of evacuation order fails to bring life back to Futaba’ Asahi Shimbun, 30 August. Online. Available HTTP: < https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14706619 > (accessed December 7, 2022). Asahi (2022b) ‘Editorial: Post-disaster deaths among survivors an urgent issue’, Asahi Shimbun, 24 March. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed June 22, 2022). Asahi (2022c) ‘Survey: 60% of nearby mayors oppose TEPCO’s water discharge’ Asahi Shimbun, March 11. Online. Available HTTP: (Accessed December 7, 2022. Asahi (2021a) 3/11 museum updates displays of nuclear crisis to give truer picture’, Asahi Shimbun, 10 April. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14312444 (Accessed June 22, 2022). Asahi (2021b) ‘Editorial: Public’s distrust of TEPCO runs deeper than its water tanks’, Asahi Shimbun, 14 April. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14330360 (Accessed June 22, 2022). Asahi (2020) ‘Don’t criticize government or TEPCO, guides in Fukushima told’, Asahi Shimbun, 23 September. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13752941 (Accessed June 22, 2022). Asahi (2014) ‘Reality of the Fukushima 50 Special Report’, Asahi Shimbun. http://www.asahi.com/ special/yoshida_report/en/ (Accessed June 22, 2022). Birmingham, L. and McNeill D. (2012) Strong in the Rain: Surviving Japan’s Earthquake, Tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, A. (2021) ‘Fukushima Daiichi water: The world is watching or should be’, Safecast, 6 May. https://safecast.org/2021/05/fukushima-daiichi-water-the-world-is-watching-or-should-be/ (Accessed June 22, 2022). Cabinet (2012) Cabinet of Japan Investigation committee on the accident at Fukushima nuclear power stations of Tokyo Electric Power Company. Final Report. 23 July. www.cas.go.jp/jp/seisaku/icanps/ eng/final-report.html (accessed May 25, 2022). Diet (2012) The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission. Executive Summary. Tokyo: National Diet of Japan. http://www.nirs.org/wp-content/uploads/fukushima/ naiic_report.pdf (accessed May 25, 2022). FCCJ (2022). ‘Fukushima Thyroid-Cancer Victims Take TEPCO to Court’ March 2. Foreign Correspondents Club Japan. (accessed December 7, 2022) Kyodo (2022b) ‘Fisheries group conveys to PM opposition to Fukushima water release’, Kyodo News, 5 April. https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/04/493cfc399008-fisheries-remain-opposedto-fukushima-water-discharge.html (Accessed June 22, 2022). Lloyd-Parry, R. (2017) Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone. London: Jonathan Cape. Lukner, K. and Sakaki A. (2013) ‘Lessons from Fukushima: An assessment of the investigations of the nuclear disaster’, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 11(19), 2. https://apjjf.org/-Alexandra-Sakaki--­KerstinLukner/3937/article.pdf (Accessed June 22, 2022). Mainichi (2022) ‘6 people to sue TEPCO over thyroid cancer after Fukushima nuclear disaster’ January 21. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20220121/p2a/00m/0na/018000c (Accessed December 7, 2022) Mainichi (2016) Experts divided on causes of high thyroid cancer rates among Fukushima children.’ March 7. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160307/p2a/00m/0na/022000c (Accessed December 7, 2022) McCurry (2012). ‘Fukushima disaster could have been avoided, nuclear plant operator admits’, Guardian, 15 October. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/fukushima-­ disaster-avoided-nuclear-plant (Accessed June 22, 2022). Nakagawa, N. (2021) ‘Evacuation complete with 227 patients left behind during Fukushima d­ isaster’, Tansa (Tokyo Investigative Newsroom), 10 March. https://en.tansajp.org/­i nvestigativejournal/7591/ (Accessed June 22, 2022). Nikkei (2021) ‘Japan bans TEPCO from restarting nuclear plant over safety flaws’, Nikkei, 14 April. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/Japan-bans-TEPCO-from-restarting-nuclear-plantover-safety-flaws (Accessed June 22, 2022). Nippon (2022) ‘The state of recovery in Tohoku eleven years after 3/11’, Nippon.com, 10 March. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01282/ (Accessed June 22, 2022). Nippon (2020) ‘Recording the past and communicating the present: Fukushima Daiichi’s Archive Center’, Nippon.com, 5 June. https://www.nippon.com/en/guide-to-japan/gu900141/ (Accessed June 22, 2022). Onitsuka, H. (2012) ‘Hooked on nuclear power: Japanese state-local relations and the vicious cycle of nuclear dependence’, The Asia-Pacific Journal 10(3), 1. https://apjjf.org/2012/10/3/HiroshiOnitsuka/3677/article.html (Accessed June 22, 2022). RJIF (2014) Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Disaster: Investigating the Myth and Reality. (Expanded and updated English edition of the Report by The Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation (originally published in Japanese on 1 March 2012). London: Routledge. Rich, M. and Hikari Hida (2022), ”Japan says it needs nuclear power. Can host towns ever trust it again?” New York Times, May 4.

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PART 2

China/Hong Kong

16 HONG KONG AS PILLAR OF SHAME Trauma Foretold, Suppressed and Compounded Louisa Lim The Disappearance of the Pillar of Shame The Pillar of Shame is an eight-metre-high tangerine-coloured statue comprised of twisted bodies and contorted, agonized faces apparently on the point of death, which had been located on the campus of the University of Hong Kong. Its power lay not so much in its artistic value but in the uncompromising nature of its principled message. Its aim was to commemorate the killings of 4 June 1989 in Beijing, with its very presence serving to remind Hong Kongers of their duty to remember since, even after its 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty, the territory was the only place on Chinese soil able to publicly commemorate those deaths. On 21 December, 2021, in the dead of night, workmen at the campus dismantled the statue, swathed it in white plastic and then removed it in a shipping container. Made by Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot in 1997, the location of the Pillar of Shame was a matter of controversy from the start. After scuffles with the police, the two-tonne statue was installed by stealth by students at the University of Hong Kong, acting without the support of university authorities who had expressed concerns that the statue was too heavy for the chosen location. The statue was moved to other locations but was eventually reinstalled at the University of Hong Kong, becoming a pivotal part of annual Tiananmen commemorations at the university (Figure 16.1). Every year on 4 June, students started their remembrance rituals by scrubbing the statue in a symbolic gesture, wiping away the dirt. In 2022, one student representative described the ritual, knowing it was facing imminent demise, saying, ‘We hope to defend historical truth given that our freedom of speech is dwindling’ (Lim 2021a). After cleaning the statue, the students would walk together to a flyover on campus called Swire Bridge, where they used white paint to repaint a Chinese slogan written on the pavement. The words, first painted in 1989, read, ‘Souls of the martyrs shall forever linger despite the brutal massacre; the spark of democracy shall forever glow for the demise of evil.’ While these actions publicly marked the memory of Tiananmen, they also served to commemorate the university’s freedom of academic endeavour and its function as a site of free speech, as well as its tradition of student activism and its historic role as a hotbed for revolutionary thinkers. The university was, after all, the site of a 1923 address by China’s founding father Sun Yat-sen titled ‘Why I became a Revolutionist,’ which he concluded DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-18

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Figure 16.1  The Pillar of Shame at Hong Kong University. Credit: Louisa Lim.

with the words: ‘That is the answer to the question: Where did I get my revolutionary ideas? It is entirely in Hong Kong’ (Sun 1923). In this way, the removal of the statue signified many endings, heaping shame upon the university that had housed it for almost a quarter of a century (Figure 16.2). The university cited both safety concerns and legal arguments as reasons for the statue’s removal, arguing that no one had ever received approval to display the statue on campus. However, it was just the first in a number of removals. Three days later, at dawn on Christmas Eve 2021, the Chinese University of Hong Kong removed another statue from its campus. This time it was a replica of the ‘Goddess of Democracy’ statue built by students on Tiananmen Square in 1997, which had itself become a university landmark, situated in a plaza near the train station. The statue had often been used by students to draw attention to current political movements, for example by wrapping the Goddess of Democracy in a rainbow flag to show support for the LGBTQI+ movement or in a banner bearing the names of Occupy activists who had been jailed or faced persecution (Leutzsch 2019). This flexibility 188

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Figure 16.2 Chrysanthemums, the flower of mourning in China, laid on the Pillar of Shame as a tribute to June 4 victims. Credit: Louisa Lim.

demonstrates the statue’s importance as a moral symbol of student activism and global protest. A third university, Lingnan, removed a wall relief featuring the Tank Man—an unidentified protestor who stood defiantly in front of a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square the day after the 1989 crackdown. A month later, on 29 January 2022, authorities at the University of Hong Kong covered over the slogan painted on Swire Bridge, citing maintenance work. It was clear that Hong Kong authorities would no longer tolerate any visual reminders in public places of the 4 June killings. These moves followed the imposition in June 2020 of National Security Legislation on Hong Kong outlawing secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers. This legislation further curtailed freedom of speech, press freedom and freedom of association, giving authorities sweeping powers to stifle dissent. The removal of the statues compounded the three-decade-old trauma of the 1989 killings with new trauma, in particular the trauma of disappearance. The statues had been ever-present reminders of Hong Kong’s relative freedoms, monuments symbolizing Hong Kong’s place as a site of commemoration, a repository of memories that had been suppressed or excised in mainland China. One unspoken function the statues performed was as unofficial memorials to the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ formula made by Beijing in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984. Thus, their removal was traumatic on many levels, signifying the end of this political pledge, as well as demonstrating the wide-ranging ramifications of this policy change. Their removal also invoked the spectre of disappearance, a most profound fear for Hong 189

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Kongers, whose culture was defined in 1997 by cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas as a culture of ­d isappearance, or ‘dis-appearance, a kind of pathology of presence,’ due to the ever-present imminence of its end (Abbas 1997, 8). This referred to the uncertainty over the future of the former British colony, which was returned to Chinese sovereignty as a ‘special administrative region’ in 1997. Although China had pledged to govern according to the ‘one country, two systems’ formula for fifty years, until 2047, the events of 1989 ‘confirmed a lot of people’s fears that the Hong Kong way of life with its mixture of colonialist and democratic trappings was in imminent danger of disappearing’ (ibid, 7).

Trauma Foretold: The Long Shadow of June 4 This was trauma foretold; since 1989, the long shadow of 4 June has loomed over Hong Kong. The 1989 killings happened, after all, just eight years before Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, and after one million people in Hong Kong had taken to the streets on 21 May 1989 in support of those marching for democracy on the mainland. They held up signs ­reading ‘Today China, Tomorrow Hong Kong’ (Dapiran 2016, 23). After that rally a new body was formed, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China (referred to after this as the ‘Alliance’), which organized the annual 4 June vigil, though its ultimate aim was to end authoritarian one-party rule in China (Cheng 2021). The impact on Hong Kong was immediate. At the march itself, Democratic politician Martin Lee announced, ‘From now on, Hong Kong will not be the same’ (Cheng and Siaw 2022). That impact was solidified when the People’s Liberation Army soldiers opened fire on civilians on 4 June 1989. Democratic Party lawmaker Lee Cheuk-yan and the Alliance chairperson described how that move changed Hong Kong, ‘At the sound of the first gunshot, we wept and despaired. Hong Kong would never be the same. The people of Hong Kong moved on from political apathy to activism’ (Hong Kong Free Press 2021). In this way, the trauma of 1989 politicized a generation of Hong Kongers. That fear — Today China, Tomorrow Hong Kong — became so deeply embedded in Hong Kong’s politicians and activists that it was foundational in political calculations and protest strategy. The annual Tiananmen vigil, held from 1990 to 2019, was generally attended by more than 100,000 people, and became a key date in the annual political calendar. It often served as Hong Kongers’ first experience of political participation, and social movements used Tiananmen commemoration as a tool in memory mobilization for the purposes of social mobilization (Lee and Chan 2016). The role of memory is key, and some of the songs sung every year at the vigil underline Hong Kong’s core values. One example is the song Flowers of Freedom, whose lyrics were rewritten by lyricist Thomas Chow, back in 1989: But we have a dream, which never dies, just remember, No matter how fierce the storm, freedom will still bloom, But we have a dream, which never dies, just remember, It comes from our hearts, just remember. (Baar, 2018) The act of attending the rally and singing such lyrics affirmed those core values about freedom and helped construct a Hong Kong identity distinct from China. One small window illustrating the profound and long-lasting influence of 4 June in Hong Kong shows how the trauma of 1989 was almost epigenetic in its influence on Hong Kong 190

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politics, still underpinning political organizing and protest strategy a quarter of a century later. In a series of interviews that I carried out with political activists in December 2014, directly after the end of the Umbrella Movement, many mentioned how the events of 4 June formed the baseline of their political calculations twenty-five years on. The Umbrella Movement, which began on 26 September 2014, was a seventy-nine day occupation of streets in Admiralty and two other locations that called for more democracy in the choice of Chief Executive, defying Beijing’s will. The authorities’ use of eighty-seven rounds of teargas against demonstrators on 28 September 2014 was a turning point in Hong Kong’s protest history, heralding a new era in civil disobedience that began with that street occupation (Srivastava et al. 2014; Figure 16.3). ‘The worry of whether 4 June would happen in Hong Kong affected quite a lot of our decisions,’ one prominent political figure during the Umbrella Movement told me. In particular, he referred to rumours circulating at the start of the occupation, around the time that teargas was deployed, that the People’s Liberation Army might be deployed or that police might fire live ammunition at the crowds of people occupying protest sites. The interviewee saw personal memories of 4 June as a factor dividing the younger, more radical student leaders who had not been born in 1989 from the older protestors. To him, the older generation with lived experience of 1989 was incapable of removing the spectre of 4 June from their decision-making, while the students consistently downplayed the risk of a similar event, assessing the probability of such an outcome as very low. ‘They were not concerned that the risk was that high,’ he told me. ‘But even if the risk was not very high, we did not want to take the risk. It’s a judgement issue. It’s a different judgment without the actual experience of 4 June.’ However, student leader Nathan Law, then just twenty-two years old, who later became a legislator and then a political prisoner, disagreed with this assessment. When I interviewed him in Hong Kong in December 2014, he acknowledged the continuing impact of 4 June on activists in Hong Kong across generations. ‘The shadow of 1989 — the Tiananmen Square incident — is massive,’ he told me, referring to the mood among protest leaders during the

Figures 16.3 Tent encampments in the centre of Hong Kong, at Admiralty, during the 2014 Umbrella Movement. Credit: Louisa Lim.

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Umbrella Movement. ‘It has scared lots of people. A lot of people were scared of bloodshed in Admiralty.’ Law acknowledged that his familiarity with the events of 1989 had affected his own actions, saying, ‘For me, I kept thinking about 1989 too. It didn’t make me want to retreat, but [it] had some adjustment on our tactics.’ One of the strategic lessons the students had taken from 1989 was to try to avoid tactics that could be seen as directly confrontational or causing the Chinese Communist Party leaders to lose face. In particular, Law referred to the decision by student leader Wu’er Kaixi to wear pyjamas for his televised meeting with Premier Li Peng in 1989, which was widely interpreted as an insult. In later years, Wu’er Kaixi has maintained he was wearing a hospital gown rather than pyjamas, and it was not so much a calculated insult as a reflection of the fact that he had come to negotiations directly from a hospital ward, having been treated for hunger striking (Lim 2014). The generational difference towards 1989 was also raised by student leader Alex Chow, who in 2014 described to me how he had received a text message from his own father. In it, his father drew parallels between his own position as the parent of a Hong Kong student activist and the campaigning group, the Tiananmen Mothers, who had lost relatives back in 1989. Chow described the contents of the text message as follows, ‘If something happened in Hong Kong then he [Chow’s father] has to be an Occupy father, like the mothers of those students who sacrificed in Tiananmen.’ The text appeared to be an attempt to temper his son’s behaviour by invoking the CCP’s brutality, as well as reminding him of his duty as a filial child. Chow also described how the students themselves acknowledged that the killings of 1989 had been a constraining factor in their decisions. He said, ‘We were also affected by that feeling of fear. But afterwards when we did reflection, we would say, “It is simply too much, we need to shake it off.” We could not simply fear the potential force used by the government. We need to think of ways to tackle it or to counter it. Otherwise, we could not move forward.’ These interviews underline the ways in which the trauma of Tiananmen had a profound and intergenerational impact on street politics in Hong Kong, affecting how political actors behaved a full twenty-five years later. The sentiment that Alex Chow describes—a decision to shake off the impact of 1989 by student activists—was one important factor that caused young Hong Kongers to stop attending the official vigil commemorating Tiananmen in the years after the Umbrella Movement. In those years, a rising sentiment of localism led some students to boycott the official vigil, claiming that it was formalistic, not meaningful and unrelated to Hong Kong. However, the disqualification of popularly elected localist politicians from the legislature after controversy about their oath-taking, combined with the jailing of some activists on public order offences after the Umbrella Movement, bolstered the perception that the system would not change. However, the proximate cause for the protests—the ‘greatest crisis since the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989’ (Dapiran 2020, 14)–was the government’s attempt to push through extradition legislation perceived as detrimental to Hong Kong and its independent judiciary, as Beijing was tightening its control on the territory (Dapiran 2020). The first large-scale protest, in June 2019, attracted an estimated one million people, followed a week later by an estimated two million people, indicating the widespread nature of the opposition to the new extradition law (Figure 16.4). Although it had been feared and foretold since 1989, the crackdown on Hong Kong took longer than expected and came in a different form, not involving tanks or People’s Liberation Army troops. Instead, Hong Kong police regularly deployed large amounts of teargas to clear protests — over 16,000 rounds by the end of 2019 (Dapiran 2020, 5) — and used force to 192

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Figure 16.4 Two million people protest against proposed extradition legislation, on 16 June 2019.  Credit: Louisa Lim.

disperse marches, even on at least two occasions depending on thugs clad in white shirts who beat protestors. Authorities criminalized protest by withholding, and sometimes withdrawing, permission for public assemblies halfway through (Lim 2022). The use of such tactics, combined with video footage showcasing violent acts by protestors, was used on social media and in state-run news outlets to portray protestors as dangerous extremists (Stewart 2019) (Figure 16.5). Yet when it came, both the speed and the ferocity of the political suppression realized Hong Kongers’ deep-rooted pessimism about their future under Chinese rule. In an interview, Umbrella Movement leader Chan Kin-man articulated the parallels when he told me, ‘Now we are facing a similar crackdown In Hong Kong we took almost nine months to experience the crackdown, but in 1989 it was just one evening. It’s not a piece of history. It’s happening now’ (Lim 2022, 256). The removal of the statues had not been the first move against Tiananmen memorials. In 2020, the annual vigil was cancelled on COVID grounds, and some prominent figures who turned up at the Victoria Park vigil site—including Lee Cheuk-yan, newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai and politician Joshua Wong—were arrested, charged with unauthorized assembly and sentenced to as much as ten months in jail. That year, protestors who wanted to mark the date skirted the curbs by walking around the perimeter of the park, then raising their mobile phone torches in a gesture of protest. Other methods of commemoration that were publicly suggested were wearing black clothes, writing the numerals 6.4 (4 June) on light switches and flicking them on and off, and making smoke signals through the bars of a jail cell using 193

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Figures 16.5 Armed police deployed in Hong Kong on 1 October 2019 dispersing the protests, amid clouds of tear gas. Credit: Louisa Lim.

a cigarette. The modesty of these tiny gestures reflects the dramatic deterioration of freedom in the urban centre once known as a City of Protest (Dapiran 2016). By September 2021, the police had raided and shut down Hong Kong’s 4 June Massacre museum, accusing it of operating with the wrong permit. The Alliance disbanded the same month, after months of pressure. A senior Chinese official had said those trying to end the rule of China’s Communist Party were trying to use Hong Kong as a geopolitical pawn to contain China and infiltrate the mainland (Reuters 2021). The group had faced accusations that the organization was an agent of foreign forces. At least four senior Alliance members were arrested the same month, accused of foreign collusion. In December 2021, Lee Cheuk-yan was one of twenty-four activists charged over ­attending the 2020 vigil. He pleaded guilty to inciting others to take part, organizing and participating in the unauthorized vigil. He received fourteen months in jail along with seven others. A month earlier, in making a mitigation plea, Lee had denied accusations of being a provocateur and thanked the people of Hong Kong, saying, In the face of suppression they persisted, honouring the memory of the June Fourth Massacre in Victoria Park with their candlelight. Your Honour, the people of Hong Kong who took part needed no person or organization to incite them. If there was a provocateur, it is the regime that fired at its own people (Lee, 2021).

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‘For 31 years,’ he continued, ‘our unyielding memory and unrelenting conscience drove us to keep the promise, persist in honoring their memory, demand truth and accountability, and carry on the pursuit of freedom and democracy of the Chinese people’ (Lee 2021). For three decades since 1989, the trauma of those killings had been uncontested in Hong Kong, even if there had at times been public debate over the efficacy and significance of the annual vigil. Now this uncontested trauma had become contested and banned from memory, and space for public discussions about it was narrowing rapidly. In November 2021, it emerged that dozens of books about the massacre had been removed from public library shelves. Within the space of three short years, Hong Kong had lost its place as the memory repository for the events and trauma of 1989. The Alliance has always seen the protection of the memory of Tiananmen as the first line of defence for Hong Kong people. ‘We have to use this moment to say Hong Kong people will not submit to your rewriting of history,’ jailed lawyer Chow Hang-Tung told the Washington Post in May 2021 (Mahtani and Yu 2021). Just seven months later, in December 2021, Chow had been sentenced to twelve months in jail for inciting and taking part an illegal assembly in relation to the 2020 4 June vigil. The next month, Chow had an extra fifteen months added to her sentence for inciting others to defy the police ban on the vigil in 2021, by writing articles calling to ‘defend the candlelight’ and ‘fight for justice for the deceased’ (Wong 2022).

The Trauma of Suppression, Compounded by Enforced Silence The trauma of suppression has also been compounded by the trauma of enforced silence. The vague and draconian nature of the national security legislation has prevented Hong Kongers from being able to voice their discontent at such sentences, or the bans on gathering. Those who have defied the silence, even with the most minor gestures, have been very publicly punished. One example is the case of Chow Hang-tung’s hearing in January 2022, during which she defiantly asserted that she was inciting people not to forget 4 June. She also warned the court after the verdict about its significance, ‘It can be foreseen that the public space to discuss 4 June will disappear entirely,’ she said, ‘Tyranny is greedy, red lines keep expanding’ (Al-Jazeera 2022). As if to underline this, at least two spectators attending the hearing who clapped at Chow’s speeches were later arrested and face sedition charges (Lee 2022). Both faced charges of uttering seditious words and one also faced charges of committing acts with seditious intent. These intimidatory attempts to enforce silence produce another layer of trauma, in reminding Hong Kongers of the new category of ‘speech crimes’ that did not previously exist, and the disappearance of their freedom of speech. They also underline the spiralling logic of the machinery of repression, when enforced silence requires more arrests to ensure future silence. This heightens the intensity of the collective trauma, as the cost of speech—or in this case, clapping—is now immediately obvious. In this way, an enforced silence backed up by intimidatory legal decisions has added to Hong Kongers’ trauma by removing both their agency and their voice. During the movement, scholar Brian Leung Kai-ping described how Hong Kongers had become a ‘community of suffering.’ He said, ‘I think this is what it means to call ourselves a community, that we are able to imagine others’ suffering, and willing to shoulder one ­another’s burdens’ (Leung 2019). In this way, the imposed silence on those who remain

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within Hong Kong is also designed to create trauma by cleaving that community of suffering in two, dividing those in exile who can speak more openly from those inside Hong Kong who are now muzzled by the multiplicity of encroaching red lines. By June 2022, the annual vigil had again been banned on COVID safety grounds, this time with fences put up around its site in Victoria Park to stop access. The police presence was high, and people wearing black or carrying flowers were stopped for ID checks. A woman distributing blank paper was warned by police to stop, while another was told that the flowers she was carrying were ‘seditious.’ Police had warned that even turning up alone could be grounds for an illegal assembly charge, since ‘a group of people appearing in the same place at the same time with a common purpose is meeting the definition of a public meeting’ (Lam and Lam 2022). In this way, the trauma of suppression was ­compounded by the arbitrary application of the common law, a fact that was especially painful given Hong Kongers’ historic respect for the rule of law and their independent judiciary. The acquiescence of the University of Hong Kong’s administration in urging the removal of the Pillar of Shame signals its submission, not just to the rewriting of history but to the reorienting of its educational purpose in this new era of national security (Lim 2021b). Jeremy Brown’s (2021) analysis of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre suggests a further motive. Brown describes the post-June-Fourth purge in 1989 that rolled through universities and state-run work units in China, requiring students and employees to write self-criticisms. Many went through the motions, realizing that the aim was not so much to exact heartfelt pledges of loyalty but rather an explicit performance of self-abasement and subjection to power. Lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, then a graduate student, was one of the very few who were completely unrepentant. He even responded to accusations of financial malfeasance by admitting he had misspent money buying athletic shorts because he had pooped his pants during the protests. Pu Zhiqiang, Brown writes, suspected ‘the purge was about making people bow down to the post-massacre reality’ (Brown 2021, 237). Viewed in this light, the disappearance of these statues is part of a purge aimed at expanding that culture of abasement to Hong Kong. In removing the physical reminders of the Tiananmen killings, the three universities bowed down to Beijing and the post-National Security Law reality and signalled that they were willing to sacrifice their century-old tradition of academic freedom and critical inquiry in the interests of self-preservation. The very disappearance of the statues became a feature of the 2022 anniversary. In the run-up to the 4 June, one anonymous student collective planned to hide thirty-two 3D printed miniature statues around the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong for students to find. ‘This is a kind of rebellion,’ one of the organizers told the Hong Kong Free Press, ‘The university “stole” the statue from its students, so we’ve decided to make our own versions of it and put it back’ (Mok 2022). But even that action ended prematurely, stymied by sabotage and fear. At the University of Hong Kong, a display of colourful flowers in flowerpots was placed over the site of the slogan. And the area once occupied by the Pillar of Shame was transformed into a relaxation area with gigantic, polished, flat stones installed for students to sit on. The lack of any visual attractions underlines the moral vacuum left by the removal of these reminders of 4 June 1989. The absence of the vigils and statues underlines the pathology of their non-presence, and in this way Hong Kong itself becomes a Pillar of Shame. A dishonourable vacuum has been left by the disappearance of these vigils, organizations and statues which were once at the core of the territory’s political identity. In this way, the trauma 196

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of removal is compounded by the impossibility of discussing either the ­d isappearances or the related trauma, with the disappearance of speech itself further ­compounding the trauma. The very heart of Hong Kong’s political identity has been ripped out, with the lack of possibility of allaying any collective trauma through discussion or sharing further intensifying the pain.

Works Cited Abbas, A (1997) Hong Kong; Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Al-Jazeera (2022) Hong Kong’s Chow Hang-Tung Jailed in Second Tiananmen Vigil Case, Qatar: Al-Jazeera News. 4 June. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). Amnesty International (2022). Hong Kong: Sedition Arrests after Clapping in Court a New Low for Human Rights, London: Amnesty International, 6 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). Baar, J (2018). Friday Song: ‘Flowers of Freedom’ and Its Political Implications: Washington, Supchina, 2 June. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). BBC (2021). Hong Kong: Jimmy Lai Convicted for Taking Part in Tiananmen Vigil, London: BBC News, 9 December. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). Brown, J (2021). June Fourth; The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cheng, O and Siaw, W-H (2022). The Life and Death of Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements: China Change. 29 July. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). Cheng, S (2021). Exclusive: Hong Kong Public Libraries Purge 29 Titles about the Tiananmen Massacre from the Shelves. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Free Press. 21 November. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). Dapiran, A (2016). City of Protest; A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong, Australia: Penguin Random House. Dapiran, A (2020). City on Fire; The Fight for Hong Kong. Melbourne: Scribe. Davidson, H (2021). Hong Kong Police Raid Tiananmen Massacre Museum, London: The Guardian, 9 September. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). HKFP Fast News (2022). Potted Plants Replace Tiananmen Slogan on University Bridge: Hong Kong Free Press. 14 March. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). Lam, N and Lam, J (2022). June 4 Candlelight Vigil: Hong Kong Residents Should Avoid ‘Unlawful Assemblies’ around Victoria Park, Say Police as Ban Continues for Third Year. HK: South China Morning Post, 2 June. Lee, C-Y (2021). In full: Hong Kong Democrat Lee Cheuk Yan’s Mitigation Plea before his Sentence over Banned 2020 Tiananmen Vigil, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Free Press. 17 November 2022. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). Lee, FLF and Chan, JM (2016). Collective Memory Mobilization and Tiananmen Commemoration in Hong Kong. Media, Culture and Society Vol 38, Issue 7, pp. 997-1014. Lee, P (2022). Two Face Sedition Charges after allegedly ‘Causing Nuisance’ in Hong Kong Court. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Free Press, 2 April. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). Leung, B (2019). I am Brian Leung: They Cannot Understand; They Cannot Comprehend; They Cannot See. New Zealand: China Heritage, 20 August. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 3 August 2022). Leutzsch, A (2019). Handing Over Memories; the Transnationalization of Memorials and the Construction of Collective Memory in Post-war and Post-Colonial Hong Kong in Leutzsch, A. ed., Historical Parallels, Icons and Commemorations. London: Routledge, pp.115-165. Lim, L (2014). The People’s Republic of Amnesia; Tiananmen Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press. Lim, L (2021a). By Banning Tiananmen Vigils, China Is Trying to Rewrite History. London: The Guardian, 4 June. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 3 August 2022). Lim, L (2021b). The Tiananmen Statue and the Purging of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Free Press. 12 October. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 3/8/22). Lim, L (2022). Indelible City; Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong. New York: Riverhead Books. Mahtani, S and Yu, T (2021). In a Changing Hong Kong, Activists Fight to Keep the Tiananmen Vigil Alive, Washington: Washington Post. 31 May. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 3 August 2022). McLaughlin, T (2021). Beijing Keeps Trying to Rewrite History, Washington: The Atlantic. 27 November. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 3 August 2022). Mok, L (2022). In Pictures: Anonymous Hong Kong Students Hide Miniatures of Vanished Tiananmen Crackdown Statue around Campus. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Free Press, 3 June. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 3 August 2022). Stewart, E (2019). How China Used Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to Spread Disinformation about the Hong Kong Protests, New York: Vox 23 August. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). Sun, Y-S (1923). Why I Became a Revolutionist? Hong Kong, Speech to Hong Kong University, 19 February. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). Reuters (2021). Beijing Official Says ‘Real Enemies’ Want Hong Kong to be ‘Pawn in Geopolitics’ London: Reuters, 12 June Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 4 August 2022). Srivastava, M, Browning, J, Khan, N and Li, F (2014). How Teargas Ignited Hong Kong’s Democracy Protests. London: Bloomberg, 9 October. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022). Wong, B (2022). Tiananmen Vigil: Hong Kong Activist Jailed for 10 Extra Months Following Second Incitement Conviction over Banned June 4 Gatherings, Hong Kong: South China Morning Post, 4 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 August 2022).

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17 THE NAZI HOLOCAUST IN A CHINESE MIRROR Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees Museum Edward Vickers Introduction Since the 1990s, when the Chinese-American writer, Iris Chang (1997), dubbed the 1937 Nanjing Massacre ‘the forgotten Holocaust of World War Two’, Chinese propagandists have increasingly invoked parallels to the Nazi Holocaust as they seek to engage with ‘one of the most powerful [global] narratives of the wartime years’ (Mitter 2020, 120–121). It is therefore pertinent to ask how the Nazi Holocaust itself is remembered within China. What do attempts there to deploy the Holocaust as usable history tell us about efforts to legitimate Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule at home, and to project Chinese power and prestige abroad? By comparison with China’s own ‘War of Patriotic Resistance against Japanese Aggression’ (1931–1945), or Anti-Japan War (AJW), the Nazi Holocaust has generally attracted little Chinese attention. Only recently and partially has China embraced the notion of a ‘Holocaust’ and sought to compare Chinese to Jewish suffering. Amongst the few sites where these distinct narratives converge, Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees Museum (the SJRM) is perhaps the most notable. The story of Shanghai’s Jewish refugees has in recent years been used to buttress China’s claims to the moral high ground vis-à-vis the West. Understanding those claims requires examining how memories of colonial trauma are woven into Chinese national ­consciousness—a task undertaken in the first section below. This is followed by a summary of the history of Jewish refugees in wartime Shanghai and a discussion of the origins and establishment of the SJRM. The bulk of the chapter then analyses the museum’s narrative, identifying key themes and highlighting notable obfuscations and distortions. A concluding section reflects on what this approach to Holocaust commemoration tells us about the politics of contemporary Chinese nationalism.

Conflict and Colonial Victimhood in the Construction of Chinese Identity China’s status as a colonial victim is a cardinal tenet of the nationalist ‘Century of Humiliation’ narrative (Wang 2012). But the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is successor to the Qing Empire, largely comprising conquered non-Chinese territories. The official historical DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-19

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narrative tells of a weak China subjugated by foreign imperialists, finally ‘liberated’ by the CCP in 1949. However, the CCP itself pursues a colonial civilising mission vis-à-vis assorted ethnic ‘minorities’ (Anand 2019). A cycle of inter-ethnic tension and state repression has culminated in concentration camps for Muslim Uyghurs: ‘the largest internment of an ethnic-religious minority since the Nazi era’ (Strittmatter 2020, 213). Contradictory claims to colonial victimhood and colonialist repression of ‘minorities’ are resolved in a vision of history-as-Darwinian parable, with traumatic memories of foreign ‘bullying’ reinforcing the supreme importance of national strength (Vickers 2009, 70). The traumatised national self of this narrative is today constructed in explicitly ethnocentric, even racialised, terms (Tobin 2020). Efforts early in the post-Mao ‘Reform’ era (1980s–1990s) to promote a more tolerant multiculturalism have given way to resurgent Han chauvinism (Yan and Vickers 2019). Under Xi Jinping, the CCP portrays itself as the custodian of a conservative, Han-centric vision of ‘China’s outstanding traditional ­culture’ (Vickers 2021a). Bilingual education has been curtailed, religious observance severely restricted (especially for Muslims), and women from certain communities (notably Uyghurs) even forcibly sterilised (Zenz 2020). Internationally, Xi’s ‘Chinese Dream of the Great Revival of the Chinese Nation’ projects resumption of China’s rightful place atop a hierarchical global order. As Wang argues (2012), a ‘chosenness-myths-trauma complex’ lies at the heart of Chinese nationalism, with intense ‘humiliation’ reflecting a profound conviction of superiority: how could this happen to us? However, especially under Xi, a desire to project national strength has reshaped narratives of past trauma, particularly in relation to the Second World War. Accounts of national victimhood, epitomised by the Nanjing Massacre, are increasingly balanced by emphasis on Chinese power. The seventieth anniversary of the war’s end, in 2015, witnessed the inauguration of an enormous annex dedicated to ‘Victory’ at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial (Frost et al. 2019). The CCP today portrays China as a central pillar of the multilateral order, deploying rhetoric of a ‘Community of Shared Future for Humanity’ that harks back to Chinese leadership in the triumphant struggle against Fascism. Where, though, does the Nazi Holocaust fit into this narrative of ‘China’s Good War’? Holocaust commemoration in the West has supplied a template for commemorating Chinese suffering, notably at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, where certain architectural features echo Israel’s Yad Vashem (Mitter 2020, 121). But beyond such borrowing of commemorative tropes, the story of Jewish suffering receives little attention in Chinese accounts of the war. Current school textbooks make almost no reference to the Nazi killing of Jews: a History and Society (Lishi yu Shehui) text from 2013 features three lines and a photograph of emaciated concentration camp survivors (PEP 2013, 83). High school Language and Literature texts have featured extracts from Anne Frank’s Diary (and in 2017–2018, Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House staged a temporary exhibition at the SJRM), but that Frank’s account allows readers to ‘relate to the Holocaust… without tackling the hard historical realities’ explains much of its popularity (Zwigenberg 2015, 183). Jews as a racial category have nonetheless featured prominently in Chinese nationalist discourse, helping explain both policy towards wartime Jewish refugees and the narration of their history today. Traditional fixation on patrilineal ‘blood lines’ heightened Chinese receptivity to European race theory, shaping a vision of ‘Chineseness’ as ‘primarily… a matter of biological descent, physical appearance and congenital inheritance’ (Dikötter 1997, 1). Along with imported Darwinism came racial stereotypes of Jews, which acquired contradictory and ambiguous ‘indigenous meanings’ for Chinese nationalists: ‘while the “stateless Jew” became a warning of racial extinction, the “rich Jew” or “powerful Jew” became an 200

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inspiration, a model of a “new people” in China’ (Zhou 2003, 548). Much later, in the early years of post-Mao ‘Reform and Opening’, a prominent scholar who had described Jews as ‘laughable, despicable, pitiable, admirable, enviable and hateful’ cited the ‘assimilation’ of Kaifeng’s ancient Jewish community as evidence of the cultural superiority, ‘magnanimity’ and tolerance of ‘the Chinese race’ (Zhou 1997, 73). One question for this analysis thus concerns the extent to which biological notions of identity continue to influence the narrative of Chinese-Jewish interaction. Another relates to how the portrayal of Jews mirrors certain ideas of ‘Chineseness’. But before examining how the representation of Shanghai’s Jewish refugees sheds light on such questions, it is ­necessary first to review their history itself.

European Jewish Refugees and Shanghai Following the British-imposed 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, Shanghai developed into China’s largest and wealthiest metropolis. Its commercial centre was the British-dominated International Settlement; there was also a separate French Concession. The city’s Chinese inhabitants thus coexisted with a substantial foreign elite, while the wheels of commerce were greased by a cosmopolitan underclass. Amongst the foreigners, the balance of power shifted during the 1930s; from 1937, the Japanese controlled the ‘Chinese city’ surrounding the international zone. Baghdadi Jewish dynasties such as the Sassoons and Kadoories were prominent in pre-war Shanghai but had little in common with their refugee coreligionists from Europe. From the mid-1930s, European Jews sought to emigrate in increasing numbers, but their preferred destinations did not include ‘poor and under-developed’ China (Gao 2013, 128). ‘Advanced’ Western societies were most favoured, but Jewish emigrants faced widespread and entrenched antisemitism and heightened anti-immigrant sentiment due to the Great Depression. That Shanghai emerged as a refuge of last resort was due partly to its extraterritorial status (prior to 1942), but also due to Chinese and Japanese policy. Chinese nationalism acquired its racialist inflection partly from Japan, and nationalists in both countries shared similar beliefs concerning ‘the Jewish race’ (Dikötter 1997)—beliefs largely borrowed from contemporary European nationalists and reflecting their antisemitic assumptions (Zhou 2003; see previous section). After full-blown Sino-Japanese hostilities commenced in 1937, these beliefs fuelled competition for Jewish support. Seeking to appeal to what he perceived as America’s powerful Jewish lobby, Sun Ke, a Kuomintang (KMT) luminary and son of Sun Yat-sen, proposed resettling Jewish refugees in South-West China. Lack of American financial support scuppered Sun’s plan, but the KMT authorities mandated a relatively liberal visa regime for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution—a policy famously implemented, despite obstruction from China’s Ambassador to Germany, by the diplomat He Fengshan (Gao 2013). Jewish ‘experts’ in the Japanese military, Yasue Norihiro and Inuzuka Koreshige, meanwhile developed their own plan to exploit ‘Jewish power’. Gao (2013) distinguishes self-serving Japanese motives of militaristic aggrandisement from more sincere Chinese humanitarianism. Japanese beliefs, she argues, ‘ironically [my emphasis]… helped save the lives of Jewish refugees’, making Japan resistant to German pressure to extend the ‘Final Solution’ to China (30). However, her more charitable verdict that Chinese stereotyping of Jews as ‘wealthy people’ constituted ‘a sort of soft anti-Semitism’ applies equally to Japanese such as Yasue and Inuzuka (29). Both Japanese and Chinese elites were influenced by ­antisemitic  tropes regarding the sway of global ‘Jewry’ in Britain and the USA (Abe 2002, 10). 201

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What of the experience of the Jewish refugees who reached Shanghai? Gao emphasises their inability and unwillingness to integrate into ‘either Chinese or Western society in the city’ (2013, 128). One disillusioned refugee spoke for many: ‘What a disgusting city Shanghai is!’ (129); when the war ended ‘fewer than ten percent’ wished to remain (130; see also Cheng 2021). Those few willing to stay on faced ‘indescribable confusion and chaos’ after Japan’s surrender, and most fled ‘the takeover by Mao Tse-Tung and the Communists’ (Gao 2013, 130). Besides such ‘push’ factors, Western societies held a strong attraction. During their stay in Shanghai, refugees generally strove to learn English rather than Chinese (131). Relations with local Chinese were nonetheless often cordial. After February 1943, when the Japanese confined all refugees to the impoverished Hongkou District, Jews and Chinese were thrown more closely together. Chinese responses to their new Jewish neighbours were also mixed. While refugees recalled instances of hospitality or even camaraderie, often expressing gratitude for the sanctuary Shanghai afforded, they sometimes faced xenophobic prejudice. This typically manifested as generalised anti-Westernism rather than specifically antisemitic sentiment. However, ‘xenophobic behaviour escalated after the war’, amidst spiralling civil conflict and chronic insecurity (Gao 2013, 133). In May 1946, a Chinese mob in Hongkou, asserting their rights to property occupied by Jewish refugees, displayed ‘anti-Semitic banners proclaiming “The Japs and Jews are our enemies”’ (134). The complex legacy of Shanghai’s Jewish Refugee Zone thus reflects the tumult of mid-twentieth-century China. More than 20,000 European Jews granted sanctuary there escaped the dire fate of millions of their co-religionists. But alongside acknowledgement of the justified gratitude of refugees and their descendants, the commemoration of this episode touches upon other, more contentious aspects of the envisioning of modern Chinese identity.

The Holocaust, Global Memory Culture and the Origins of Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees Museum Iris Chang, honoured at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial with a statue after her death in 2004, showed how invoking Holocaust memory could strike a chord in the USA. As e­ thnically based identity politics surged from the 1960s, American public life increasingly resembled ‘a competition for enshrining grievances’ (Novick 2000, 8). In this context, America’s relatively privileged Jewish community found that the Holocaust bestowed a powerful claim to ‘certification as (vicarious) victims’, with the attendant ‘moral privilege’ (Novick 2000, 9). Their success—symbolised by the National Holocaust Memorial Museum on Washington DC’s National Mall—spurred others, including Chinese-Americans, to push similar narratives of victimisation. Visitors from China also noted the prominent commemoration of Nazi atrocities against the Jews. The Head of Chinese Military Intelligence commented, after a 1996 visit to the National Holocaust Memorial, ‘Terrible! But there is no comparison to how cruel the Japanese soldiers were. You know, China should have a Holocaust Museum of its own’ (Mitter 2020, 237). While the American example has been influential, a ‘global memory culture’ extolling victimhood has multiple origins. In Japan, commemoration of the Hiroshima bombing became central to a re-fashioning of national identity around a commitment to ‘peace’ grounded in memories of Japanese suffering. In the early 1960s, Hiroshima-based activists organised a ‘Peace March’ to Auschwitz, asserting equivalence between their victimhood and that of massacred Jews. Such efforts ran with the tide of Cold War Western opinion, which commonly assumed commensurability between the atomic bombings and the Shoah 202

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(Zwigenberg 2015). Both the threat of atomic weaponry and the guilt of genocide were recast as shared burdens of ‘humanity’, obscuring the particular circumstances of these atrocities. Meanwhile, in the 1980s, China dismantled the divisive Mao cult, recasting its national narrative as a tale of patriotic unity against foreign invasion. Commemoration of the AJW increasingly assumed centre stage but, ironically, Japan supplied commemorative templates, not least for the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, whose ‘peace park’ features iconography ­reminiscent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the same time, modernisers in Chinese heritage management, as in other sectors, looked increasingly to the West, where they were confronted with the extraordinary cultural prominence of the Holocaust. When Deng Xiaoping visited Washington DC in 1979, President Jimmy Carter ­introduced him to ‘Kurt Duldner, a Jew and friend of the Chinese people’ (according to the 2020 SJRM exhibition). Duldner subsequently pressed for the erection in Shanghai’s Huoshan Park of a memorial wall to wartime Jewish refugees. This was unveiled in 1994, when Chinese awareness of the Nazi Holocaust was rapidly growing. Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was released in 1993, just as Deng’s intensified ‘Reform and Opening’ drive heightened Chinese exposure to Western popular culture. Iris Chang dubbed another German Nazi, John Rabe, ‘the Oskar Schindler of Nanking’ for his role in rescuing Chinese civilians from the marauding Japanese; Rabe’s former Nanjing residence is now a memorial.1 And when ‘China’s Spielberg’, Feng Xiaogang, sought a Western lead for his 2012 war film Back to 1942, he tapped Adrian Brody, star of Roman Polanksi’s 2002 Holocaust film, The Pianist (Vickers 2018, 52–53). Official Chinese interest in the Holocaust reflected consciousness of its potential for raising global—or Western—awareness of China’s wartime role. Nowhere was the desire for global status and recognition stronger than in Shanghai, which from the 1990s branded itself as China’s beacon of modernity and gateway to the wider world ( Jiang and Vickers 2015). But the Second World War did not immediately suggest itself as fertile terrain for municipal propagandists. Nanjing could commemorate its noble, if disastrous, stand against the Japanese, and the southwestern city of Chongqing its role as China’s wartime capital, but Shanghai’s record offered little to celebrate. Occupied for eight years, collaboration was the dominant reality for Shanghai’s Chinese population. A museum commemorating the 1937 battle for Shanghai at Songhu omits discussion of the occupation period, skipping forward to post-1945 trials of Japanese war criminals; other local museums and school texts are similarly evasive (Vickers 2018). But the Jewish refugees’ story offered a positive spin on Shanghai’s experience of occupation. Moves to establish a museum gathered momentum in the early 2000s, partly through the advocacy of an official in the Foreign Affairs Division of the municipal government, Chen Jian. Chen noticed that Hongkou District, and especially the Tilanqiao area, was attracting significant numbers of Jewish visitors (Huang 2022). The flow had intensified following a 1993 visit by the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, to the Ohel Moshe synagogue (now centrepiece of the SJRM). Chen helped persuade local authorities of the potential for capitalising on this interest to boost Shanghai’s cosmopolitan image; he would become the first director of the SJRM in 2007. Meanwhile, a new Sino-Japanese rivalry arose over recognition for their national ­contributions to saving Jews from the Holocaust. Matching Shanghai’s efforts to promote its Jewish refugee ‘heritage’, in 2015 a hagiographic biopic of Sugihara Chiune, the Japanese consul in wartime Lithuania who issued exit visas to Jews, was released. The same year, Soka University hosted a joint exhibition on Sugihara and Anne Frank (precursor to the SJRM’s 2017 Anne Frank exhibition). Japanese efforts to secure a UNESCO ‘Memory of the World’ 203

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(MOW) inscription for a Sugihara archive are ongoing, despite a rejection in 2017. Although unexplained, this 2017 rejection coincided with that of an application for MOW inscription of a ‘comfort women’ archive that was vehemently opposed by the Japanese government. It is likely that UNESCO feared that recognising an instance of Japanese ‘heroism’ during the Second World War while denying similar recognition to Japan’s wartime victims would be politically explosive (Vickers 2021b). The Shanghai authorities responded to these Japanese moves by intensifying attempts to secure UNESCO MOW registration for a Jewish Refugee Zone archive. A ‘recommendation’ from the Shanghai delegation to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress (CPPCC) cited a key Xi Jinping slogan: The history of saving Jewish refugees is an important instance of ‘A Community with a Shared Future for Mankind’. During the Second World War, China withstood pressure and overcame difficulties, taking in and saving Jews persecuted by Fascism, evincing the spirit of willingly sharing meagre resources and friendly mutual assistance. Through telling the story of Shanghai’s Jewish refugees to the world, it is possible to gain the acclaim of international society, including that of the Jewish world (youtai shijie). (CPPCC 2019) This story would further showcase ‘China’s outstanding traditional culture’, and the e­ ssential qualities of the Chinese race-nation (minzu): ‘a love of peace, harmony, kindness and ­tolerance’. Crucially, stepping up ‘people’s diplomacy’ involving the SJRM was urgent given the ‘threat’ of Japanese lobbying for their Sugihara application; it was essential to prevent ‘granting space for other perspectives to confuse right and wrong’ (CPPCC 2019).

Narrating the Story of Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees in the SJRM The remainder of this chapter examines the representation of wartime Jewish refugees in the SJRM. Key themes include the place of Jews in China’s ethnic imagination, China’s role in (and motives for) saving Jews, relations between the refugees and the local Chinese, Japanese treatment of the refugees, the latter’s postwar departure from Shanghai, and the museum’s emphasis on overseas outreach. I visited the SJRM in 2015, but the exhibition was overhauled and expanded in late 2020. Having obtained data on the renovated exhibition with local assistance, I discuss certain shifts in the treatment of the aforementioned themes. In my concluding remarks, I then reflect on what this evolving narrative reveals about the Holocaust’s role in mirroring or amplifying memories of Chinese trauma, and more broadly in the official reimagining of China’s identity and global status.

Jewish Refugees and the Jewish Presence in China The 2020 SJRM exhibit notes the long Jewish presence in China thus: Jews first came to China in the Tang Dynasty 1,000 years ago. They settled down, ran business, and prospered… They have developed strong ties with the Chinese people. These allusions to ‘business’ and prosperity are suggestive of stereotypical associations of Jews with money-making. We are told that Jews who settled in Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital, around 1000 AD ‘gradually lost’ their ‘ethnic features… and fused with the Han 204

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Chinese’. This record of seamless fusion echoes the assimilatory destiny projected for ethnic minorities in today’s China (Vickers 2021a). However, Shanghai’s twentieth-century Jewish refugees are portrayed emphatically as temporary sojourners; for them, assimilation was never on the agenda. Shanghai’s refugee Jews thus remain definitively ‘other’, even while deployment of their heritage for propaganda purposes intensifies. In 2020, Xi Jinping’s slogan ‘Work together to build a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind’ was emblazoned across one wall of the refurbished museum (see above; CPPCC 2019). As elsewhere in today’s China, heritage thus serves to burnish Xi’s inspirational ‘thought’, a doctrine for a new era of China-led global cooperation.

Chinese Policy and Motives The 2020 exhibition elaborates the context for the refugees’ plight and China’s role in saving them. An audio-visual display shows archive footage of Nazi concentration camps (accompanied by the plangent violin of the Schindler’s List soundtrack), followed by images of refugees happily resuming normal life in Shanghai. An explanation of the ‘Final Solution’ and gas ovens’ role in ‘efficient’ killing, along with photographs of heaped bones under the heading ‘The Cruelty of the Holocaust’, provide further context for the Jewish exodus. Reflecting the museum’s drive to expand its collection (and with an eye on that UNESCO listing), the 2020 exhibition also features more original artefacts throughout, including Nazi-era Jewish identification papers and passports. The horrors of the Holocaust are also situated in a larger historical context: ‘the Jewish people have a long history’, have ‘suffered from a high frequency of persecutions, been forced to scatter from time to time, and have tasted the sweetness of reunions’.2 The Nazis sought to eliminate a Jewish presence in Europe dating back ‘2,000 years’. These allusions seem calculated to strike a chord with Chinese primed to see their own history as both incomparably long and marked by ‘a high frequency of persecutions’. The 2020 exhibition also features enhanced emphasis on ‘Chinese sympathy for the Jews’, evidenced by a ‘Letter of Protest against Anti-Semitism’ delivered to Germany’s ConsulateGeneral in Shanghai by Soong Ching-ling, Lu Xun, Cai Yuanpei and other luminaries, citing ‘social justice, human values and cultural progress’; a nearby panel records a ­subsequent ‘Letter of Appreciation from the Jewish Press to Madam Soong’, widow of Sun Yat-sen (founder of the Chinese Republic) and a renowned CCP sympathiser. Invoking Sun Yatsen’s legacy, the exhibition hails the 1939 ‘plan’ of his son, Sun Ke, as ‘a lesson from his deceased father, who insisted on uniting and helping the poor and weak nations and ethnic groups’, while noting that it ‘was also intended to improve diplomatic ties with the USA and UK’. Although the plan failed ‘due to lack of funding’, it symbolised ‘Chinese compassion for the Jews in danger’. Mapping the ‘escape routes’ that brought Jews to Shanghai, the exhibition explains the crucial role of ‘Visas for Life’. Many countries, including Britain and the USA, made it ‘nearly impossible’ for Jews ‘to get a life-saving visa’. Many therefore ‘turned to the embassy (sic.) of China in Vienna for help’, where Dr He Feng Shan issued ‘thousands of visas’ enabling them to travel to Shanghai. We are told that He ‘was nicknamed “China’s Schindler” and awarded [by Israel, in 2001] the title “Righteous among the Nations.”’ The same section alludes briefly to the role of Sugihara Chiune, amongst ‘other diplomats who issued visas to Jews’. Dr He exemplifies Chinese ‘sympathy’ for Jews, but the narrative omits to explain that he disobeyed instructions from China’s Berlin ambassador to desist granting visas to 205

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Austrian Jews (He 1990); insubordination is not a virtue in Xi’s China. We are thus left with the ­m isleading impression that Dr He was simply implementing Chinese government policy. Only a plaque affixed to the wall of the museum courtyard by the ‘United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad’ praises He’s ‘steadfast ­courage’ in ­‘ignoring the orders of his superiors… at risk to his career and personal safety’.

Chinese-Jewish ‘Brotherhood’ in Hongkou and Beyond Having established the Chinese state’s role in saving them, the exhibition details the refugees’ experience in Shanghai. Vagueness surrounds the status of Hongkou District itself, which in fact fell outside Chinese jurisdiction. Part of Shanghai’s International Settlement, by the time Jewish refugees arrived there, Hongkou was under effective Japanese control (Gao 2013). It is not explained that it was precisely Hongkou’s extraterritorial status that made it far safer than Shanghai’s ‘Chinese city’. We are simply told that Jewish refugees gravitated to Hongkou because it was ‘cheap’. By contrast, Israel’s Yad Vashem ‘World Holocaust Remembrance Centre’ credits Japan with opening Shanghai’s ‘doors to Jews, with no visa requirement’ (Yad Vashem 2022).3 The SJRM portrays the refugees as basking in the friendship and hospitality of their new Chinese neighbours. While the ‘generous support’ of some wealthy local Jews is noted, the emphasis falls overwhelmingly on acts of kindness by local Chinese ‘who were not better off’. In a pointed contrast with European anti-semitism, one panel in 2020 proclaims that ‘Chinese were not prejudiced against Jews’. But more than absence of prejudice was at work: there was a spirit of ‘brotherhood’. Under the heading ‘The Chinese and Jews lived harmoniously in the Ghetto’, former refugee Jerry Moses is quoted as saying: For me, the heroes are and always will be the Chinese people’s hearts… kindness and understanding and tolerance make a great nation like China greater… this amazing experience… of how people who were even worse off than I was could feel sorry for me. Prominently covered is the story of Lin Daozhi’s ‘Keeping a Promise for Seven Decades’. The headmaster of a local Christian school, Lin was entrusted by a Jewish headmaster with the care of valuable books. Lin (who died in 1981) and his family fulfilled this trust over many decades. Coverage of this case was expanded in 2020, with an audio-visual display featuring grateful testimony from the Jewish headmaster’s descendants. But nowhere does the display acknowledge the grave risks borne by the Lins during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when possession of foreign or ‘old’ literature could invite vicious persecution or death by lynching (Dikötter 2017). While thus drawing a veil over violent Maoist anti-traditionalism, the SJRM echoes the CCP’s contemporary enthusiasm for ‘outstanding traditional Chinese culture’ (Vickers 2021a). Approving parallels are drawn between supposedly essential features of Chinese and Jewish ‘culture’. ‘Family life’ and ‘education’ are singled out, with praise for refugee efforts to organise educational and cultural activities. ‘Like so many Chinese families’, explains the text, ‘Jews attach great importance to the education of their children. They also believe that home is the place to pass down knowledge and Jewish virtues’. The English version of the text asserts that ‘No other religious or ethnic groups (sic.) in the world have paid as much attention to family education as the Jews’ (in Chinese, this becomes ‘Few other…’). Ignoring the refugees’ general lack of interest in Chinese language or culture (Gao 2013), the exhibition highlights the case of one refugee, Otto Schnepp, who learned the Shanghai dialect. 206

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Refugees’ traditional ‘family values’ are celebrated in a section entitled ‘Love and ­ arriage— The brand-new life begins’. The importance attached to marriage is attributed m in part to an impulse for communal self-preservation; it is approvingly remarked that ‘the marriage of Jews in Shanghai was very solid, with a very low divorce rate’. While noting that ‘endogamy’ was the norm, the exhibition also acknowledges ‘some legendary exceptions’ of Jews who married Chinese. Especially highlighted is the case of Sara Imas, daughter of a mixed marriage who, after an unhappy decade in Israel from 1992 (witnessing ‘clashes’ between Israelis and Palestinians), returned to China (her ‘motherland’) and found ‘true love’ after marrying a Chinese professor. Jewish affection for China expressed itself in other ways, too. Under the heading ‘I love Chinese’, the 2015 text highlighted the stories of several refugees who ‘made their own ­contributions to the Chinese revolution’. The 2020 revamp further elaborates the experiences of refugees who fought with Chinese forces against Japan or served as army medics. Xi Jinping is quoted, in a 2016 speech in Poland, hailing the contribution of ‘Polish friends’ in providing support to China during the AJW.

Japanese Administration of the Refugee Zone While shared experience of Japanese oppression is portrayed as uniting Chinese residents and refugees, the SJRM indicts ‘fascist’ Japan by association with Holocaust-perpetrating Nazis. In 2015, the museum mounted a special exhibition on an animated film, The Mystery of the Necklace: A Jewish Girl in Shanghai 2, featuring a refugee family, their steadfast Chinese neighbours, a fat and venal Japanese officer (Yamamoto) and German Colonel Meisinger. Meisinger, a historical figure who was the chief Nazi representative in Japan, sought to persuade the Japanese in Shanghai to adopt the ‘Final Solution’. In 2020, expanded coverage of this episode briefly acknowledged that ‘the plan was not carried out at last’, without explaining why. Instead, emphasis is placed on Japanese brutality and the refugees’ worsening plight, ­especially following their confinement to the ‘Hongkou Ghetto’ from May 1943. A graph shows how annual refugee deaths almost doubled between 1941 and 1942–1943. Coverage of the ghetto was expanded in 2020, with increased discussion of the Pao Chia System—a traditional method of social control through collective responsibility, rigorously enforced by the Japanese. The text notes the role of various officers, including Inuzaka Koreshige, in managing local Jewish affairs, but omits discussion of Japanese policy or ideology (see Abe 2002). Japanese brutality is personified by a stereotypical ‘Japanese devil’ of a kind pervasive in contemporary Chinese popular culture. This is ‘Ghoya, King of the Jews’, the tyrannical overseer of the Hongkou Ghetto. The exhibition highlights an incident in which Ghoya terrorised an elderly rabbi, cutting off his beard with his sword. The 2020 version quotes one refugee describing him as ‘a manic sadist who was [always] in a rage and given to physical violence’. He is also described as a ‘psycho’. But like many of the ‘Japanese devils’ of Chinese imagination, Ghoya is also ridiculed—in a prominently displayed satirical cartoon by a former refugee.

The Refugees Depart Having escaped death in Europe and survived Japanese persecution, the refugees greet ‘the Dawn of Peace’ in August 1945. The 2020 exhibition starkly contrasts the fate of six million ‘massacred’ Jews in Europe with that of Shanghai’s fortunate 20,000 refugees. Of the latter, 207

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we are told: ‘Sorrow and guilt filled their hearts. Some of them blamed themselves for not bringing their relatives to China’. However, almost none ultimately opted to stay in China. The 2015 exhibition noted that ‘from 1946 to 1951, about 22,000 to 24,000 Jews left Shanghai’. Alluding to ‘the difficult question of whether…[to] stay or go’, the 2020 text implies a straightforward answer: ‘most Jews left Shanghai to reunite with their family and seek a better life’. Due to ‘differences in language, culture and lifestyle’, the refugees ‘had regarded Shanghai only as a temporary refuge and had not intended to settle’. Nowhere mentioned is the chaos of the KMT-CCP Civil War, which claimed more lives than the Sino-Japanese conflict. Eliding the chronic violence and insecurity of late-1940s China, the Jews’ departure is represented as a natural consequence of their ties to America, Israel or the wider West.

The SJRM ‘Goes Global’ The SJRM forcefully asserts the global significance of the traumatic history recorded there. This is also evident at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial (especially in its 2015 extension) and at Nanjing’s Comfort Women Museum (also opened in 2015). Perhaps significantly, those institutions also relate to applications for UNESCO Memory of the World registration (Vickers 2021b). The pursuit of ‘people’s diplomacy’, urged by the CPPCC in 2019, was a foundational aim of the SJRM, which also seeks to impress Chinese visitors with evidence of global attention. In 2015, numerous refugee testimonials and photographs of visiting foreign dignitaries featured endorsements of China’s postwar development under CCP guidance. Michael Blumenthal, a former refugee who became US Treasury Secretary, was quoted as noting ‘one change’ on a 1979 visit to Shanghai: ‘there are no beggars or people dying in the street’. Rehearsing the old trope of Jewish business acumen, another panel noted that many former refugees had ‘returned to Shanghai for business investment’, thus helping promote ‘China’s economy and culture abroad’ and ‘fuelling’ China’s ‘modernization’. Another 2015 exhibit, The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum Going Global (now incorporated in the main SJRM exhibition), celebrated the museum’s extensive programme of global outreach, to Germany (2011), Israel (2012), various American cities (2013–2014), Hungary (2014) and Australia (2015). A ‘Preface’ explained that the story of Shanghai’s Jewish refugees ‘illustrated the kindness, generosity and inclusiveness of the Chinese people. It is to some extent a story of China’ (my emphasis). In the Chinese text, these qualities were explicitly ­a ssociated with ‘China’s outstanding traditional culture’. The SJRM’s global roadshow was credited with having ‘enriched the cultural exchange programmes of China Cultural Exchange Centres and Confucius Institutes worldwide’. A 2014 exhibition in the US Capitol complex reportedly ‘attracted the attention of seven Congress members and 200 ­d istinguished guests’. Coverage of the SJRM’s global impact highlights its role in ‘enhancing the friendship between the Chinese and Israeli people’ (as the Going Global exhibit put it). A prominent mural features an inscription penned by Yitzhak Rabin during his 1993 visit, thanking ‘the people of Shanghai’ for their ‘unique humanitarian act’ in saving Jewish refugees. The 2020 exhibition celebrates Prime Minister Netanyahu’s fortuitous role in the 2013 opening of The Café Atlantic (a replica of a demolished Viennese-style café) in the SJRM courtyard; he ‘happened to be in Shanghai’ at the time. Meanwhile, the attendance of the Israeli consul-general at the December 2020 reopening of the museum features prominently in a television news report posted on the SJRM website (SJRM 2022). 208

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There is also implicit endorsement of the Zionist project—a striking turnaround from Chairman Mao’s portrayal of Israel as the ‘poisoned knife which American imperialists have struck into the heart of Palestine’ (Zhou 1997, 73). In 2020, one former refugee, George Renisch, is quoted recalling his religious advisor’s words at the end of the war: We don’t hate, but this should never happen again. We need a country of our own, and we should not be bullied by all crazy people. When there is need, we must stand up and sacrifice for our land. Chinese visitors cannot fail to detect echoes here of ‘patriotic education’ messaging on China’s fate during the AJW. Meanwhile, the museum barely mentions the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As ethnically-based nationalism has supplanted class-based anti-imperialism as the cornerstone of CCP ideology, and with Beijing confronting restive Muslims in Xinjiang, China’s Communist regime now finds itself more in sympathy with the chauvinist Israeli establishment than with their Palestinian subjects.

Conclusion The Israeli scholars Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan—fierce critics of their government’s manipulation of the Shoah to distract from colonialism in the Palestinian territories—find China’s embrace of Holocaust commemoration bemusing. Analysing the globalisation of Holocaust memory, they report a lavish 2013 conference of the international Association of Holocaust Organisations held in China. This commenced with sessions on ‘The Jews in China’ and ‘Japanese Genocide in China’, but few topics directly addressed the Holocaust. Goldberg and Hazan ask whether (or to what extent) global Holocaust memory is really ‘about Jews’ or ‘Jewish history’; if it concerns ‘other genocides’; and how ‘political and politicised’ it has become (Goldberg and Hazan 2015, xi). The SJRM itself portrays its narrative as ‘to some extent a story of China’. For today’s CCP as for earlier Chinese nationalists, Jewish experiences mirror Chinese anxieties and aspirations. Essentialising portrayals of ethnicity testify to the continued pervasiveness of racialised ideas of nationhood and a Darwinian worldview emphasising national strength. In the SJRM drama, Jewish refugees function as supporting actors, chorusing appreciation of ‘outstanding traditional Chinese values’. The stars are the Chinese nation—benevolent, ­tolerant, humane—and the forces of global ‘fascism’, Japanese and German. The refugees’ family values, community spirit and educational enthusiasm, along with their status as ­fascism’s victims, render them worthy recipients of Chinese benevolence. Their story also bolsters the image of a tolerant, cosmopolitan Shanghai, serving a local agenda of selective ‘cosmonostalgia’ (Huang 2022). The Holocaust itself functions as a lurid backdrop, casting Chinese virtue into stark relief. Nuance and historical accuracy are the primary casualties: we see no exploitative Chinese landlords; no haughtily racist European Jewish refugees; no Japanese who are neither demonic nor comic. Nor is the story of the Jewish refugees related to the wider cataclysm afflicting mid-twentieth-century China. The bloody Civil War after 1945 compounded the displacement of Shanghai’s refugee Jews, compelling them to seek safer havens elsewhere. But acknowledgement of China’s mid-century societal collapse sits awkwardly with the image of rocklike power and unwavering magnanimity the CCP today seeks to project, as it claims global leadership under the banner of Xi’s ‘Community with a Shared Future for Mankind’. 209

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As in contemporary Israel, Russia and much of Eastern Europe, so in China, an e­ ssentialised ethnic identity, grounded in a narrative of unique trauma, serves to invest the nation with a verisimilitude of moral authority ( Janmaat and Vickers 2007). The Holocaust’s main significance for China’s authorities has been as an inspiration for attempts to emulate what are seen as successful Jewish efforts to weaponise a story of victimhood for national or ethnic advantage. But as victimhood narratives become totems of collective innocence and parables of national strength, they can licence vicious suppression of subordinate populations and obliviousness to their trauma. The tragic consequences are apparent today in Xinjiang.

Acknowledgement This chapter has been adapted from the article ‘Celebrating the Humane Superpower: China, the Holocaust and Transnational Heritage Politics at Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees Museum’ (2022), published in a special issue of the journal Holocaust Studies. DOI: 10.1080/17504902.2022.2116543

Notes 1 Although in the early 2000s the building had been scheduled for imminent demolition, and was saved partly through the intervention of Siemens (Rabe’s former employers) and the German government. 2 Unless otherwise specified, quotations from here on are from the museum exhibition. 3 https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/march/1949.html.

Works Cited Abe, Yoshio (2002). ‘Senzen no Nihon ni okeru tai yudayahito seisaku no tenkai-ten’ (‘The Turning Point in Pre-War Japan’s Jewish Policy’), Kyūshū daigaku daigakuin gengo kenkyūin: Gengo bunkai ronkyū (Kyushu University Faculty of Languages and Cultures: Studies in Languages and Cultures), 16, 1–13. Anand, Dibyesh (2019). ‘Colonization with Chinese Characteristics: Politics of (In)security in Xinjiang and Tibet’, Central Asian Survey, 38:1, 129–147. Chang, Iris (1997). The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War Two. San Francisco, CA: Basic Books. Cheng, Kimberly (2021). ‘Anxieties of Escape: Climate, Hygiene, and Central European Jewish Refugees in WWII Shanghai’, paper presented at the annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies. 24 March. CPPCC (2019). Shanghai zhengxie ti’an xuan deng: guanyu jia kuai tuidong Shanghai youtai nanmin dang’an wenjian shenbao shijie jiyi yichan, zuohao minjian waijiao xiang shijie hongyang heping youshan baorong de jianyi (CPPCC Proposal by Shanghai Adopted: A Recommendation Regarding the Acceleration of the Registration of the Archive Relating to Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees as [UNESCO] Memory of the World, to Further People’s Diplomacy and Promote Peace, Friendship and Tolerance to the World). http://zhengxie.thnet.gov.cn/. (accessed January 22, 2021). Dikötter, Frank (1997). ‘Introduction’, in Dikötter, F. (ed.), The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1–11. Dikötter, Frank (2017) The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976. London: Bloomsbury Press. Frost, Mark, Schumacher, Daniel and Vickers, Edward (2019). ‘Introduction: Locating Asia’s War Memory Boom: A New Temporal and Geopolitical Perspective’, in Frost, M., Schumacher, D. and Vickers, E. (eds), Remembering Asia’s World War Two. London and New York: Routledge, 1–24. Gao, Bei (2013). Shanghai Sanctuary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, Amos and Hazan, Haim (eds) (2015). Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

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The Nazi Holocaust in a Chinese Mirror He, Fengshan (1990). Wai jiao sheng ya si shi nian [My Forty Years as a Diplomat]. (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Huang, Shu-Mei (2022). ‘Staking Claims to Difficult Memories: Diplomacy and Jewish Heritage in Shanghai and Beyond,’ in Huang, S.-M., Lee, H.-K. and Vickers, E. (eds), Frontiers of Memory. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 165-186. Janmaat, Jan Germen and Vickers, Edward (2007). ‘Education and Identity Formation in Post-Cold War Eastern Europe and East Asia’, Compare, A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 37:3, 267–275. Jiang, Lei and Vickers, Edward (2015). ‘Constructing Civic Identity in Shanghai’s Museums: Heritage, Ideology and Local Distinctiveness’, in Vickers, E. and Kumar, K. (eds), Constructing Modern Asian Citizenship. New York and London: Routledge, 217–239. Mitter, Rana (2020). China’s Good War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Novick, Peter (2000). The Holocaust in American Life. Boston, MA and New York: Mariner Books. PEP (People’s Education Press) (2013). Lishi yu Shehui (History and Society), Year 9, Volume 1. Beijing: PEP. SJRM (2022). ‘Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum Reopened after Expansion’, video posted on the website of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum: http://www.shhkjrm.com/node2/n4/n6/index. html (accessed May 9, 2022). Strittmatter, Kai (2019). We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China’s Surveillance State. London: Old Street Publishing. Tobin, David (2020). Securing China’s Northwest Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vickers, Edward (2009). ‘The Opportunity of China,’ in Lall, M. and Vickers, E. (eds), Education as a Political Tool in Asia. New York and London: Routledge: 53–82. Vickers, Edward (2018). ‘Remembering and Forgetting War and Occupation in the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan,’ in Finney, P. (ed.) Remembering the Second World War. London and New York: Routledge: 46–67. Vickers, Edward (2021a). ‘Smothering Diversity: Patriotism in China’s School Curriculum under Xi Jinping’, Journal of Genocide Research, 24:2, 158–170. Vickers, Edward (2021b). ‘Slaves to Rival Nationalisms: UNESCO and the Politics of “Comfort Women” Commemoration’, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 5: 5, Article ID 5546. Wang, Zheng (2012). Never Forget National Humiliation. New York: Columbia University Press. Yad Vashem (2022). ‘March 1949: Immigrants from Shanghai Arrive in Israel’, website of Yad Vashem: https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/march/1949.html (accessed May 9, 2022). Yan, Fei and Vickers, Edward (2019). ‘Portraying “Minorities” in Chinese History Textbooks of the 1990s and 2000s: The Advance and Retreat of Ethnocultural Inclusivity’, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 39:2, 190–208. Zenz, Adrian (2020). Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang. Washington, DC: The Jamestown Foundation. Zhou, Xun (1997). ‘Youtai: The Myth of the “Jew” in Modern China,’ in Dikötter, F. (ed.), The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press: 53–74. Zhou, Xun (2003). ‘Review of Chirot, Daniel and Reid, Anthony, Essential Outsiders’, in The China Quarterly, 174: 547–549. Zwigenberg, Ran (2015). Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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18 MEMORY AND MYTHMAKING World War II in Chinese Cinema Mike Fu

To proclaim that the trauma of World War II (WWII) continues to haunt East Asian geopolitics may be an understatement. Despite closer economic ties between China and Japan than ever before, bilateral diplomacy is volatile at best and vulnerable to the missteps and manipulations of political leaders on both sides. In China, the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) remains fresh in public memory in no small part due to the dramatizations of wartime ­v iolence and valour that popular audiences have consumed via film and television across ­several generations. Public memorials, along with government and media discourse, also play a large part in how Japan and Japanese people, by extension, are viewed. In the year 2000, the Chinese actor and auteur Jiang Wen released a historical film called Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi laile) that took a subversive approach to depicting the brutality of Japanese-occupied China during WWII. The film is an unlikely black comedy, an intimate tale of bumbling Chinese villagers whose misfortunes and handwringing over the fate of two prisoners in their charge are shadowed constantly by the presence of the Japanese ­m ilitary. Writing in Film Comment, Berenice Reynaud observed that Jiang renders his characters with a fundamental humanity, the interior complexities of ‘their greed, craftiness, cowardice, stupidity, lust, warmth, foolishness, stubbornness’ transcending nationality (2002, 75). While Devils was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes, Jiang eventually ran afoul of Chinese government censors for his bold portrayal of sensitive subjects. A New York Times article cited a Film Bureau committee member’s explanation that Jiang’s work was not banned, per se, but in violation of protocol for having been shown abroad ‘without prior approval’ (Eckholm 2000). The film was generally praised in Japan, with commentators even applauding the realism of its depiction of the Imperial Japanese Army (Yau 2014, 80). Over two decades later, Devils on the Doorstep remains a powerfully affecting work and singular vision that stands apart from the glossy blockbusters and WWII melodramas typically approved by the Chinese government for public consumption. I begin this chapter with a synopsis of the film and some notes regarding its technical and stylistic choices. Next, I contextualize Devils against other major works of contemporary Chinese cinema addressing WWII and offer an overview of the domestic and global reception of these films. From there, I sketch a broad outline of Sino-Japanese relations in the twenty-first century and the mutual distrust sown by disagreements over wartime ­h istory. I circle back to examine Jiang’s career following the release of Devils and evolutions 212

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in Chinese and Japanese society since the early 2000s, particularly among youth generations. I conclude by acknowledging contemporary reverberations of Jiang’s film and of WWII and posit what the current condition may portend for Sino-Japanese relations going forward.

Absurd Intimacies, Sumptuous Violence As an actor, Jiang Wen vaulted into Western consciousness as Gong Li’s lover in the seminal Fifth Generation film Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang), directed by Zhang Yimou. Jiang made his directorial debut in 1994 with the evocative In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi), an adaptation of a Wang Shuo novella that depicted the lives of wayward teenagers left to their own devices in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. Six years later, Jiang’s sophomore film Devils on the Doorstep was released to international accolades at Cannes and other festivals. Based on the novel Survival (Shengcun) by You Fengwei, Devils follows the plight of Hebei peasant Ma Dasan, played by Jiang Wen himself, who receives an unexpected visitor one night while making love with local widow Yu’er ( Jiang Hongbo, no relation). An unseen interlocutor deposits two captives in gunnysacks into Ma’s home. Brandishing a knife and gun, the man instructs Ma that it is his responsibility to keep the prisoners alive and well, and perhaps interrogate them in the meanwhile; he’ll be back to retrieve the pair in several days. The captives turn out to be Hanaya Kosaburo (Kagawa Teruyuki), a fervently nationalistic and defiant Japanese sergeant, and Dong Hanchen (Yuan Ding), a self-serving Chinese interpreter. Ma and Yu’er are dumbfounded by their predicament and decide to seek advice from their fellow villagers. It is shortly before Chinese New Year of 1945. Ma’s home of Rack-Armour Terrace is already occupied by the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army, with the strains of the former’s Gunkan māchi heard at regular intervals as they ostentatiously parade around this tiny village nestled into the far eastern end of the Great Wall of China. An uneasy peace lingers. The locals have more or less accepted the presence of the occupying forces, while the Japanese also tolerate the subjugated peasants with occasional bursts of derision or gruff demands. Deviating from the conventions of most commercially driven Chinese cinema, the cast members of Devils speak Tangshan dialect rather than standard Mandarin or putonghua. Dang Li notes that Article 16 of the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Use of Chinese Languages and Characters ‘strongly discourages the use of dialects and languages other than [standard Mandarin]’ (2018, 272). Prior to 1980, standard Mandarin was dominant in Chinese films regardless of the setting or characters, or else dialects and accents were simply used for superficial colour and were ultimately ‘subordinated to an overarching discourse of the nation-state’ (273). Jiang Wen’s deliberate choice to feature almost all of the Chinese cast members speaking a dialect from Hebei adds significant depth to his narrative, in contrast to the standard fare that one might typically come across via popular film and television. Jiang employs expressive black-and-white cinematography in Devils on the Doorstep as homage to the war films of his upbringing (Ward 2004, 108). This aesthetic choice, ­m asterfully executed by director of photography Gu Changwei, lends itself to a surprising intimacy that characterizes the first two-thirds of the narrative. Jiang’s Ma Dasan and his lover Yu’er are already carrying out an affair with relative discretion, given the taboo nature of their tryst—she is not only a widow but already a mother. The arrival of Hanaya and Dong in their midst requires the couple to operate with utmost caution to evade the potentially lethal attention of the Japanese conquerors of Rack-Armour Terrace. Fiercely unrepentant, 213

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Hanaya’s first reaction to his new custodians is to scream obscenities at Ma and Yu’er while urging Dong to translate. Some of the film’s initial comic tension revolves around Dong’s softening or elision of Hanaya’s feverish exclamations; he explains to Ma and Yu’er that the Japanese language naturally sounds angry, while appealing to them for mercy and freedom as a fellow Chinese, his affiliations notwithstanding. The shadowy figure who brought Hanaya and Dong to Rack-Armour Terrace never returns to collect his prisoners. Half a year later, in the height of summertime, Ma and Yu’er are still tending to the bound captives, feeding them in secret in a basement shed. The psychological weight becomes too much to bear, particularly when Japanese soldiers draw near at regular intervals. With the aid of the other villagers, Ma concocts various plans to unburden himself of his charges, but each solution fizzles out due to moral equivocations or comical ineptitudes. Enervated from his months in captivity, Hanaya is no longer the strident patriot he was when he first arrived in Rack-Armour Terrace. A mawkish, blubbering mess of a man, he eventually strikes a bargain with Ma. In exchange for his release, Hanaya promises that the Imperial Japanese Army will reward the villagers with grain for their humane treatment of the two prisoners. All parties sign a written agreement penned by the village elder. Ma and a band of his compatriots then muster up the courage to deliver Hanaya and Dong to the Japanese military encampment as promised. The fearsome Sakatsuka Inokichi (Sawada Kenya), commander of the local forces, is none too pleased to receive Hanaya, whose family had already been informed of his presumed death. For Ma and his ragtag band, discomfort mounts at the local encampment as the Japanese army snaps to attention. This theatrical comedy of errors quickly takes on a much more serious tone. However, Captain Sakatsuka makes good on Hanaya’s promise to recompense the villagers of Rack-Armour Terrace for their troubles. He offers Ma many times more grain than promised and proceeds to organize a feast that very evening for the Army, the Navy and the local Chinese peasants. Hanaya, meanwhile, is berated and physically abused for his ignoble return from the grave. That evening, the dinner party in plein air proceeds in a spirit of unexpected levity. The Navy band plays the Gunkan māchi and the soldiers sing, while the Chinese alternately perform small skits and provide other entertainment in between toasts. Ma is notably absent, having gone off to fetch Yu’er from home. One of the young villagers starts to get a little too chummy with Captain Sakatsuka during the celebration, much to Hanaya’s horror. Incited by both alcohol and an irrepressible urge to redeem his honour, Hanaya attacks the man and swiftly beheads him. The dinner descends into chaos as the Gunkan māchi plays on, with the Chinese pitifully outnumbered and no man, woman or child spared in the orgy of violence. At the very moment that Hanaya prepares to commit ritual suicide, Sakatsuka stops him and reveals to the gathered soldiers a piece of shocking news: the Emperor has recently declared Japan’s surrender. Approaching from a distance by skiff, Ma and Yu’er are aghast to discover a conflagration at the site of the supposed festivities. The final portion of Devils on the Doorstep is a sombre slog. American troops and the Republic of China Army now control the local town that the Japanese had previously occupied. Dong Hanchen, the interpreter, is summarily executed in public for treason. Downtrodden and alone, Ma has become a cigarette hawker who reluctantly peddles his wares to the Japanese prisoners of war. He loses his patience after a transaction one day and begins attacking the soldiers with an axe, breaking into their camp in a rage. Ma happens upon Hanaya and gives chase, but is apprehended before he can exact his revenge. For his infractions, Ma is also sentenced to death—his ignominious actions earning him punishment at the hands of Captain Sakatsuka of the Imperial Japanese Army. Sakatsuka, in turn, 214

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devolves this duty onto Hanaya. The action comes full circle from the night Hanaya was delivered to Ma’s home half a year earlier as a bound prisoner. For so long, Ma lived in fear of what Hanaya’s presence could mean, ever anxious about the omnipresent danger his charge represented even within the confines of his hideout. By the end of the film, Ma is completely disillusioned and apathetic to the world, even as Hanaya tests the blade of the katana against the back of his neck. The penultimate image of the film is a point-of-view shot from the ­perspective of Ma at the moment of his decapitation. As his head rolls on the ground, the world comes into colour for the first time. In the final shot, Ma’s severed head blinks and smiles as the film fades to red for the credits. Jie Li reads Jiang Wen’s choice to shoot his film in black and white as a means to ‘parody, mimic, and critique the narratives and tropes of both Chinese and Japanese screen h ­ istories’ (2014, 259), particularly among works addressing WWII. Li draws connections between the cinematography of Devils and that of works such as Imamura Shohei’s Black Rain (Kuroi ame) and Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon. Nearly a decade after Devils was released to international acclaim and infamy, director Lu Chuan contributed yet another black-and-white film memorializing WWII with City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing!). Unlike Jiang’s focus on absurd intimacies in the rural peripheries, Lu dramatizes the events leading up to and unfolding in the erstwhile Chinese capital in a period that has come to be known as the Nanking Massacre. Lu, too, deploys a Japanese protagonist in the form of Kadokawa Masao (Nakaizumi Hideo), a soldier whose character development and equivocations serve as somewhat of a humanizing anchor amid the ubiquitous violence of the film. City of Life and Death departs from the theatricality of a single peasant’s conundrum and instead engages a cast of hundreds, if not thousands, a veritable chorus narrativizing the atrocities in Nanjing from the points of view of Chinese, Japanese and Westerners alike. Visceral portrayals of death and destruction are integral to the film from the outset, rather than simply the s­uggestion or potentiality of danger that Ma Dasan wrestles with for most of Devils. Lu Chuan appeals to the viewer’s pathos and moral outrage through numerous scenes of physical transgressions, including mass rape and executions. Perhaps in a bid to curry the favour of the government censors, he also includes a notable scene of patriotic zeal wherein orchestral music swells to a crescendo as a crowd of beleaguered soldiers chant, ‘China will not perish!’ Following on the heels of this grim fare, the celebrated Fifth-Generation director Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, To Live) released a thematically similar film in 2011 set in wartime Nanjing, with the conspicuous participation of Hollywood actor Christian Bale. The Flowers of War ( Jinling shisan chai) was the most expensive Chinese film in history at the time, purportedly made on a budget of USD $100 million (Chang 2011). Unlike the work of his contemporaries Lu and Jiang, Zhang’s film was shot in dazzling colour. Flowers offers yet another narrative of the Nanking Massacre wherein the brutality of the Japanese army against soldiers and civilians alike is depicted in excruciating detail. The violent potentiality of Japanese militarism looms over the smouldering ruins of the city, with little possibility for redemption or emotional nuance. The only Japanese supporting cast member of significance is Colonel Hasegawa (Watabe Atsuro), whose courteous mien is undermined by the ultimatum he delivers to the church where wayward mortician John Miller (Christian Bale) is pretending to be the head priest. Acknowledging his unique privilege as a Westerner, Miller determines to protect the group of Chinese Catholic schoolgirls residing in the church, as well as the bevy of prostitutes who have taken refuge in the basement. The heightened tension of confined spaces and furtive schemes for self-preservation recall the basic dramatic arc of Devils. Whereas the threat of violence lingers in Devils and remains ultimately unrealized 215

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until the final stretch of the film, Flowers stages its narrative against a backdrop of ubiquitous death and destruction. Only its denouement offers some reprieve—at the cost of tremendous offscreen sacrifice. ‘For people familiar with the war film in China’, writes Yingjin Zhang, ‘the dominance of official history and collective memory on screen are all too obvious’ (2016, 24). Cinema has often served as a vehicle for the reification of national trauma and the propagation of ideology. As such, the Chinese government is unsurprisingly heavy-handed in its approach to managing the kinds of homegrown narratives it sees fit for consumption, by domestic and foreign audiences alike. Mere months after winning the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2000, Jiang Wen withdrew Devils on the Doorstep from the Edinburgh International Film Festival due to political pressure. Official quibbles with his film were dubious or unclear, with some unnamed sources contending that perhaps overzealous bureaucrats sought to exercise what little power they had by taking issue with Jiang’s use of expletives (Gibbons 2000). Other scholars such as Haiyan Lee have vouched for the idea that Jiang’s complex drama did not conform to the ‘standard alignment of good and evil in representing the anti-Japanese war’ (2014, 261). Whatever the rationale, the consequences soon became clear: due to his violation of guidelines set forth by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), Jiang Wen was banned from directing films entirely for seven years (Zhu and Rosen 2010, 3). This apparently did not preclude his continued career as an actor, however, as he starred in several roles in the years following. Jiang ultimately returned to directing with The Sun Also Rises (Taiyang zhaochang shengqi) in 2007 and has since helmed three more feature-length works. While Devils was generally praised by Western critics for its moral complexities, Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death received mixed reviews despite scooping up several international awards of its own. The superficial innocence that director Lu conferred on the character of Kadokawa, the Japanese soldier, is a fundamental flaw for Kevin B. Lee, who offers a scathing interpretation that this ‘childlike obtuseness [was] a way of absolving a projected Japanese audience, suggesting that both are guileless witnesses to atrocities beyond their control or comprehension’ (2010). Lee is among the scholars who draw a connection between Lu’s choice of black-and-white cinematography and Schindler’s List, the quintessential Hollywood wartime drama directed by Steven Spielberg. More generous readings of City exist, though it has been noted that the film’s ‘constant oscillation between Chinese heroism and universal humanism leads to slippery ideological stands and narrative tensions’ (Yang 2017, 691). Despite its patriotic trappings, Lu’s film was still intensely scrutinized by Chinese censors before it was approved for release. Lu publicly expressed his hope that City could inspire reflection among and even reconciliation between Chinese and Japanese people, but moviegoers on both sides did not take too kindly to his efforts. His humanization of Japanese characters like Kadokawa, for instance, drew outrage from Chinese viewers, who also criticized what they saw as an overly sanitized rendition of the Nanking Massacre (Brown 2015, 530). Meanwhile, in Japan, film distributors and theatres shied away from embracing Lu’s work for fear of militant right-wing groups who had previously incited public action against films about their country’s wartime atrocities (WikiLeaks 2009). Like Devils on the Doorstep, The Flowers of War was adapted from a work of fiction, in this case the eponymous novel by Yan Geling. Whereas City of Life and Death garnered cautious praise in the West and courted controversy in China and Japan, Zhang Yimou’s lavish production was received tepidly by critics but embraced by domestic audiences. Laurie Burkitt and Tom Orlik declared the film’s visuals to be ‘sumptuous’ in the Wall Street Journal but critiqued its lack of subtlety, even bringing up Jiang’s Devils as a point of comparison (2011). 216

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The starring role of Christian Bale made it apparent that the project doubled as a vehicle for China’s Hollywood-sized ambitions in expanding the reach of its homegrown film industry. Zhang, who served as the creative director for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, had no problem obtaining official approval to release Flowers domestically. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it became the highest grossing film in China in 2011 and the sixth highest of all time (McClintock 2012). The only controversy that Flowers engendered seemed to be a business matter regarding ticket prices that caused Zhang’s production company to briefly clash with Chinese distributors (‘Chinese exhibitors to boycott’ 2011). Ultimately, the film failed to garner an Academy Award nomination, or much scholarly attention compared to the works by Jiang and Lu. The New York Times lamented Zhang’s ‘distanced, strangely frivolous treatment… [and] his refusal to take a point of view on one of the most gruesome chapters in Chinese history’ (Hale 2011), while The Hollywood Reporter described elements of the film as far-fetched and crass (McCarthy 2011). Although there is little evidence of public outcry in Japan over Zhang’s film, neither does this mean the film was an unqualified success. Devils on the Doorstep, City of Life and Death and The Flowers of War each take up the grim subject matter of Japanese atrocities in WWII through a different directorial vision and narrative scope. It could be argued that the historical reality of the Nanking Massacre separates the latter two from the rural fabulations of Jiang’s film, but the humanistic gaze on the Japanese by Jiang and Lu that so incensed Chinese audiences justifies this particular pairing. Wu Haiyun of the Chinese state-sanctioned online magazine Sixth Tone sees Devils on the Doorstep as a pioneer in this respect, paving the way for ‘more nuanced portrayals of Japanese soldiers’ in film, although none have been quite as masterful as Jiang (2020). The socio-political context behind Chinese responses to this cinematic triptych will be explored in the next section, as I trace the pendulum swing of modern Sino-Japanese relations vis-àvis commemorations of history.

Hot and Cold Histories Chinese tourism to Japan has increased more than tenfold in the past two decades, peaking at a total of 9.6 million visitors in 2019 (‘Chinese Visitors Spend’ 2020). Meanwhile, ­bilateral relations between China and Japan have remained anaemic at best, with both countries reporting overwhelmingly negative opinions about the other according to public opinion polls (Yau 2021). Kinnia Yau Shuk-ting argues that Japanese discourse on China took a considerable nosedive during Abe Shinzo’s tenure as prime minister from 2012 to 2020, as news media and television dramas alike portrayed the Chinese government and people in an unflattering light (2021). Mutual goodwill nowadays seems to be at a historic low since the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations in 1972. In fact, the roots of contemporary tensions may be traced back to the 1990s, when Japan’s economic bubble burst and earlier overtures of friendship and cooperation to China were overshadowed by emerging territorial disputes, the post-Tiananmen flowering of patriotic education and China’s nuclear t­esting. The spectre of wartime, too, has never fully dissipated. In 1995, to commemorate fifty years since the end of WWII, China released a spate of films that depicted the Japanese as the national enemy and expanded the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. No doubt these highly public commemorations and rehashings of history have ensured that wartime trauma remains fresh as ever, even for youth many generations removed from WWII. Abe Shinzo is not solely responsible for the mutual ill will of the status-quo, of course. William A. Callahan describes the early years of the twenty-first century as a ‘deep freeze’ 217

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in Sino-Japanese relations (2009), a period in which Koizumi Junichiro’s tenure as prime minister included frequent visits to the Yasukuni Shrine—a Shinto shrine that honours not just those fallen in war but also fourteen Class A war criminals since 1978. In the early 2000s, Chinese public outrage towards Japan was more often than not amplified by the unsettled history between the countries, regardless of whether the triggering incident happened to be a sports match or a prostitution scandal. Certainly, the Nanking Massacre looms large in Chinese narratives of WWII, as demonstrated by the cinematic works of Lu Chuan and Zhang Yimou and reinforced by the Chinese government’s memorialization of the atrocities through ‘lasting national institutions’ (Callahan 2009). Anniversaries of the war in China became prime occasions for the unveiling of physical establishments, such as the museum and memorial hall, as well as mass dissemination of photo albums, illustrated articles, TV series, paintings, novels and the like. Antipathy towards Japan, Callahan argues, is reinforced by ‘a combination of official censorship and vigilante harassment, showing how state policy and popular movements work together to produce China’s national identity’ (2009, 165). The Nanking Massacre and Japanese leaders’ visits to the Yasukuni Shrine are just two among many issues of historical memory that continue to impede warmer relations between China and Japan. Caroline Rose and Jan Sykora characterize the current conundrum as a ‘trust deficit’ rooted in unresolved historical issues, the longstanding rancour leftover from WWII now encompassing contemporary disputes such as sovereignty over the Diaoyu (or Senkaku) Islands. The decades immediately following the war saw a number of ‘trust-­ building initiatives’, but these were ultimately too flimsy to withstand sweeping political changes, in both countries and around the world, beginning in the late-twentieth century. The controversial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, for example, were already a point of contention as early as the mid-1980s, emerging around the same time as the issue of Japanese history textbooks, which were charged with downplaying and ultimately denying responsibility for Japan’s expansionist aggression during WWII. On the former issue, Chinese and Japanese leaders in the 1980s struck a tacit agreement for the Japanese prime minister to abstain from visiting the shrine (Rose and Sykora 2016, 115). When this consensus was repeatedly breached by Koizumi Junichiro in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was tantamount to a betrayal of diplomatic trust that reopened old wounds. Subsequent visits to the Yasukuni Shrine by members of Abe Shinzo’s administration (including by the prime minister himself in 2013) were not only a demonstration of obstinate will, but a refusal to acknowledge the symbolic weight of a political figurehead offering respects to war criminals responsible for orchestrating mass destruction across Asia. The war may long be over, but memory lives on. Contentious though the Yasukuni Shrine may be, Jonathan Henshaw observes that Japan’s long shadow extends to commemorations of the war in China itself, where ‘a moral and political charge … can overshadow the role of mourning’ (2021, 896). Nationalist ideology within the People’s Republic became a sort of organizing principle as the country transitioned away from the communist era led by Mao. Nanjing, unsurprisingly, has long been among the most charged sites where local and national organisations and governmental bodies alike have made efforts to memorialize Japanese atrocities, from as early as December 1937, while the Japanese occupation was still ongoing (Henshaw 2021, 899). Walter Hatch argues that China’s narrative of WWII, as reified in its museums, is ‘remarkably consistent … [and] has helped shape the collective identity of a proud, increasingly assertive country’ (2014, 367). By contrast, Japanese museums offer a multiplicity of narratives whose mutual incongruities are one of the factors that stymie the public’s ability to fully accept and acknowledge historical realities. Among the Chinese museums analysed by Hatch is the 218

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Memorial Hall of Victims of Nanjing Massacre, originally opened in 1985 and expanded in 2007 to include a grim new discovery: a mass grave with nineteen partial skeletons that now serves as another focal point of the site. Though the museum includes a so-called Reconciliation Room that features photos of Chinese and Japanese leaders together, and even touches upon Japan’s foreign aid to China in the modern era, the quasi-religious staging of the space and the graphic violence of the exhibits are intentionally designed to provoke a visceral, emotional response. One can easily imagine how visitors who encounter such displays or a cinephile who has viewed films about this horror—like those of Jiang, Lu or Zhang—may be loath to extend their magnanimity to the Japanese, particularly when Chinese official discourse reinforces the notion that the Japanese, as represented at the highest level of government, remain unrepentant. In Japan, governmental leaders seem to have been driven by the domestic political ­environment as much as, if not more than, external pressure. In an effort to distance himself from Koizumi, Hatoyama Yukio (2009–2010), the first prime minister from outside the Liberal Democratic Party since 1995, pledged not to visit the Yasukuni Shrine and even travelled to Nanjing in 2013 to formally apologize (Gluck, Mitter and Armstrong 2015, 532). Just a few years later, during Abe Shinzo’s tenure, the Japanese administration once again veered towards the right by denouncing efforts at reconciliation with China and South Korea and expressions of remorse as ‘masochistic history’ and ‘apology fatigue’ (ibid. 533). The vociferous online and offline activities of ultra-right nationalists are among the influencing factors that impede Japan from making demonstrable progress on reconciliation with its neighbours. Rather than representing a mere fringe viewpoint, ultra-right xenophobic attitudes have seeped into the discourse of ‘mainstream conservatives’ whose perspectives go on to receive broader support from the public (Yamaguchi 2018, 194). While one of the priorities of Japanese revisionists is denying or downplaying the comfort women issue of military ­sexual slavery, their extremist beliefs touch upon all of the lingering issues between Japan and China. Abe, as the most prominent and influential revisionist, has promoted efforts to evade or minimize responsibility for the scars of wartime trauma. The rhetoric of the Japanese right can seemingly contaminate the most mundane spaces of daily life, as demonstrated by Motoya Fumiko and Motoya Toshio, founders of the APA Group, a real estate and hotel empire. While Fumiko is ostensibly the face of their business, her husband Toshio’s activities and publications as a historical revisionist came under intense scrutiny and criticism in 2017. Motoya’s books proclaim that the ‘alleged atrocities [of WWII] were invented by Chinese and Korean propagandists’ and go so far as to deny the historical veracity of both the Nanking Massacre and the comfort women (Soble 2017). So long as prominent politicians and business leaders parrot these right-wing views that diminish or ignore the violence perpetrated by Imperial Japan—and completely shirk the intergenerational traumas that reverberate into the present day—historical memory will remain a vengeful spirit, casting a dark cloud over the possibility of regional accord and mutual goodwill.

Bridges to Past and Future Despite the bureaucratic blips and official chastisement that greeted Devils on the Doorstep in China, the film ultimately did not deter Jiang Wen from continuing a successful career as both an actor and director. Jiang’s next directorial work would not be released until 2007 with The Sun Also Rises, an abstruse and evocatively nested narrative about the Chinese hinterlands set during the Cultural Revolution. Complex and somewhat sardonic, The Sun Also Rises nonetheless did not attract the same level of scrutiny or international praise as Devils on 219

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the Doorstep. Derek Elley described it as ‘part ego trip’, a wry film that touches upon some potentially sensitive topics but nonetheless avoids ‘becoming overtly political’ (2007). The next decade would see Jiang release three more films set in the Republican China period. Rather than the small-scale drama of Devils—or even In the Heat of the Sun, his debut work— Jiang has exhibited a tendency towards ostentation in his later oeuvre, with intensely choreographed fight scenes, special effects and marquee actors from across Greater China, including the likes of Chow Yun-fat, Ge You, Carina Lau and Eddie Peng. True to form, Jiang Wen has also had a starring role in every one of his own films, a presence so domineering that one reviewer described him as ‘China’s most important film director or his country’s answer to Marlon Brando’ (Coonan 2007). Outside of China, Jiang also played a supporting role in the film Rogue One, part of the Star Wars franchise. But his participation, alongside Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen, was not enough to bolster the franchise’s abysmal performance in the Chinese box office (Yuhas 2020). Jiang’s involvement in the film is nonetheless a testament to Hollywood’s vested stakes in appealing to Chinese moviegoers. The number of movie screens in China increased fourfold in a period of five years, reaching over 50,000 screens by the end of 2017 (Song 2018). The American film industry has sought to capitalize on this boom by appealing to Chinese audiences through narrative elements, coproduction schemes and localized marketing strategies alike. The world has dramatically transformed in the two decades since the release of Devils on the Doorstep. The rapid development and proliferation of mobile technologies and Internet 2.0, especially social media, have changed the way that humans work and play while providing a robust series of digital platforms for individuals to fashion their identities. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, a resurgence of right-wing populism gradually swept through the United States, Europe and Latin America. The COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s wrought untold damages on the physical, mental and economic well-being of billions around the world. Amidst these technological revolutions and historical upheavals, the rise of China has generated great anxiety in Japan, which ceded its place to China in 2010 as the world’s second largest economy (Barboza 2010). Since ascending to the presidency in 2012, Xi Jinping has consolidated his grip and exerted his influence at all levels of Chinese government and society, steering the country in a culturally c­ onservative direction while ramping up its military power and revealing his hegemonic ambitions. Meanwhile, Japanese leadership has returned to its usual pattern of ephemeral leaders after the relative stability of Abe Shinzo’s nearly eight-year reign (2012–2020) as prime minister. In light of the technologies that continue to shape cultural consumption habits and mediate social lives around the world, I offer that younger generations’ attitudes may serve as a barometer for national moods while providing some clues about future trends. Orna Naftali’s analysis of interviews of middle school students in Henan and Shanghai found two prevailing attitudes in coexistence: feelings of hostility towards Japan for its history of aggression, along with a robust appetite for Japanese cultural forms such as manga and anime. While most Chinese students did not see any inherent contradiction in this, some indeed articulated a self-awareness regarding the value of learning about Japan beyond the context of their state-mandated patriotic education. They thus exhibit a capacity to create ‘complex visions of [China] and its relations with Japan’ (2018, 717), a heartening sign for empathy at the individual, if not governmental, level. Yida Zhai locates the possibility of improved Sino-Japanese relations in the embrace of an Asian or cosmopolitan identity over a nationalist worldview, whereas a stronger attachment to national identity suggests that ‘any positive effect of contact on attitudes toward

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the other will disappear, or even reverse direction and become a negative effect’ (2017, 99). Though cultural contact at the level of the individual may seem trifling in the face of mutual governmental distrust, these mundane exchanges can nonetheless build bridges of friendship that are sorely needed when public opinion trends towards the negative. It must be noted that there is a curious asymmetry at play: while Chinese survey respondents in Zhai’s data set reported more favourable opinions of Japan that correlated with higher exposure to Japanese culture, exposure to Chinese culture did not necessarily have the same mollifying effect on the Japanese respondents. Zhai views this phenomenon as the result of the Chinese ­government’s lacklustre management of the cultural sector coupled with a foreign policy that relies on financial and military power. Soft power through vehicles of cultural consumption such as cinema may indeed be a salve—so long as creators are given free rein to tell the s­ tories they wish to tell, which may in turn inspire new ways of thinking about self and other. On the popular literature and media rating platform Douban, Devils on the Doorstep has a respectable 9.3 stars and is ranked #41 among the top 250 films, as of January 2023. More than half a million users have rated the film, with an overwhelming majority (70.6 per cent) giving it five stars. Only five Chinese films have a higher ranking than Jiang’s: Farewell My Concubine (#2), Infernal Affairs (#17), A Chinese Odyssey Part Two (#20), To Live (#29) and Dying to Survive (#36). Jiang’s film is the only one to deal directly and thoroughly with the violence of Japanese occupation. Official censorship, it seems, has not been able to quash the longevity of Devils on the Doorstep or muffle the resonance of its parable of human nature. The eightieth anniversary of the end of WWII is fast approaching. With tightening regulations in Chinese cultural industries across the board, it is practically inconceivable for a film like Devils on the Doorstep to be produced today. Compared with the turn of the millennium, however, when Jiang released his unlikely black comedy, the internet offers dazzling potentiality and agency to the individual to construct their own narrative of the world. Censorship of Chinese cyberspace is a considerable obstacle, to be sure. But the flows of globalization, whether of people, goods or ideas, ultimately cannot be resisted so easily. The Japan Student Services Organization ( JASSO) reported an astounding 121,845 students from China studying in Japan as of 2020, slightly down from the year prior. The number of Chinese studying abroad overall more than tripled in the preceding decade (Textor 2021). In step with China’s economic ascent and debut as a modern world power, millions of Chinese youth have been able to experience societies outside of their country, befriend people of all different backgrounds and encounter new perspectives on learning and life. These trajectories will no doubt have ripple effects that may take several generations to be fully revealed but may ultimately have a dramatic impact on the future direction of Chinese society, and perhaps even government. The ritual commemoration of history is an ongoing practice. Japan pays respects to the sacrifices its citizens made in WWII annually in August, with the imperial family’s sentiments of ‘deep remorse’ over the wartime past in contrast with the platitudes of politicians (Yamaguchi 2021). The emotional flatness or contradictory behaviour of the latter group often sparks criticism from their governmental counterparts in China and South Korea. By now this ordering of events is routine, even predictable. One hopes that future leaders will have the diplomatic savvy and wherewithal to express compassion and contrition and break this dyspeptic cycle. With so much uncertainty and manifold crises facing human civilization in the twenty-first century, mutual cooperation and goodwill are needed more than ever.

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Works Cited Barboza, D. (2010) ‘China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy’, The New York Times. 15 August. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 17 May 2022). Brown, S.M. (2015) ‘Victims, Heroes, Men, and Monsters: Revisiting a Violent History in City of Life and Death’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 32(6), 527–537. Burkitt, L. and Orlik, T. (2011) ‘Zhang Yimou’s ‘Flowers of War’ Sumptuous but Lacks Subtlety’, Wall Street Journal, China Real Time, 15 December. Callahan, W. (2009) China: The Pessoptimist Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chang, J. (2011) ‘The Flowers of War’, Variety. 11 December. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 28 Apr 2022). ‘Chinese Exhibitors to Boycott Zhang Yimou’s Flowers of War’ (2011), Screen International, 23 November. ‘Chinese Visitors Spend ¥1.8 Trillion in Japan in 2019’ (2020), Nippon Communications Foundation. 12 February. Online. Available HTTP: < https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00646/­ chinese-visitors-spend-%C2%A51-8-trillion-in-japan-in-2019.html> (accessed 23 Jun 2022). Coonan, C. (2007) ‘Wen Rises with “Sun”’, Variety. 31 August. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 16 May 2022). Douban (2023) ‘Guizi laile (2000)’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 Jan 2023). Eckholm, E. (2000) ‘China Puts Director in Suspense Over a Film’, The New York Times. 15 July. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 31 Mar 2022). Elley, D. (2007) ‘The Sun Also Rises’, Variety. 10 September. Online. Available HTTP (accessed 16 May 2022). Gibbons, F. (2000) ‘Chinese Director Bows to the Censors’, The Guardian. 18 August. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 May 2022). Gluck, C., Mitter, R. and Armstrong, C. (2015) ‘The Seventieth Anniversary of World War II’s End in Asia: Three Perspectives’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 74(3): 531–537. Hale, M. (2011) ‘A Shady American in the Nanjing Massacre’, The New York Times. 21 December. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 May 2022). Hatch, W. (2014) ‘Bloody Memories: Affect and Effect of World War II Museums in China and Japan’, Peace & Change, 39(3): 366–394. Henshaw, J. (2021) ‘That Which Is Carved in Stone: Nanjing’s Monuments and Chinese Commemoration of the Second World War’, Modern China, 47(6): 895–920. Lee, H. (2014) The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lee, K.B. (2010) ‘City of Life and Death’, Cineaste, 35(2). Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 May 2022). Li, D. (2018) ‘Chinese-Dialect Film and Its Translation: A Case Study of The World (2004)’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 12(3): 267–284. Li, J. (2014) ‘Discoloured Vestiges of History: Black and White in the Age of Colour Cinema’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 6(3): 247–262. McCarthy, T. (2011) ‘The Flowers of War: Zhang Yimou and Christian Bale’s Take on the Nanjing Massacre Is Burdened with a Far-Fetched Plot’, The Hollywood Reporter. 13 December. Online. flowers-warAvailable HTTP: (accessed 3 May 2022). McClintock, P. (2012) ‘Christian Bale’s ‘Flowers of War’ Grosses $83 Mil in 17 Days in China’, The Hollywood Reporter. 4 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 3 May 2022). Naftali, O. (2018) ‘“These War Dramas are like Cartoons”: Education, Media Consumption, and Chinese Youth Attitudes Towards Japan’, Journal of Contemporary China, 27(113): 703–718. Reynaud, B. (2002) ‘Devils on the Doorstep’, Film Comment, 38(6): 75. Rose, C. and Sykora, J. (2016) ‘The Trust Deficit in Sino-Japanese Relations’, Japan Forum, 29(1): 100–124.

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19 MARTYRS, MILITARY HEROES AND MASSACRE VICTIMS The Complex Memorial Terrain of Lushun, 1894–Present Christian A. Hess

There are few places in China with a concentration of memorials like those found in Lushun, a port city at the tip of the Liaodong peninsula in Liaoning Province, People’s Republic of China (PRC). With just a half-day itinerary, a visitor can see monuments and museums that commemorate traumatic events spanning multiple political regimes from the late-Qing period in the 1890s to the early years of the Cold War in the 1950s. Lushun is home to the Mausoleum of Ten Thousand Martyrs, built to commemorate massacre victims in the SinoJapanese War of 1894–1895; the 203 Highland Memorial, commemorating where tens of thousands of Japanese troops died in the Russo-Japanese War; the Lushun Russo-Japanese prison where anti-colonial patriots were put to death in the 1930s and 1940s; and finally monuments built to commemorate the prolonged Soviet military presence in the region after 1945. In this one concentrated area, centred around the port, one thus finds a full spectrum of memorial sites, some designed to stoke nationalism through recounting humiliation and suffering—such as sites of state-sanctioned Patriotic Education—and others where nostalgia tourists from Japan come to see the sites of famous historical battles. Sino-Soviet monuments, meanwhile, are designed to emphasize socialist internationalism, military strength and cooperation, while hiding the complex realities of life in a militarized base town (see Burrett Chapter 30; Figure 19.1). As scholars of war and memory have recently noted, parts of Asia are experiencing a war ‘memory boom’ (Frost et al. 2019, 1–2). Lushun is a central site for this boom, as its monuments and museums commemorate various types of traumatic events experienced over decades of militarization. Yet, Lushun’s modern history remains understudied due mainly to the fact that it remains home to major People’s Liberation Army (PLA) naval facilities and was closed to foreigners until the late 2010s. Moreover, issues of history and memory are politically sensitive in the PRC, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) keeps a firm grip on state narratives and is intolerant of challenges. The CCP’s narrative involves an intertwined theme of victimization and resistance that emphasizes the ‘century of national humiliation’ when China was a victim of imperialism from the Opium wars in the 1840s through the end of the Second World War, and the CCP’s efforts to defeat imperialism and build a new China from the 1920s onwards. These narratives operate at the national scale 224

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Lushun

Figure 19.1  Map of Lushun

to emphasize the origins and strength of the CCP as the rightful and only political force in China (Wang Z. 2012). Thus, the dynamics of memory sites in Lushun are different from those associated with the memory boom in other parts of Asia. Local narratives and those that might run against the grain of official nationalist remembering are not possible in Lushun. The case of Lushun shares some similarities with Okinawa, for example (see Dudden and Kingston in this volume). Both places had a lengthy history of colonialism and imperialism that linked the islands and their people to various forms of empire and the nation-state. Moreover, militarization and bases remain a significant feature of life in both Okinawa and Lushun. This chapter explores four different sites of memory and trauma in Lushun. It traces the origins of these sites and how their meaning has evolved over time, probing the processes through which a national narrative creates and lays claims to a diverse range of memory sites in a single community. This approach builds on previous work on memorials and memory in the PRC, which, as James Hevia’s work reveals, have passed from sites of history to those of national heritage. For Hevia, such sites have a ‘double identity,’ one fixed in the past and the other malleable in the present (Hevia 2007, 194). This chapter further attempts to shed 225

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light on these dynamics in a neglected but important spot on the national and geopolitical map so that Lushun can be included in further research on the complex memorial terrain of trauma sites in East Asia.

Historical Background The modern history of Lushun is directly connected to a process of militarization and ­m ilitary development that began in the late 1880s and continues today. During the late 1890s, rivalries flared between Russia, Japan and China over control of Manchuria and its resources. Jutting out between Korea and the Chinese coast, the Liaodong peninsula became a focal point in this emerging contest for dominance in Northeast Asia. A port here would enable the projection of naval power in both the strategic Bohai Gulf and the Yellow Sea. Its crescent harbour, with a narrow inlet, is surrounded by hills, some of which rise several hundred metres high. The narrow channel to the harbour makes it readily defendable, while the hills surrounding the bay gave commanding views from which to bombard enemy vessels. James Allan, a British sailor who visited the port in 1894, noted as much, commenting that ‘for defensive purposes, nature and art have combined to render the place exceedingly strong’ (Allan 1898, 40–41). Lushun’s port became the focal point for militarization efforts of the Qing, Czarist Russia, Japan, the Soviet Union and, finally, the PLA over a period stretching from the 1880s to the present. While the contours of geopolitics changed over this period, a domineering military presence remained a consistent fact of life for people living in Lushun. After the 1894 Sino-Japanese War, Lushun was controlled by Russia until the Russo-Japanese conflict (1904–1905). After 1905, the port was in Japanese hands until August 1945, when the Soviet military arrived and took over. They would remain in control until 1950 and retained a significant military presence on bases in Lushun until 1955. After 1955, the Soviets returned the military facilities at the port to the PRC. Much of Lushun remained a restricted-base area until the 2010s.

The Lushun Massacre and the Mausoleum of Ten Thousand Martyrs One of Lushun’s most significant sites commemorating trauma is the Mausoleum of Ten Thousand Martyrs. Opened in 1994, the Mausoleum commemorates the victims of a ­m assacre perpetrated by the Japanese military as they entered Lushun one hundred years earlier during the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. The Mausoleum is built on a site where numerous bodies were cremated in the aftermath of the massacre. Though the exact number of victims is unknown, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Chinese were killed, both soldiers and civilians (Guan 2004, 212–215). It is a prominent feature of Lushun’s trauma-­ commemorating landscape. The CCP designated the site a Patriotic Education Base in 1997, cementing its position on the map of nationalistic red tourism in the PRC. Red tourism became a key component of the patriotic education campaign in China from the early 2000s and saw rapid development from 2005 to 2010, with dozens of ‘bases’ established and plans for thirty million domestic tourists by 2015 (Denton 2014, 219–220). Like other Patriotic Education sites, the Mausoleum emphasizes a narrative of victimization and humiliation at the hands of the Japanese military and the sacrifices and suffering of the Chinese people during the ‘century of humiliation’ between the Opium Wars and the War of Resistance against Japan. Victims are not named but collectively remembered, soldier and civilian alike, as part of the Chinese nation’s struggle to overcome imperialism. 226

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The massacre occurred over three days, from 21 to 24 November 1894. As the S­ ino-Japanese War was one of the first major wars in Asia to feature reporters embedded with military units, some Japanese and foreign correspondents were on the scene covering the battles (Huffman 1997, 208). As Japanese troops captured Lushun and entered the town, they encountered the mutilated, severed heads of some Japanese soldiers hanging by cords (Creelman 1901, 109). Journalists on the scene included representatives from Japanese, American, French and British newspapers. They reported that upon seeing the heads of their fellow soldiers, Japanese units began attacking those they thought responsible for the mutilation. Japanese reporters claimed that Qing troops were disguising themselves in civilian clothing and that those killed were actually soldiers (Huffman 1997, 221). Similar claims would be made by the Japanese military in Nanjing in the aftermath of the Nanjing Massacre in 1937. Eyewitness accounts from Western journalists painted a harrowing picture of brutality which accused the Japanese military of killing Chinese civilians. American James Creelman’s coverage for the New York World featured graphic accounts of the massacre that shocked US readers: ‘Unarmed men, kneeling in the streets and begging for life, were shot, stabbed, or beheaded. The town was sacked from end to end, and the inhabitants were butchered in their own houses’ (Creelman 1901, 110). Creelman also claims to have witnessed children being shot. The British sailor James Allan, who was caught in the town just as the Japanese forces began their attack, described the scene on the first day of killing: Shots, shouts, shrieks, and groans resounded on every side; the streets presented a fearful spectacle; the ground was saturated with blood, and everywhere strewn with horribly mutilated corpses; some of the narrower avenues were positively choked with carnage. The dead were mostly townspeople. (Allan 1898, 80–85) The authenticity of Creelman’s reports was questioned at the time by a rival reporter also on the scene at Lushun, AB de Guerville, working for the New York Herald, who claimed no massacre ever happened (de Guerville 1894). The US and Japanese governments, seeking resolution of treaty revisions, concluded that while Japanese troops killed surrendering Qing forces, civilians were not targeted or killed (Kane 2005). The United States concluded: From the statements of these gentlemen, it appears to be clear that: there was a slaughter of Chinese soldiers at Port Arthur on the 21st of November, 1894, but that the horrors reported by Mr. Creelman in his communication to the New York World as having taken place subsequent to that date are not true, and that the impression Mr. Creelman’s reports are prone to convey is a gross exaggeration of the truth. (United States Department of State 1894, Document 88) During the renovation of the Mausoleum in 1994, archaeologists discovered a mass burial under the site, including children’s skulls and evidence that the bodies buried there had been hastily burned, further confirming the scale and scope of the massacre (Dalian shi zhongong danshi yanjiuhui 2014, 176–177). The exact number of victims remains unknown, but Chinese historians, following the Qing sources from the time of the massacre, maintain that 2,500 Qing soldiers and 18,000 civilians were killed (Guan 2004, 215). The visibility and commemoration of the massacre follow the shifting geopolitics of the Liaodong peninsula. Shortly after occupying Lushun, the Japanese military erected a 227

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wooden placard that stated ‘Tomb of the Qing Troops Killed in Action’ near a site where victims’ bodies had been buried. However, by 1895, the Japanese withdrew from Lushun under diplomatic pressure from Germany, Russia and France in what is known as the Triple Intervention of 1895. This was a diplomatic intervention by Russia, Germany and France over the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki. The goal was to limit Japanese expansion in China. Russia immediately seized Lushun after Japan’s withdrawal. The Russians were willing to allow the construction of more permanent monument. Under the direction of a Qing military official, a new stone monument was erected in 1896 and inscribed as the Mausoleum of Ten Thousand Martyrs. This new stele featured a more descriptive text about the massacre. For the first time, the memorial provided numbers, claiming 18,000 lives were lost and, importantly, noting that civilians and military personnel were among the victims (Dalian shi zhongong danshi yanjiuhui 2014, 172). Upon regaining control of the port after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the Japanese military feared that this memorial site might serve as a catalyst for anti-Japanese nationalism. That year, late one evening, they removed the stone monument and carried it to the garden of a nearby medical facility, where it remained inaccessible for townspeople until the mid-1940s. After 1917, the original site of the memorial graves was granted to a Japanese lumber company (Guan 2004, 215–219). The heightened sensitivity on the part of Japanese authorities to a memorial site linked to Chinese nationalism is rather unique to the situation in Lushun at that time in that Japan had lost and regained control of the Liaodong peninsula, and their withdrawal had given the Qing the opportunity to create the memorial. In 1922 the local Chinese business community collected funds to construct a new stone monument, which they erected near the original site. However, by the early 1930s, the Japanese colonial government in Lushun shut down the site and enclosed it with a chain-link fence. Flora and fauna around the monument were allowed to overgrow the area, obscuring the monument from view, and it remained in this state until the arrival of Soviet military units in 1945 (Dalian shi zhongong danshi yanjiuhui 2014, 173–174). Efforts to rebuild the monument after 1945 were likewise influenced by geopolitics. The Soviet military maintained a significant presence in Lushun until 1955. As we will see, the prolonged Soviet occupation further altered the memorial landscape, first with sites celebrating victory over Japan, then others emphasizing Soviet sacrifice in the war and Moscow’s preservation of peace in the region in the emerging Cold War. Aside from sites dedicated to Sino-Soviet Friendship, Soviet military authorities also oversaw the rebuilding of the Mausoleum of the Ten Thousand Martyrs. Before it had been rebuilt and without realizing its historical significance, Soviet troops used the site as an open-air warehouse for military supplies (Liang 1993, 250–251). Plans for the restoration were announced at a public ceremony at the site in October 1946. With Soviet aid, Chinese labour and the designs of a Japanese engineer who remained in Lushun, the construction of the new Mausoleum was completed in 1948. No longer just a site to commemorate the massacre, the new signage made references to the Soviets, whose aid and military presence ‘protected peace in the Far East.’ As we will see below, the homage to Soviet military protection aimed to smooth over tensions between locals and Soviet military bases set up in the area after 1945. Another ceremony was held by the local government at the site during the peak of the Korean War in 1951, emphasizing the patriotism of the volunteers going to the front (Dalian shi zhongong danshi yanjiuhui 2014, 172–174). The Mausoleum was dedicated as a significant cultural relic by the Liaoning provincial government in 1963, and in 1971 an exhibition hall was built at the site, featuring images and text relating to the Sino-Japanese War and the massacre. However, as Lushun remained 228

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a secured naval base facility, few visitors outside of locals from the Lushun and Dalian area could visit to these and other sites, a situation that the local travel industry grappled with well into the 1980s and early 1990s. Travel guides from the 1980s mention the site and describe the massacre in detail, but the site itself is listed second to the more popular Baiyu Tower, built by the Japanese to commemorate the fierce Russo-Japanese battles in Lushun (Dong 1988, 90–103). To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the massacre, the Mausoleum was ­renovated extensively in 1994 with funding from the state and contributions from individuals in Taiwan and Japan (Dalian shi zhongong danshi yanjiuhui 2014, 176). Today, as a Patriotic Education Base, it is a mainstay for tourists, school trips and tour packages to Lushun. This has brought renewed visibility to the local massacre and to the history of Lushun, but the site remains packaged as a national event. Lushun’s residents murdered in 1894 are not remembered by name but as the ‘Chinese people.’ This is in line with Xi Jinping’s wider propaganda aims which use history to link events like this to a national narrative of victimization at the hands of foreign powers and that the CCP vows to never allow repeated. Erased in this nationalist story is a local history that reveals an enduring militarized environment, one which brought successive waves of conquest in a process that started well before the massacre and would continue well after it.

Russo-Japanese War Sites A decade after the reports of the massacre shocked global readers, Lushun was again the scene of fierce battles and a site of international media coverage. The port and its fortifications were a main battleground in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Russia had gained control of the area following the Triple Intervention of 1895, a diplomatic intervention by Russia, Germany and France over the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki. The goal was to limit Japanese expansion in China. In February 1904, Japanese troops launched a surprise attack on Russian positions in Port Arthur. The subsequent seven-month siege culminated in a dramatic, prolonged attack on the fortifications at 203-Meter Hill, the main fortress overlooking the harbour, which resulted in a prolonged battle with tens of thousands of casualties (Kowner 2006, 290–299). Battlefield sites from this war soon became a part of the memorial landscape of Lushun under Japanese imperialism (1905–1945). They served dual purposes. In addition to commemorating the war dead, battlefield sites became important in staking imperialist claims in Manchuria. They were spots on an emergent Japanese map of the empire, linking the Liaodong peninsula to Japan (McDonald 2017, 36). There are two major sites commemorating the battles of the Russo-Japanese conflict in Lushun, along with numerous smaller monuments. Baiyu Tower, constructed in 1906 with work completed in 1909, is situated on a hill with excellent views of the port and remains a significant tourist spot today due to the view and its proximity to other memorial sites in the town. It is the largest of the war monuments and features a 65-metre-tall circular tower with a cannon shell at the top, built to commemorate the sacrifices of Japanese soldiers. One of the more popular sites from the Japanese imperial period was the 203 Highland Monument, a memorial tower built in 1913 to commemorate the losses at the battle for the fort at 203-Meter Hill. Japanese settlers established the Society for the Preservation of Manchuria’s Battlefield Ruins which aimed not only to protect battlefield sites but also to instil in tourists a sense of patriotism and loyalty to the nation represented by the heroic military acts on these now sacred spaces of imperial Japan. 229

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These efforts to engage visitors included battle re-enactments and the dramatic c­ommentary of official tour guides, often former soldiers, who led tour groups through the site (McDonald 2017, 37). By the 1930s, an entire tourist infrastructure was in place for Japanese tourists coming to see the empire, featuring dozens of buses providing two tours per day of Lushun’s battlefield sites (Ruoff 2010, 131). What was not on the itinerary, nor mentioned at all, was the massacre from the previous Sino-Japanese War. Sealed off and overgrown with weeds, the Mausoleum had no place in Japan’s imperial landscape. Both Baiyu Tower and the Highland Monument remain major tourist sites in Lushun today. They have not been dismantled, significantly altered or rebuilt and are not spots of official, state-sanctioned red tourism as deemed by the central government. Instead, they are historical attractions with dual purposes. In the 1980s, Baiyu Tower became a tourist attraction as the site offered a great view of the harbour. Today the local government encourages visits to the site, even offering free entrance for local residents on their birthdays. The RussoJapanese battle sites are a fixture of nostalgia tourism for Japanese tourists. A popular NHK drama about the war in 2006 spurred Japanese tours to Lushun (McDonald 2019, 77). For the Chinese state, they also serve as yet another patriotic site for remembering humiliation. However, unlike other late Qing sites of victimization and trauma, like the Dagu Forts or the sacking of the Qing summer palace in Yuanming Garden in Beijing, there is a less direct connection to Chinese victimization as these were sites of a battle between two empires fighting to claim Chinese territory. The 203 Highland Monument, for example, now features narrative placards that present a factual account of the battles, only to conclude that the site is shameful evidence of Japanese militarism. A placard at Baiyu Tower mentions that Chinese forced labour was used in the construction of the tower.

Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison Museum Not far from the massacre site and monuments of war is the Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison Museum. Construction of the prison began in 1902, based on Russian plans. After 1905 the Japanese significantly expanded the facility, making it one of the largest prisons in Northeast China, capable of holding several thousand prisoners. The prison included workshops, an infirmary, body search rooms, torture and interrogation halls, execution rooms and ­‘strangling cells’ where political prisoners were tortured and executed by strangulation. At its peak in the early 1940s, the prison housed numerous Chinese and Korean resistance fighters, some from the Chinese Communist Party and others from different backgrounds (Guo 2002). After 1945, the prison fell into disrepair. Some buildings were used by the Chinese military, and the prison site was administered as part of the Lushun naval base area. From the 1950s through the 1960s, the prison site faded from memory. Access to this site was formerly restricted as it is located on land that was controlled by the military. By the mid-2010s, much of Lushun had been opened to foreign and domestic tourists, and the former colonial prison was remade into a major feature of the memorial landscape as a museum. Like the Mausoleum, it was selected in 2005 as a ‘Patriotic Education Base’ with an emphasis on the prison’s role in victimization and trauma at the hands of foreign imperial powers. These themes, together with exhibits on the patriotism and heroism of the prisoners, are on display in newly renovated exhibitions built into the prison. Unlike the other sites, however, this is not just a memorial monument, but a full-fledged museum occupying the physical space of the former prison. This gives the exhibition experience a certain power, as, in a sense, visitors are taken deep into the jail. The museum is also one of the few historical sites to feature the names and faces of victims. This is because many 230

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were political prisoners working against Japanese imperialism, and some for the Chinese Communist movement whose deaths in the prison made them martyrs. The execution and interrogation rooms are now a central feature of the tour. Torture equipment, nooses and barrels used to store executed prisoners for burial are all on display and, when coupled with the faces and stories of individual prisoners, some of whom were executed there, form a powerful, nationalistic memory effect of suffering and sacrifice in the name of resistance to imperialism (Tang 2002). As we discuss below, following geopolitical and national trends, the memorial landscape in Lushun shifted in the 1950s and 1960s from imperialist trauma sites to those ­emphasizing Sino-Soviet ties and military vigilance in defending the motherland. However, the prison was reopened for visitors in the early 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution period, when the municipal government renovated part of the facility to host an exhibition on the ­imperialist invasion of China (Guo 2002). Held in the newly renovated ‘Lushun/Dalian Hall for Propagating Mao Zedong Thought,’ the exhibition was a response to the Sino-Soviet border conflict (dates) and the ongoing efforts at remilitarization in Japan. In this rendering, the prison was displayed as evidence of war crimes (Huang and Lee 2018, 145–146). But accessing the exhibition proved difficult, as it remained part of a military facility, so visitors were driven to the site on military vehicles. In its four-month run, the exhibition had 18,000 visitors. In 1983, the prison site was handed over to the Dalian Municipal government, and throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the facility served as a repository for historical materials related to imperialism (Guo 2002, 53–60). The hundredth anniversary of the prison in 2002 marked its rise on Lushun’s memorial map as a renovated, professionally curated museum, which hosted several commemorative events and conferences, as well as sponsoring publications related to the museum’s history. In addition, a group of local historians, curators and former employees at the facility compiled a 700-page commemorative volume that featured a detailed account of its use as an instrument of imperial oppression, interviews with former employees and a large section dedicated to studies of colonial prisons around the world (Guo 2002). This comparative approach, which situated the Lushun prison within a broader context of the history of colonial prisons, is rare among sites memorializing trauma in China. The rise of Patriotic Education initiatives, including tourism to Patriotic Education Bases, emphasizes a nationalistic narrative that is almost exclusively focused on China and its modern history (Wang H. 2012, 219–220). The prison exhibition features a section devoted to international prisoners, ‘The International Soldiers in Lushun,’ which emphasizes Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Soviet resistance to Japanese imperialism (Lushun Japan and Russia Prison Site Museum 2019). This is tied to efforts to build regional connections with neighbouring countries based on shared historical experiences with Japanese colonialism (Mitter 2020, 213–214). Significantly, by the early 2010s, the Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison Museum was becoming not only a base of patriotic education but also a transnational heritage site. Moreover, since the 1980s, the prison has attracted visits from scholars in South Korea because of its association with independence activist Ahn Jung-geun. In October 1909, Ahn assassinated prince Ito Hirobumi on a railway platform in Harbin. Ito was negotiating with Russia in advance of Japan’s annexation of Korea. Following his arrest, Ahn was imprisoned and executed at the prison in 1910; however, the location of his remains has been in question since this time. In 1995, the Chinese and South Korean governments began cooperating in a multi-national search for Ahn’s remains, an endeavour that continued into the 2000s. By the 231

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2010s, collaborations were launched between the Lushun Museum and a counterpart in Seoul, the colonial-era Seodaemun Prison which had also been transformed into a museum. This culminated in an episode of ‘heritage diplomacy’ where the two museums considered a joint nomination as a World Heritage site (Huang and Lee 2018, 148–150). The thaw in political relations was evident as the South Korean President Park even attended the Chinese military parade celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. However, as tensions rose between South Korea and the PRC over the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system in South Korea (Huang and Lee 2018, 151–155), the ROK/PRC relationship grew cold again, and by 2017 the efforts at cooperation over memorial sites collapsed. In addition to this international dimension, China’s domestic politics played a ­significant role in shutting down these collaborations. Today the Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison Museum remains chained to a nationalistic, propagandistic narrative of suffering and resistance. Under Xi Jinping, the CCP has exerted greater control over the field of history. Anything that challenges or might downplay the dominant national narrative has been criminalized as ‘nihilistic history.’ In recent years scholars and journalists accused of propagating nihilistic historical narratives on modern Chinese history, or ‘slandering martyrs’ have received jail sentences (Zhao 2016; Brouwer 2022). The possibility of such collaborations resulting in a loss of Chinese control over the resistance narrative, for example, puts transnational commemoration and heritage sites in danger. It is little surprise that, from the Chinese side, it is easier to shut them down than to risk going forward, which is exactly what happened in the case of the collaboration between Seoul and Lushun.

Sino-Soviet Memorials The final feature of the complex memorial terrain in Lushun are the various sites commemorating Russian/Soviet military sacrifice and Sino-Soviet friendship. On the surface, these memorials are the least connected to trauma. They were built from the late 1940s through the 1950s, during the golden age of Sino-Soviet Friendship, and emphasized the Soviet defeat of Japan, Soviet military aid in defence of China and socialist internationalism. They include the Victory Tower unveiled in 1955 and the Sino-Soviet Friendship Monument constructed in 1957. Whereas the massacre, war memorials and prison museum served to mark Lushun as a space of national humiliation and trauma, Sino-Soviet monuments served a different purpose. They placed the city on the map as one of the PRC’s most significant Sino-Soviet contact zones. Yet, beneath the visible messages at these sites, different memories surface, particularly for local residents. Lushun was a Soviet base town until the early 1950s and a Chinese military base town after that. The prolonged occupation of the Soviet military in Lushun from 1945 to the mid-1950s meant that locals lived their daily lives navigating restricted areas, surrounded by tens of thousands of military personnel and weapons. Between 1945 and 1950, Lushun and much of the surrounding 1,300 square mile area of the Liaodong peninsula were in Soviet hands, granted to them via agreements at Yalta and signed with the Nationalist government at the end of the Second World War. Much of this territory was gradually returned to the Chinese Communists, except for Lushun. A significant Soviet military presence remained here until 1955, when the naval facilities were turned over to the PLA. It is estimated that the total number of Soviet troops on the peninsula was 100,000 plus munitions depots, tanks, aircraft and naval vessels (Hess 2018, 3–4). After some tense negotiating, the Soviets agreed to return the area to Chinese control in 1950; however, 232

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the two sides agreed to allow the Soviets to stay on due to the outbreak of the Korean War. In 1954 Khrushchev visited the area and agreed to begin the withdrawal of Soviet forces, which was completed in 1955 (Shen Z. and Xia Y. 2015, 103–104). The Soviets left in 1955, but Lushun remained a prominent naval-base facility throughout the Cold War. Sino-Soviet memorials fail to capture the complex reality of life on or near a base, with a mixture of economic opportunity, racism and violence. Local businesses served the bases and provided jobs for Chinese, but the Soviets for the most part lived segregated lives on base. Instead, the monuments attempt to channel these memories into more abstract spheres of geopolitical cooperation and socialist internationalism. The official state narrative about the Soviet military in Lushun was multifaceted. Sites like the Victory Tower emphasize the role the Soviet military played in defeating Japan. Built on the tenth anniversary of Japan’s defeat, this monument, a simple tower structure, features a placard in Russian and Chinese commemorating the Soviets military victory and liberation of Northeast China from Japanese military rule (Dalian shi shizhi bangongshi 1995, 383–384). Few would dispute the Soviet’s role in defeating Japan in Manchuria. However, by the early 1950s the reality of a longer-term Soviet military presence set in, and another narrative was added to the propaganda sphere which emphasized the vital role the Soviet military played in protecting the newly formed PRC from the USA and US-backed hostilities in the region. Thus, for example, school textbooks introducing this region to students in the 1950s first and foremost define Lushun as a military port, essential for its strategic role in defending the motherland and protecting peace in the Far East (Liu 1957, 18). This definition and function of Lushun as an important military port continued after the Soviet withdrawal. The Sino-Soviet Friendship Monument was built between 1955 and 1957, when the Soviet military was leaving Lushun. It features a 20-metre-tall tower, ringed with images cut into the stone base of Soviet and Chinese people embracing in close friendship. Referred to colloquially and in the national press as ‘Soviet Big Brother’ (Sulian lao da ge), the socialist internationalism and friendship of the Soviets provided China with both a development model and new socialist culture models, leading to an embrace of Soviet culture, including films, literature, youth exchanged and the performing arts (Chen 2004; Hess 2018). For a time, Lushun was a central Sino-Soviet contact zone, propagated as such throughout the PRC (Hess 2018). However, this idealized image of socialist international cooperation obscured the reality that the contact was primarily militarized and segregated and featured as much hostility and fear as friendship. Tensions simmered between Chinese Communist officials in Lushun and Soviet military authorities and between locals and Soviet troops throughout 1945–1955. Chinese civilians were targets of sexual assaults and violent crime shortly after Soviet troops arrived in the area in August 1945. While this initial chaotic period lasted only weeks, it damaged Chinese views of the Soviet military. The looting of industrial equipment and supplies and Soviet control of major industrial facilities exacerbated tensions through the late 1940s. The land in Lushun, from the former Japanese military installations to Japanese housing, was in Soviet hands. Soviet troops lived in segregated, secured compounds with access restrictions. In 1946, anti-Soviet student demonstrations, likening their presence to an imperialist occupation, erupted in nearby Dalian (Hess 2007). Police records from the early 1950s reveal incidents of locals attacking Soviet military personnel. These incidents ranged from night-time attacks on Soviet security patrols to deliberate food poisoning. An investigation into Chinese workers at a Soviet military cafeteria in Lushun revealed they had attempted to serve Soviet troops food boiled in wastewater and laced with glass shards (Luda gong an, May 14, 1953). 233

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Behind the platitudes of victory, friendship and protection commemorated in SinoSoviet memorials was thus a more complex reality, in which the ongoing remilitarization of Lushun, framed as a key location in the defence of China, impacted the lives of those living there. The Soviet military presence brought, at times, traumatic violence but also an ­enduring form of militarization not experienced in other parts of the PRC. By 1955, the Soviets were gone, but the bases were not. The PLA maintained a major troop presence in Lushun, which included airfields and a naval base for both surface ships and submarines.

Conclusion: Remembering and Forgetting Manchuria’s Base Town This chapter has explored several key memorial sites in Lushun, a port town with an ­unusually high concentration of historical memorials due to its geopolitical significance throughout the twentieth century. The sites memorialize and commemorate massacre victims, martyrs and military heroes, serving the CCP’s master historical narratives of victimization and ­nationalistic triumph over imperialism. They are a microcosm of how the CCP’s use of  ­h istory and historical sites has evolved, serving different domestic and geopolitical agendas. The Lushun massacre was an event covered by global media at the time, after which the process of memorialization involved local efforts to construct and preserve a monument to the massacre. This involved confrontations between Japanese colonial authorities and Chinese elites. The nearly forgotten site reappeared after 1945 and became a prominent feature of Lushun’s memorial landscape in the 1990s under the state-led push for nationalism in education, where the massacre and its victims are tied to the CCP’s national narrative of victimization. The Russo-Japanese War battlefield sites were used in Japanese colonial efforts to link the colony to Japan and became major stops on imperial tourist circuits for Japanese tours of Manchuria. Such deep claims, coupled with the fact that the battles did not directly involve Chinese, make these sites harder for the CCP to claim and link to nationalist narratives; other than that, they are used as examples of imperialist aggression. Perhaps for this reason, the less-politicized battlefield sites continue to draw Japanese tourists today. After decades of neglect, the Lushun Russo-Japanese prison began to be rebuilt as a museum in the early 1970s during a period of international isolation when the Russian and Japanese origins of the prison were framed geopolitically as part of the PRC’s persistent battles against imperialist threats, which following the Sino-Soviet split included the Soviet Union. By the early 2000s, the prison museum became nationally recognized as a ‘Patriotic Education Base’ and researchers began a process of building international connections to similar colonial prison sites in South Korea. However, geopolitical tensions overrode their shared historical experiences with Japanese colonialism, and efforts at building joint heritage sites collapsed. Finally, the Sino-Soviet Friendship memorials were constructed at a time when the geopolitical relationship between the PRC and the Soviet Union was starting to break. Given the tensions of having large numbers of Soviet military stationed on bases in Lushun, and the dramatic deterioration of the Sino-Soviet relationship by the end of the 1950s, these homages to friendship must have seemed out of place soon after they were finished. In his work on war memorials in Okinawa, Gerald Figal discusses what he terms the ‘treachery of memorials,’ a process in which the supposed preservation of memories represented by a monument also involves forgetting other ways of remembering (see Dudden and Kingston). For Okinawans, remembering via the memorial is meaningless. Figal argues that Okinawans seek to forget official narratives of memory to make space for action to recapture 234

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suppressed memories and experiences (Figal 2018, 144–145). Lushun’s memorials are also treacherous in that they obscure the complexities of life under decades of militarization and military occupation in the name of nationalistic narratives of suffering and military heroism. Unlike the situation in Okinawa, however, the CCP maintains firm control over the narrative that these memorials and museums contribute. As a result, more nuanced, especially local, histories of the shifting geopolitics of empire and its aftermath are lost. Lushun was a military base town from its inception, through periods of Russian, Japanese, Soviet and finally Chinese control. This pervasive and persistent militarization brought both suffering and opportunity for locals, yet any open discussion or critique of this experience and its broader consequences remains impossible in the PRC.

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Christian A. Hess Luda gong an, May 14, 1953. Lushun Japan and Russia Prison Site Museum (2019) ‘Guiji zhanshi zai Lushun’ (International War Heroes in Lushun). Available http://www.lsprison.com/view-8-5d2697e6e2424a608b2311949945a776. html McDonald, K. (2017) Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan. Oakland: University of California Press. McDonald, K. (2019) ‘War, Firsthand, at a Distance: Battlefield Tourism and Conflicts of Memory in the Multiethnic Japanese Empire,’ Japan Review 33: 57–85. Mitter, R. (2020) China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Ruoff, K. (2010) Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary. New York: Columbia University Press. Shen, Z. and Xia, Y. (2015) Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945–1959: A New History. Lanham: Lexington Books. Tang G. (2002) An Unforgettable Scene: The Former Lushun Prison. Beijing: People’s Fine Arts Publishing House. United States Department of State (1894) ‘Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of United States, 1894 ‘Chinese-Japanese War,’ Document 88, Available https://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1894app1/d87 Wang, H. (2012) ‘War and Revolution as National Heritage: Red Tourism’ in China,’ in P. Daly and T. Winter (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia. London: Routledge: 218–233. Wang, Z. (2012) Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. New York: Columbia University Press. Zhao, K. (2016) ‘Chinese Court Upholds Ruling Against Historian Who Questioned Tale of Wartime Heroes,’ New York Times, 15 August 2016.

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20 NARRATING TRAUMA Memories of the Atrocities under the Japanese Occupation of Sanzao Island Peipei Qiu

A dozen miles southwest of Macao lies a green island called Sanzao. Blessed with lush ­ mountains, farming fields and its location facing the South China Sea, this ­seventy-eight-square-kilometre island became a coveted strategic site during Imperial Japan’s aggressive war in Asia (1931–1945). On 4 December 1937, five months after the launch of its full-fledged invasion of China, Imperial Japanese forces landed on Sanzao Island and, after a brief withdrawal, fully occupied it by February 1938. During the occupation, Japanese troops committed mass murder and sexual violence against local civilians, along with looting and arson. The native population of 12,000 was reduced to 1,800 by June 1938 (Dairoku kōkū kichi shikikan, June 1938). The traumatic events, however, remained largely unknown to the outside world until the global surge of trauma studies in the 1990s. Focusing on the first-person accounts of eyewitnesses and local researchers, this chapter examines how the survivors’ traumatic memories were retrieved and narrated. It illustrates how their recounting of the traumatic experiences bears witness to the brutality of the military aggression while performing a critical function of resisting state-centred war narratives and settlements (Figure 20.1).

The Resurgence of Memories Imperial Japan’s aggression in China during the first half of the twentieth century wreaked immense destruction and loss of life, yet the enormous damages and sufferings it had caused remained largely unrecognized for decades in the post-war era. The Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) between the Nationalist and the Communist forces that took place right after Japan’s defeat not only seriously impeded the investigation of the war damages but also put the country into a political division, leading to China’s exclusion when the Allied Powers worked out the San Francisco Peace Treaty and allocated Japanese compensation to the Allied POWs and the victimized countries in 1951. Later Taiwan and Beijing signed separate agreements with Japan in 1952 and 1972 respectively. However, prioritizing the regimes’ geopolitical interests, both waived, implicitly or explicitly, the governmental claim for war compensation and provided no clear provision of reparations for individual victims. The lack of recognition of the profound sufferings of Chinese victims was also seen in the master war narratives in both Japan and China. Sheltered by the political and ideological DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-22

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Figure 20.1  Sanzao in a 1938 Detailed Map of Guangdong and Hong Kong. (Courtesy of Geographicus Rare Antique Maps.)

structures of the Cold War, conservative politicians dominated Japan in the post-war era and continued downplaying, marginalizing and expunging Imperial Japan’s war atrocities from national memory. However, in post-war China there was ‘a reticence verging on denial when it comes to discussing the slaughter’ (Lary and MacKinnon 2001, 3) as the Chinese government promoted a heroic narrative of the resistance and victory under the leadership of the Communist Party while regarding stories of suffering as exposing national shame. Consequently, little research was conducted on the trauma of the Japanese invasion and Chinese media coverage of the Japanese atrocities remained lowkey until the 1980s. The Chinese narratives of the anti-Japanese war showed a marked attention to the Japanese atrocities in the 1980s when the acceleration of the ultranationalist attempt to whitewash ­h istory in Japan evoked international protests. This change of narrative focus, together with the ensuing nation-wide investigation of the Japanese war crimes in the 1990s, has been summarized as a shift of war narratives from China as victor to China as victim (Gries 2004, 69–85; Coble 2007; Wang 2012, 95–117), highlighting the government’s ­self-legitimating strategy to burnish patriotic education through recalling the nation’s past humiliations (Cohen 2003, 166–169; Coble 2007: 403; Wang 2012, 95–117). It needs to be noted, however, that Chinese researchers and activists also contributed to this narrative change, and for them the shift manifested a critical response to the ultranationalist denial of Japan’s war crimes and an outpouring of the long-repressed memories of wartime trauma. In March 1991, legal scholar and activist Tong Zeng sent an open letter entitled ‘It is of Great Urgency that China Demand Damage Compensation from Japan’ to China’s National People’s Congress (NPC). In the letter, Tong argues that while China relinquished its claim for war indemnity from Japan in the Sino-Japanese Joint Communiqué of 1972, China did 238

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not waive individual victims’ rights to claim such reparations (Tong 1991). Reportedly, members of the NPC submitted several proposals to discuss the issues Tong raised, but no formal resolution resulted. Tong’s call, however, received thousands of fervent responses from ordinary citizens from all over China. In the next few years, Tong received some 10,000 letters from war victims and their relatives; many others went to talk to him in ­person. The letters detailed the appalling brutalities of the Imperial Japanese military and the traumas inflicted on the victims and their families. The letters, a portion of which are now available at the website ‘10,000 Cries for Justice’ (2018), exposed the deep wounds caused by Imperial Japan’s aggression: the mass traumas that did not and cannot achieve proper closure through political or diplomatic treaties and agreements made between nation-states. The voices of the victims serve as a rebuke to the state-centred settlements, which were typically made without carefully consulting the traumatized citizens. The letters also critique the ultranationalist discourse of war memories in Japan. When, in the 1990s, Japanese citizens and people in neighbouring countries increasingly challenged Japan’s official narrative of the war by shining a spotlight on various atrocities, such as the Nanjing Massacre, Japan’s use of biological weapons and the enslavement of the ‘comfort women’, conservative politicians and right-wing activists persisted in their denialist acts, making visits to Yasukuni Shrine to honour war criminals and including misleading war narratives in Japan’s national history textbooks. This posturing, however, only fuelled deeper indignation and drew broader international attention to Japan’s imperial past. As part of the global rise of trauma studies and memory studies in the 1990s, growing numbers of researchers from different countries joined the investigations of Japan’s war of aggression. The traumatic history of Sanzao Island was brought to light during this global movement. Beginning in the early 1990s, researchers at the Zhuhai Museum and Zhuhai Archives, together with scholars from Hong Kong, began collecting oral histories from those who experienced the Japanese occupation of Sanzao. Local residents and the associations of Sanzao natives (Sanzao Tongxianghui) in Hong Kong, Macao and the United States organized events commemorating those killed by the Japanese military. At the same time, research into Sanzao’s traumatic past was conducted by Japanese researchers. Kyoto Tachibana Women’s University Professor Kaba Toyohiko encountered the traumatic history of Sanzao while conducting research on the rural history of China’s Guangdong Province. He went on ­further investigation with Wani Yukio, a high school history teacher and activist supporting Hong Kong citizens’ lawsuits demanding compensation for the wartime currency ( junyong shoupiao, abbr. junpiao) issued by Imperial Japanese military that was used to pay for goods and services during the occupation but lost all value when Japan surrendered. Together with Urashima Etsuko, an Okinawa-based writer who participated in the Nago City history ­project ­documenting the local people’s wartime immigration to Sanzao, they co-authored a book detailing the historical events including the killing at Sanzao during the Japanese occupation (Kaba et al. 2018). In 1998, third-generation Chinese immigrant Robert Cupchoy travelled to Sanzao from the United States to visit his relatives. Learning about the Sanzao massacres from his cousin Chen Fuyan prompted him to begin his own research. He ­produced a long report with information collected from his relatives and local eyewitnesses and published its Chinese translation online (Cupchoy 2005). Despite the emerging research outlined above, Sanzao’s traumatic past remained largely unknown beyond the local area until the 2010s. Liu Changyan was talking about the Nanjing Massacre in his classroom in May 2013 when one of his students raised a question: why were the Sanzao massacres in 1938 not taught? ‘The Japanese troops killed so many people’, the 239

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student said, ‘My grandparents were there’ (Liu 2019). Liu was shocked; he had never heard of these incidents despite teaching in the area for years. Liu and a colleague, Hua Yuejin, then led a group of seven volunteers in a thorough investigation. They travelled to every village on the island, interviewed more than forty eyewitnesses and gathered historical relics and documents. Their research was supported by the China Zhigong Party and also informed by the investigations of other Chinese historians and Japanese scholars, including Wani Yukio and Kaba Toyohiko. After three years, the team produced a full-length film documenting the testimonies of the Imperial Japanese military atrocities. The film, titled Sanzao 1938, was released on 7 July 2015, the seventy-eighth anniversary of Japan’s full-scale invasion of China, and received wide public attention. Together with Yang Changzheng of the Zhuhai Museum, Liu and Hua also published a book with the same title (Liu et al. 2018). The volume contains transcriptions of the local eyewitness testimonies and photocopies of reports produced by the Commander of Imperial Japan’s sixth airbase at Sanzao, providing invaluable information for future researchers. In this way, Sanzao’s traumatic history was brought to light by individual researchers. Chinese and Japanese researchers supported each other, establishing impressive transnational collaborations. Tracing this resurgence of memory, I went to Sanzao together with Liu Changyan in the summer of 2019 and listened to the first-person narratives of the eyewitnesses and researchers.

The Occupation and Massacres Following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7 July 1937, Imperial Japan quickly expanded its invasion, and within a few months, northern and central China had become battlefields. On 25 August 1937, the Japanese navy declared ‘The First Transportation Block’ to obstruct transit between the Yangtze Estuary and the port cities in Guangdong Province. By the end of 1937, Japanese forces had established a blockade along the entirety of the Chinese ­coastline, cutting off supplies from overseas. During this operation Japanese forces needed military bases in South China; Sanzao Island was one of the target sites. On 3 December 1937, ten days before the infamous Nanjing Massacre began, the Imperial Japanese China Area Fleet ordered the establishment of an airbase on Sanzao Island. Some 400 Japanese marines from three battleships and the flagship of the Fourth Fleet landed at Liantang Bay on the following day. During this initial occupation, the troops constructed some docks and cabins on the island and about thirty islanders were killed for refusing to work on the construction projects; women who could not escape to the mountains were raped (Yang 1982: 65; Kaba et al. 2018, 47). On 16 February 1938, a larger number of Imperial Japanese Marines from the Fifth Fleet entered Sanzao and occupied the island the next day; soon after that the military construction team and the Second Defence Force arrived (Kaba et al. 2018, 51). Zeng Tang, president of the association of Sanzao natives (Sam Jo Association) in New York, recalled what he saw at that time. My home was not far from Liantang Bay in Sanzao. My grandfather was a senior member of the community and the head of Shanglian Township. He always had me by his side. That day he was discussing something with several elders when they all left in a hurry. After a while, a group of Japanese soldiers broke into my house, led by a short man with a long sword hanging from his waist. He shouted for the chief of the township. I was very scared, so I hid behind my grandfather, who calmed me 240

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down with tenderness. The short man said something to my grandfather through a ­Chinese-speaking ­interpreter, and then led the troops away. On that day a large number of Japanese soldiers landed from Liantang Bay. They passed through Shangbiao Village and entered the villages of Sanzao. They occupied the entire Sanzao Island and didn’t need to fire a bullet. (Zeng 2012: 163) Zeng Tang’s account indicates that there was no Chinese military on the island at the time and the subsequent killing was against unarmed islanders. Zeng was six years old then. His family, like others who had boats, escaped from Sanzao. Those unable to escape faced ruthless military brutality. Tan Guijue was ten when the Japanese military occupied his home village of Shangbiao. ‘There were no Chinese soldiers, so the Japanese troops landed easily on the Golden Beach. My father Tan Fuyi was killed by the Japanese’, he said, visibly overcome by the painful memory. He further recalled: The Japanese troops attacked us in the chaotic situation not long after they arrived at Sanzao. The troops didn’t take the main road. They came through the path behind the houses. There was a villager who used to smoke opium. He saw that a neighbour had a gun hidden under the eaves and he stole it. When he jumped down, he was seen by the Japanese and was shot dead. I was planting rice when he was killed. After the shot, whistles were blown all day long. [The Japanese] blew whistles to gather the ­v illagers together. The troops interrogated the villagers and then arrested them. They were all taken away and not released. They were detained in the clan’s ancestral temple in Liantang Village for a day, and then the Japanese dragged them out and killed them at the nearby beach. (Tan G. 2019) The Japanese soldiers killed all men and boys over fifteen-year-old from the village; Tan was not allowed to see his father’s remains. The mass killing Tan Guijue spoke of was only one of the many massacres committed by the Japanese military from 12 to 14 April 1938. According to Japanese sources, the killing was carried out in retaliation for a Chinese guerrilla attack at a Japanese garrison stationed at Pan Gu Temple on Dingjia Bay on 11 April 1938 (Kaba et al. 2018, 64–70), but the personal accounts of the survivors and their family members reveal that the victims were civilians. From 12 to 14 April, the Japanese forces carried out a series of mopping-up operations (sōtō sakusen) in the villages in the northwest region of Sanzao (Kaba et al. 2018, 69–70). The troops drove the islanders from their homes in Maotian, Wubian, Caotang, Shengtang, Chunhuayuan, Yuetang, Yu’nong, Yadun and other villages, telling the villagers that ‘they were to be issued Good Resident Identification Cards’ (liangminzheng); once the islanders came out, however, they were tied up, taken away and killed (Liu et al. 2018, 104–105; Tan G. et al. 2014: 15-23). Tan Tianlun’s father and grandfather were given wooden tags and taken away. At that time, Tan Tianlun’s mother thought they were taken away to do labour work, but they were both killed. Eighty years after the massacres, Tan Tianlun still could not hold back tears when he spoke of that day: ‘The entire village was wiped out. All the houses were razed’ (Tan T. 2019). Accurate counts of victim numbers and damage assessments are not available, but evidence suggests that in those three days the Japanese military raided thirty-six villages, killed more than 2,000 people, burned 164 boats and destroyed more than 3,200 houses (Kaba et al. 2018, 70; Liu et al. 2018, 109). Cai Huai, a native of Yu’nong Village, was twenty-six when 241

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the Japanese troops raided his village. He survived the massacre only because he was in the middle of a crowd and the bodies around him blocked the bullets so he escaped into the reeds amid the chaos. He recalled: The Japanese troops took the villagers to the Guan Clan Ancestral Temple (Guanjiaci) and then made them dig big pits in the field. People from my village didn’t know what these pits were for. We didn’t know that we were to be buried in them… At dusk we were dragged out and taken away from the ancestral temple, two at a time, our hands tied tightly behind us. We were dragged to the field near the temple, facing a big pit that was more than 100 meters wide. We were forced to kneel by the pit. Villagers were taken there and killed one group after another. Those who were killed fell into the pit. It was then that we realized that we were going to die. By 9 o’clock all the captured villagers were killed. Then [the Japanese soldiers] poured gasoline into the pit and burned the bodies. They all died. (Liu et al. 2015, 35:35–37:22) Survivor Li Yixing (Liu et al. 2018, 107–108) reported a similar massacre that took place at Chunhuayuan, where about thirty Japanese military men raided the village. The soldiers drove the villagers to the township hall. They tied up the male villagers and took them to the other side of the mountain and ordered the women and children to stay in the village. Those men and boys who were taken away never returned. At noon that day, the soldiers drove the women and young children to the bank of a river near the village and e­ xecuted them with machineguns. Six members of Li Yixing’s family were killed, including his ­g randparents. The twelve-year-old Li Yixing was covered by the dead bodies and survived. Deeply ­t raumatized, Li suffered nightmares for the rest of his life. Thus far, testimony from the perpetrators of the Sanzao massacres has been hard to find except a brief mention of the awful smell of dead bodies at Sanzao and a mopping-up operation that killed about a dozen ‘plainclothes soldiers’ in the memoir of Luo Shiyong, a Taiwanese man who worked as the Japanese navy’s local interpreter (Kaba et al. 2018, 73). The strong stench of corpses at Sanzao was also noted by a navy officer. In NHK’s documentary programme, ‘Japanese Navy: 400 Hours of Testimonies III—War Criminals Trial, The Second War’, aired on 11 August 2009, Ōi Atsushi, a former Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff Colonel, mentioned the ‘Sanzao incident’: I went there way after the incident, but there was still an awful odour—the smell of dead bodies. On Sanzao Island a Navy’s airfield was built. To build the airfield, they killed all the residents. They killed hundreds of people. (Liu et al. 2015, 52:03–52:29; Kaba et al. 2018, 75) The killing did not stop after the troops had wiped out the villagers in the northern region of the island. According to the incomplete count of Yang Fan (1982: 68), 2,891 islanders were killed and more than 3,500 starved to death during the Japanese occupation. In ­addition, countless islanders died in famine during their forced migration (Zeng T. 2019). The airbase commander’s ‘Sanzao Island Special Report I’ dated 15 June 1938 indicates that after having eliminated all the native residents in the northern region in April 1938 the Japanese military continued mopping-up operations throughout the island. In Section 5 of the report the Commander writes (Dairoku kōkū kichi shikikan, June 1938):

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Before the incident there were about 12,000 residents here. After the island was o ­ ccupied by the Imperial Japanese Navy, the majority fled to the mainland and, since we carried out mopping-up operations against the villagers in the northern region, now only about 1,800 villagers are left in the southern area. In dealing with these villagers, we have cut off the communication and transportation to the mainland and organized Security Associations (chian ijikai)… We use about 350 local men and women as labourers each month (twenty-five sen for adults, fifteen sen for children [Sen was a Japanese currency unit between 1871 and 1953; one sen was 1/100 of a yan]). Those who remained are seen as collaborators, hence they are extremely worried about the withdrawal of the Imperial Japanese forces. They looked a little relieved after seeing the Air Corps coming in. However, since they are Chinese, we can never loosen surveillance and vigilance. In the northern mountains there still are about 500 islanders, who escaped the earlier raids, so raids are currently continuing. As seen above, the islanders’ first-person accounts recaptured the personal dimension of the traumatic events, which was seriously missing in the heroic war stories before the 1980s but is essential for a full understanding of the brutality of the war.

Military Control and Cultural Domination The survivors’ recollections reveal despotic military rule during the Japanese occupation. Access to the island was prohibited and the islanders were not allowed to leave; essentially, the entire island was turned into a large detention camp. Sanzao native Zhong Quan describes the situation in the following account: The Japanese troops set up a puppet organization called the Security Association (zhian  weichihui; chian ichikai in Japanese) at Zhengbiao Village’s learning hall called Shangxian-zhai, making Tang Pinchen the president and Wu Guangzong vice ­president. They c­ ontrolled the association and issued a small wooden tag to each of us, which had the tag holder’s name and address burnt on one side and ‘Second Defence Force’ on the other. We had to wear it around our necks to show that we were obedient residents. If anyone didn’t wear it, they would be arrested, interrogated, tortured and detained. (Zhong and Liang 2014: 27) While the commander’s report cited earlier describes the remaining islanders as ‘collaborators’, the survivors’ narratives show that they were forced to work for the Japanese and were subjected to inhuman abuse and racial oppression. Tan Zhengtang (aka Tan Guijue) was one of the islanders who was forced to work for the Japanese military. ‘The Japanese troops started building an airfield as soon as they arrived’. He recalled, ‘I was forced to do hard labour—breaking rocks, pulling carts, and so on. Later, all villagers had to do that. The dirt and rocks on the mountain behind the village were all carried over for building the airfield’ (Liu et al. 2015, 19:27–19:43). To complete the construction quickly, the Japanese military also drafted labourers from Taiwan, Korea, and southeast and northeast China. Zheng Lican recalled:

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We children were assigned to help build the airfield by breaking rocks. Adults carried sand to the airfield. Those who were young and strong were paid only twenty-five sen, but it was not normal money, rather some reddish paper tickets ( junpiao). The workers included people shipped here from Korea by the Japanese army. Many people died. The construction continued day and night, even on rainy days. (Liu et al. 2015, 20:17–20:56) Lin Jinlian was only seven when she was forced to work for the construction project. She said: I was made to carry kerosene barrels and water buckets. I delivered water to the pits for the labourers. I had to carry firewood, too. The pieces of wood were so huge. They had us children carry them, one holding each end. We were beaten when we couldn’t hold it up and fell. What could we do? (Liu et al. 2015, 20:56–21:10) The Japanese military stopped at nothing to ensure the airbase construction proceeded r­ apidly. The airbase commander’s first report shows that by 4 June 1938, an airfield of 400 metres wide and 1,000 metres long had been completed. The airfield was heavily used and played an important role in Japan’s aggression in south China and the Pacific regions. By the end of September, the airbase had twenty fighters, fourteen bombers and twenty-seven attack aircraft from the fourteenth Air Corps, and thirteen attack aircraft from Takao Air Corps; a total of 6,493 Japanese military personnel were stationed on the island (Dairoku kōkū kichi shikikan October 1938). The air attacks launched from the Sanzao airbase inflicted heavy casualties in Guangzhou and other areas of south China (Kaba et al. 2018, 86; Liu et al. 2018, 117-119). The workers drafted to Sanzao from Korea, Taiwan and mainland China also suffered severe hardship. Many of them died of malnutrition, the intensive labour or illness; reportedly, the Japanese troops killed the workers when the construction was completed (Kaba 2004: 56; Liang 2012: 169; Liu et al. 2018, 115). The occupation army heightened surveillance and continued raiding the villages after the completion of the airbase. The commander’s reports recorded a number of the raid operations. On 14 June 1938, for example, twenty women who attempted to escape from the island were arrested (Dairoku kōkū kichi shikikan July 1938 and August 1938). In order to tighten their hold on the local people, the occupation authorities implemented ‘propaganda and pacification’ (senbu) measures, such as distributing relief rice, recruiting local people to be propagandists (senbuin) and organizing a Chinese Youth League (Dairoku kōkū kichi shikikan September 1938). Medical treatment and vaccines were also provided to prevent the spread of diseases. In addition, two schools were established using the islanders’ properties. The first school, located in the north, was for the children of the Japanese immigrant families (Wani 2013, 261-270). Starting in September 1939, immigrants from Okinawa were sent to Sanzao, fifty at first, increasing to 574 by 1943 (Kaba et al. 2018, 121–122). Wani Yukio observes: The immigrants were recruited for the purpose of armed colonization. They were armed farmers. This was to prevent the Chinese from attacking the Japanese military

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directly by setting up an area of farmers or immigrants between the Japanese military and the Chinese people, who were seen as Japan’s enemies at the time. (Liu et al. 2015, 55:06–55:35) The second school was set at Zhengbiao Village for the islanders’ children. Chen Fuyan, Tan Tianlun and others who attended that school remember that the school had students salute to the Japanese flag and sing Japanese songs every morning (Cupchoy 2005; Kaba et al. 2018, 177–178). On Mondays the students were taken to pay homage to Japanese soldiers killed in the war. From the second grade on, the students were required to speak Japanese. Those who could not had to wear a sign showing ‘Chinese Language User’ on their chests. If any students were absent from school or left early, their parents would be called to the school and detained in a dark room for at least a half day (Cupchoy 2005; Liu et al. 2018, 112–113). ‘My grandfather and father were killed by the Japanese’, says Tan Tianlun as his eyes filled with tears. ‘I didn’t want to learn, but they beat you up if you wouldn’t. I had so much pain in my heart’ (Tan T. 2019).

Sexual Violence and the ‘Comfort Stations’ Brutal sexual violence accompanied the military occupation of Sanzao. Tan Zhengtang shared his painful memory of one of the violent assaults: It happened in my family’s house…I was sitting in the house together with my grandma and four or five women of her age. One of the old women’s granddaughter was there, too. She was only about fourteen, not fifteen yet. A group of Japanese soldiers came into the house and dragged her into a room, despite that her grandma and the other women were there. When she was raped, you know, she was only fourteen… she was in great pain: ‘Grandma! No! No! I am hurt so much! Grandma! It hurts!’ (Liu et al. 2015, 21:33–22:33) During the occupation, troops prohibited the islanders from closing their doors at night, using security checks as a pretext to enter the villagers’ houses and rape the local women (Kaba et al. 2018, 55). Wei Furong, a native of Tianxin Village who moved to Hong Kong after the war, recalled that at night a group of Japanese soldiers would have the puppet Youth Association show them around the villages; as a result, some girls in his home village were raped by the soldiers (Kaba et al. 2018, 55–56). The numerous rapes committed by the Japanese military troops were already notorious before the outbreak of full-scale war in 1937. As early as 1932, Japanese forces had established comfort stations in Shanghai and in occupied areas of northeast China to address the problem (Qiu et al. 2014, 21–26). However, instead of preventing rape, the institutionalized comfort station system fostered sexual violence and provided authorized spaces for rape. With the comfort station system in place, Japanese military men were sanctioned to set up various ‘comfort’ facilities, improvised or formal, to satisfy their sexual needs. The following account, located by Kaba (2018, 55) in Hong Kong Chinese Mail (Xianggang huazi ribao), reported one such improvised facility. The article relates that in March 1938, the Japanese soldiers at Sanzao took doors from the islanders’ houses and built a ‘club’ with them at Lianpengfang. They rounded up fifty women aged thirty or younger and raped them there.

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On 10 March, an eighteen-year-old girl called Yamu was caught by nine military men when she went out to get water. Yamu resisted when the soldiers tried to take her away and was stabbed to death. The soldiers placed her body in front of the ‘club’ for a day to terrorize the other women, then disposed of her body in a river. Within months of the massacres in April, a comfort station for military officers was established at Shangbiao Village (Abe 1938; Liang 2012: 169) and a second one later at Liantang, both sponsored by Fukudai Konsu, a company that had actively supported Imperial Japan’s national policies (kokusaku) and provided supplies to the Japanese forces during the war (Kaba et al. 2018, 218-220; Tan and Liang 2014: 27-28). According to Zhong Quan, who worked as an assistant at the Second Defence Force Infirmary and did health checks for the comfort stations, the two comfort stations were later consolidated into one, occupying Shangbiao Village’s reading house (Yue shubao she) and identified with a sign reading ‘Military Clubhouse’ ( Junren jihui suo) on its door. Zhong Quan described the comfort station as follows: Shangbiao was a big village on Sanzao Island. After the Japanese military occupied the island, they dragged all adult men of the village—seventy or eighty of them—to Changshalan and killed them, saying that someone in the village had secretly kept a gun. After that they flattened all the houses in the village, leaving only a couple of them that had packed-earth-walls and the reading house that was built with grey bricks to make a comfort station. The village’s reading house was used as a canteen and reception room for the military men. The earth houses were for the ‘comfort women’ to work in. Every Sunday I had to go there to sanitize, spreading disinfectant and giving each ‘comfort woman’ a box of powder for making a solution to wash their private parts. Sometimes I  was asked to assist the military doctors in their examinations of the ­women’s genitals. As far as I knew, four groups of ‘comfort women’ were shipped to Sanzao: the first group was ten women from Taiwan; the second was nine from Guangzhou; the third was ten from Korea; the fourth was ten from Hong Kong. When one group came, the other was shifted away. The supervisor was a Japanese man—they called him ‘Jitou’—who sold tickets to the station users at the Military Clubhouse and was in charge of coordinating with each military unit and the management of the comfort station. (Zhong and Liang 2014: 28) At my interview Zhong Quan told me that the Military Clubhouse was for the exclusive use of the Japanese military personnel. The ‘comfort women’ were called by numbers instead of their names, which was a common practice in many military comfort stations. Zhong Quan only knew the names of two women because they contracted venereal disease and he had to complete a form with their names on it. The establishment of the comfort stations, however, did not eliminate the troops’ sexual violence against the local women. Takahashi Sadamu (1978), who served as captain of the navel bombing squadron of the 14th Air Corps at Sanzao, wrote that in the autumn of 1939, two red-uniformed men of the facility corps broke into a villager’s house, injured the owner and raped his wife. These intruders were convicted Japanese criminals serving as ‘special workers’ at the airbase; felony offenders wore red uniforms and minor offenders wore blue. A few days later, three red-uniformed men of the same corps went to that house again; this time they were caught by five villagers, who cut off the feet of one intruder and injured the faces of the other two. The man who lost his feet died; others from his corps revenged by 246

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killing an old villager. They made a big cup with his skull, then made a toast with it and offered the cup to the grave of the dead convict. It is perhaps worth mentioning here that those who would deny the criminal nature of the comfort station system sometimes point to an account of the Sanzao comfort station by Japanese writer Hasegawa Shin, who wrote about the monetary payments to the ‘comfort women’ there. In his essay ‘Remnant Notes of Facts’ ( Jijitsu zanzon shō), Hasegawa (1990) relates that he visited Sanzao towards the end of November 1938 and that he was shown to the comfort station for military officers, which had about twenty women. These women were from Taiwan and received a cash advance of 500–1,300 yen upon their recruitment. The tickets for using the comfort station, he reports, were five yen for officers and two yen for non-commissioned officers and soldiers. In his essay Hasegawa also tells the story of a military doctor who convinced the officers to help a twenty-year-old virgin get out of the comfort station. While highlighting the military men’s sympathy towards the young virgin, this story exposes, ironically, their mentality of regarding the sexual abuse of women who were not virgins as justified. Whether true or fictional, the story cannot erase the abuse and exploitation of women at this comfort station, nor can it whitewash the criminal nature of the comfort station system as a whole. Offering cash advances was a common method used by procurers when recruiting ‘­comfort women’ from Japan and its colonies. In order to support their families, women and girls from poor families accepted a cash advance, but once taken into the comfort stations, they were deprived of their freedom and it was not easy for them to pay off the advance (now considered ‘debt’) as their daily necessities and medical expenses were added to this principle. Yoshimi Yoshiaki (1995, 145–148) points out that even in cases where ‘comfort women’ worked off their advance and began drawing pay, they were often required to contribute their earnings to the national defence. Even in Hasegawa’s essay, the captain who delivered ‘comfort women’ to Sanzao commented that ‘All those women were tricked here’; Hasegawa also observed that although the women were said to receive 50 percent of the service fees after their debt deductions, ‘behind the scenes there seemed to have been different calculations’ (Hasegawa 1990). A final insult is noted  by  Zhong Quan (2019): payments made at the comfort station were not real money, but junpiao, the wartime Japanese military currency that became valueless after Japan’s defeat. Monetary payment given to the ‘comfort women’ has always been used in the denialist discourse to describe these women as professional prostitutes. However, although some ‘comfort women’ received advances or were given a percentage of the service fees, their experiences still amounted to forced prostitution. In fact, many women were simply abducted from the occupied regions, received no monetary payments and lived in slave-like conditions. In many of these cases, their families who attempted to ransom the abducted women whenever possible were forced to pay a large sum to the Japanese military.1 Zeng Dinglian, who was thirteen when the Japanese marines landed at Sanzao and did cleaning work at the comfort station at Liantang Village during the occupation, told me about a young woman nicknamed Acui who was kidnapped from Hong Kong. Zeng reported that Acui’s family had made a living fishing. When the Japanese forces occupied Hong Kong, Acui was caught on her boat. When I asked Zeng Dinglian how Acui was paid at the comfort station, she replied, There was no pay—of course they gave no payment. You were given some food to eat. Do you think they would also give you money? The women were only given some 247

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packet food, things like packed wontons and corn. That’s it. There was no pay at all. The Japanese paid them nothing. (Zeng D. 2019) The situation Ding reported is consistent with the testimonies of many other Chinese ­survivors who were kidnapped into the Japanese military comfort stations during the war. Acui and other ‘comfort women’ left Sanzao when the Imperial Japanese forces were defeated. Little is known about the whereabouts of these women now, but the building occupied by the Military Clubhouse remains today and has been designated a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level. Together with the monuments commemorating the islanders who died during the Japanese occupation, it stands in silent reproach, keeping the traumatic history visible. Leaving Sanzao Island, a comfort station survivor’s words weighed heavily on my heart: ‘Our worst fear is that our painful history during WWII will be forgotten’. These words were inscribed on the plaque of the ‘comfort women’ memorial in San Francisco. While those who experienced the trauma are not letting the history fade from public memory, the truth of the traumatic events has been energetically contested—most recently seen in the Japanese government’s effort to remove ‘comfort women’ memorials. Given that complex differences among experiences of traumatic events result in different and often conflicting memories, and that many factors—nationalistic, political and ideological, to name a few— further complicate remembrance and commemoration, how to transform the contested war memories to a transnational remembrance of the human sufferings and a legacy for preventing similar traumatic events is a challenging task. Yet, the growing transnational efforts to preserve the traumatic war memories, as seen in the case of Sanzao, constitute a meaningful step towards that goal.

Note 1 There are many testimonies of such cases. See, for example, the account of Hao Yuelian in Peipei Qiu (2021) and other cases in Qiu et al. (2014).

References 10,000 Cries for Justice. (2018) ‘10,000 Cries for Justice’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 22 December 2021). Abe, H. (1938) ‘Dairoku kōkū kichi butai nichirei dairokugō, Shōwa jūsannen jūgatsu jūichinichi’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 20 April 2022). Coble, P. (2007) ‘China’s New Remembering of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, 1937–1945’. The China Quarterly 190: 394–410. Cohen, P. (2003) China Unbound: Evolving Perspectives on the Chinese Past, London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Cupchoy, R. (2005) ‘Rijun Sanzao datusha’. Online. Available HTTP: (downloaded by Kaba Toyohiko in 2005). Dairoku kōkū kichi shikikan. (15 June 1938) ‘Sansōtō tokuhō daiichgō’, photocopy in Sanzao 1938 (2018), Guangzhou: Nanfang chuban chuanmei, 2–23. Dairoku kōkū kichi shikikan. (15 July 1938) ‘Sansōtō tokuhō dainigō’, photocopy in Sanzao 1938 (2018), Guangzhou: Nanfang chuban chuanmei, 24–45. Dairoku kōkū kichi shikikan. (1 August 1938) ‘Sansōtō tokuhō daisangō’, photocopy in Sanzao 1938 (2018), Guangzhou: Nanfang chuban chuanmei, 46–64. Dairoku kōkū kichi shikikan. (1 September 1938) ‘Sansōtō tokuhō daiyongō’, photocopy in Sanzao 1938 (2018), Guangzhou: Nanfang chuban chuanmei, 65–87.

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Narrating Trauma Dairoku kōkū kichi shikikan. (1 October 1938) ‘Sansōtō tokuhō daigogō’, photocopy in Sanzao 1938 (2018), Guangzhou: Nanfang chuban chuanmei, 88–105. Gries, P. (2004) China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hasegawa, S. (1958; reprinted 1990) ‘Jijitsu zanzon shō’, in Ikiteiru shōsetsu, Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 101–110. Lary, D. and S. MacKinnon, eds. (2001) Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China, Vancouver: UBC Press. Liang, Z. (2012). ‘Dui Sanzao-zhen Shangbiao-cun qinHua Rijun weiansuo diaocha de buchong shuoming’. Zhuhai wenshi 21: 169–172. Liu, C. (12 July 2019) Interviewed by Peipei Qiu. Liu, C. and Hua Y., planners; Zhou Y. and Guan X., directors. (2015) Sanzao 1938, Zhigongdang Zhuhai-shi weiyuanhui and Zhuhai dianshitai. Liu, C., Yang C. and Hua Y., chief compilers. (2018) Sanzao 1938, Guangzhou: Nanfang chuban chuanmei. Kaba, T. (2004) ‘ZhongRi zhanzheng shiqi zai Guangdong Sanzaodao de Riben nongye yimin’. Kangri zhanzheng yanjiu 4: 53–72. Kaba, T., Urashima E., and Wani Y. (2018) Sansōtō jiken – Nitchū sensō ka no gyakusatsu to Okinawa imin, Tokyo: Gendai shokan. Peipei, Q. (2021) ‘Chinese “Comfort Women”’, in Mujica, B. (ed.) Collateral Damage: Women Write about War. Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press, 33–43. Qiu, P. with Z. Su and L. Chen. (2014) Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Takahashi, S. (1978) ‘Dairokuwa: Fukushū’, in Hishōun. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 15 May 2022). Tan, G. (12 July 2019) Interviewed by Peipei Qiu; interview recording transcribed by Cristy Cai and Huang Yuxia. Tan, G. and Tan T., narrate; Zhu H., records. (2014) ‘Rijun “saodang” Sanzaodao Shangbiaocun de qianqianhouhou’. Zhuhai wenshi 23: 15–23. Tan, T. (12 July 2019) Interviewed by Peipei Qiu; interview recording transcribed by Cristy Cai and Huang Yuxia. Tan, T. narrate; Liang Z., records. (2014) ‘Rijun zai Sanzaodao shang de shenshe zhihuibu he Fuda gongsi’. Zhuhai wenshi 23: 34–41. Tong, Z. (1991) ‘It is of Great Urgency that China Demand Damage Compensation from Japan’. Online. Available HTTP: < https://2018.10000cfj.org/about-us-en/?lang=en> (accessed 22 December 2021). Wang, Z. (2012) Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations, New York: Columbia University Press. Wani, Y. (2013) Suiyue wusheng: Yige Ribenren zhuixun Xianggang Rizhan shiji; trans. Zhang Hongyan, Jiulong: Arcadia Press Ltd. Yang, F. (1982) ‘Riben qinluezhe xuexi Sanzaodao de baoxing’. Zhuhai wenshi 1: 65–68. Yoshimi, Y. (1995) Jūgun ianfu, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Zeng, D. (12 July 2019) Interviewed by Peipei Qiu; interview recording transcribed by Cristy Cai and Huang Yuxia. Zeng, T. (2012) ‘Wo suo zhidao kangzhan shi de Shangbiaocun ji Rijun weiansuo’. Zhuhai wenshi 21: 163–168. Zeng, T. (15 October 2019) Interviewed by Peipei Qiu; interview record transcribed by Cristy Cai. Zhong, Q. narrate and Liang Z. records. (2014) ‘Wei qinHua Rijun weiansuo fangyi de rizi’. Zhuhai dangan 3: 27–28 & 20. Zhong, Q. (12 July 2019) Interviewed by Peipei Qiu; interview recording transcribed by Cristy Cai and Huang Yuxia.

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21 TRAUMA, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AND CAPITALISM IN HAO JINGFANG Ban Wang

Eternal Hospital, a science fiction (sf ) novella by Chinese writer Hao Jingfang, offers a glimpse of traumatic consequences after a terminally ill patient is transformed into an AI humanoid. When protagonist Qian Rui realizes that his mother is dying from cancer, he is guiltstricken and tries to make up for his past neglect and to absolve his guilt. He stays at her bedside and takes care of her, only to have this ritual of caring and grieving cut short. Equipped with neural biomedicine and AI, the ‘Miracle Hospital’ replaces the patient with an AI reconstructed ‘person.’ The new mother returns home and retains all the memories of the family. She does a good job of housekeeping and keeps the husband happy. But Qian feels she is fake and an imposter. He enlists the help of lawyers to reveal the truth of the deception and sues the hospital for cheating patients’ families. But as the probe gives rise to anxieties about the blurred boundaries between AI and humans, Qian begins to give the fake mother the benefit of doubt. She may be bereft of human emotion but functions effectively as the family caretaker. His real mother in her last moment, it turns out, has authorized the transformation of herself into an AI body implanted with her brain contents. Qian finally drops the lawsuit when the CEO of the hospital reveals that at age of eight, Qian himself was similarly transformed after a fatal accident. Hao Jingfang has claimed that this story addresses ‘the human body and human i­dentity’ and AI’s capacity for apprehending human emotions (2017, xii). The focus on AI is b­ ecoming a cutting-edge frontier in contemporary Chinese sf fiction. Chinese sf has seen a steady stream of apocalyptical narratives about the destruction of Earth, intergalactic confrontation and wars, hi-tech rivalry in outer space, and the demise of the human species and civilization. Liu Cixin, whose Three Body Problems has received international critical acclaim, paints gloomy and epic fantasies of Cold War geopolitics in conjunction with planetary wars, traumas of China’s political turmoil, humanity’s environmental self-destruction, and the end of Earth. Hao Jingfang emerged as an internationally recognized sf writer after her novella Folding Beijing received the Hugo Prize for Science Fiction in 2016. Unlike Liu, Hao addresses much more intimate realms of the human body and psyche enmeshed with the networks of digital economy, bioengineering, and AI. A few factors in her life converged to make her an outstanding sf writer. As a child, Hao aspired to be a scientist and in high school received a prize for her literary writing. Although she was admitted by Peking University as a literature 250

DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-23

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major, she opted to enrol in Tsinghua University, better known for its t­ echnological c­ urricula, and majored in space physics. She graduated with a PhD in economics and management. Hao possesses both technical expertise in science, finance, economics, and literary talent for writing sophisticated and engaging sf works. Confronted with the raging technological triumphalism associated with AI, robotization, automation, and genetic engineering, Hao expresses scepticism regarding AI’s limits and dehumanizing effects. Her works delve into AI technology in the human-machine interface and explore the blurring of the boundaries between machine and human. The themes of alienation and disintegration of human culture and subjectivity are prominent in her narratives of AI’s penetration into everyday life, ­consciousness, and the unconscious. This chapter argues that AI-derived trauma erodes and dismantles the traditional humanist concept of the human. Eternal Hospital provides an occasion for a trauma analysis of ­consequences of human-technology entanglement. AI’s erosion of the human person and society is but a recent episode in a long trauma-ridden history of human-technology intertwinement and interaction. Since the nineteenth century, the accelerated development and spread of technology in economic production and everyday life have engendered a h ­ egemony of techno-scientific modernity. In its aggressive pursuit of power, profit, and domination over nature and human beings, the blind faith in technological progress leaves a record of eroding and dismantling the humanist mind and body. Techno-scientific modernization has been a feature in China’s rapid development since the opening and reform era of the 1980s. In the last four decades, China has transitioned from the ‘factory’ of the world to a powerhouse of research and development. Flourishing in the age of the internet, big data, and digital economy, AI applications have been ubiquitous and penetrated into every corner of economic production and the social fabric, generating controversy in the news, public discourse, and science fiction. The optimists assure an ­anxious public with the prospect of AI enhancing human life and work. AI will increase productivity and ‘reduce hunger and poverty’ (Li and Chen, 2021, xiv), and leave us with plenty of time for leisure and creative pursuits. Each human’s productivity will be amplified, allowing us to realize our potential’ (Li and Chen, 2021, xiv). Economists and sociologists warn that AI will replace the majority of jobs involving routine, repetitive operations, leading to joblessness and social upheaval. Others worry that with deep learning capacity, AI will outsmart humans and overturn entrenched ethical and social norms. Chinese science fiction wrestles with these anxieties. In Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan (2013), the ubiquitous cyborgs blend neurological, biochemical, digital, and AI components. These products of human-machine interface alienate people and polarize society into the privileged and the disadvantaged, the powerful and the powerless. In Hao Jingfang, the most traumatic aspect of AI stems from the prospect of reconstructing the human mind and body, raising the alarm of a terrifying posthuman apocalypse. Such fears of technology depart from the earlier embrace of science and technology in Chinese science fiction. When China opened up to the outside world in the 1980s, writers and the public warmly welcomed advances of technology and were confident that innovations would fuel China’s modernization drive and quest for global power. Depictions of humanoid robots were present in science fiction, but writers were inclined to see ‘robots as little more than obedient servants’ (‘AI Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Fiction’). Moving into the twentieth-first century, however, writers and the public grew increasingly concerned about AI’s amoral and evil tendencies, manifest in tensions and competition between AI and humans. In 2016, AlphaGo, an AI entity built on deep learning, defeated Lee Sedol, a South Korean Go star, in a five-round Go contest. A popular chess game in many East Asian countries, Go requires 251

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extremely complex and quick intelligence and calculation to play. The fans and the public were shocked when an AI player vanquished the human champion, spawning anxiety about the wider implications. AI researchers have focused on the language of AI as an objective and impersonal process alien to humans. Enmeshed in a vast network of digital connectivity, genetics, biology, and algorithm, AI has advanced from the ‘axiomatic logic systems to build a set of guiding rules for an intelligent agent’ (‘AI Narratives’), opening up to an all-encompassing meta-universe. The new models of AI are able to emulate human neurons and neural networks in the brain, and are enmeshed with big data algorithms, digital infrastructures of the internet, and machine deep learning. Instead of AI’s replacement of humans as a species, however, Hao Jingfang is more focused on the erasure of human emotional qualities in the drive to quantify everything about human life, interpersonal relations, and survival. ‘The quantification,’ she writes (Renzhi bi’an 2017, 308), ‘means the representation and registration of everything and every person’ by an all-encompassing digital process. The human mind only functions as a ‘yes’ in social media or a ‘click for purchase’ in the new attention economy in which human attention is a scarce commodity. Instead of AI coming close to emulating humans, there is a fear of human beings being controlled by AI. In an essay theorizing AI-human distinctions, Hao claims that far from a tool or object for digital analysis, we humans are flesh and blood bodies. Contemporary psychogical insights pay more attention to the body and its power on the brain. The brain sits in a castle and is not just a thinking machine on the roof, but is being affected by the bodily and emotional system, the total foundation of the castle. (2017, 308) The AI quantification of our life and social relations ‘make us ignore face-to-face gatherings and indifferent to eye contact and to tears and hugs.’ It makes us impervious to the pain from failures. But all these ‘feelings of joy and pain are part of our intelligence and the most ­precious one at that’ (2017, 308). If humans, as corporeal and emotional beings, are no long able to interact with eye contact, no longer understand feelings outside the digital circuit, and know no value other than those of maximization or optimization, we will lose our ability to appreciate the aesthetic power of the great masters of art in the humanist tradition. In short, we would no longer deserve to be known as human beings. Exploring the impoverishment and degradation of human emotion, Eternal Hospital depicts traumatic experience in the clean and antiseptic space created by the AI brain and body. The irruption of trauma and the return of the repressed provide a critique against the conscious denial and suppression of the negativities of sorrow, pain, and mortality that are the irrepressible part of human life. The loss of his mother is surely traumatic to Qian. But AI’s denial of his last chance to fulfil his duty of filial piety results in a deeper trauma. It nullifies the ritual of emotional connection and adds insult to injury. The advent of the AI mother cancels out the essential ritual of grieving and working through the trauma of dying and death. When he realizes his mother is on the verge of death, Qian is guilt-stricken and suffers a rude awakening about his past neglect. As an employee in a big corporation in the urban centre and driven by the neoliberal work ethic that puts self-achievement, productivity, and performance above everything else, he constantly cites excuses, such as deadlines or professional pressures, for ignoring his mother who has been suffering from chronic illness. The awakened guilt spurs him into action and he makes effort to work through his pain and 252

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remorse by reconnecting with and sharing the pain of his dying mother. He resolves to see her every day and ‘wait by her bedside so that he would be the first thing she saw when she woke up’ (3). Sneaking into the hospital ward, Qian confronts the ghastly sight of death. Her mother’s waxen face ‘was sapped of life,’ her skin is shrivelled, and ‘her head was covered with electrodes, while tubes ran into her nose and other parts of her body’ (5). Although he is frightened, Qian quickly overcomes the shocks as he begins to reconnect with his mother physically and intimately. He ‘reached out his hand, brushing against hers for a moment’ (5). When he touches her hand for a second time, he is plunged into a torrent of grief and sobs profusely. The catharsis of compassion strengthens the emotional bonds and releases somewhat the pent-up guilt. After that, he sneaks into the ward every night to take care of his mother, ‘wiping her brow, repositioning her, and giving her water’ (6). Through this ritual of care, compassion, and love, Qian feels that he is making up for the lost time and for his past neglect. As Enshia Li writes, Qian’s engagement with death through the ‘unfiltered, raw experience of trauma’ signals that a strong ‘sense of morality can be reawakened’ and that a ‘genuine human connection can be restored’ (23). Yet the deprivation of the grieving by the AI mother strikes him with a traumatic sense of abandonment: It was only as he was leaving one day, when he turned one of the hallway’s dark corners, that he suddenly remembered that lonely sickroom he’d visited on those nights. Just like this hallway, it was haunted by abandonment. And his mother then, so old, so pitiful— nobody knew she was there, and nobody cared that she even existed. Her breath then was but a whisper, but she was still holding on, struggling, as though there was some wish she hadn’t yet fulfilled. He had been the only one by his mother’s side on those desolate nights, each tear a symbol of remorse. (63) In nursing his dying mother, Qian shares and empathizes with her pain. But this emotional and ethical grieving is eradicated by the cold-hearted abandonment through the arrival of the AI mother.

Emotional Deficiency It is a shock for Qian to encounter and confront the AI mother at home. Fresh out of the ­hospital, she is sitting placidly in the living room and watching TV. Miracle Hospital is reputed for its advanced technology and miraculous cure of terminally ill patients. The ­hospital’s AI and genetic technology has transformed the dead mother into a new person, who appears to be the exact duplicate of the old mother. But Qian cannot accept her and intuits that she is fake—an imposter and an invader. He tries to expose the fakeness by giving her a series of tests and testing her at every turn about her memories of trivial incidents, his preferences, habits, and incidents that the old mother knew well. But the new mother passes every test, and her mind works like a database containing all the details of family relations, habits, and likes and dislikes. Moreover, she is functioning well as wife and housekeeper. In the past, father and mother often quarrelled but now the new mother is on good terms with the father. Something essential, however, is missing. What is frustrating to Qian about the AI mother is her complete lack of emotion and feelings, even though her brain contains all the family-related information. Embedded in past incidents and memories, the emotions and sentiments are still acute and raw in the present. To reconnect with the AI mother, Qian 253

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evokes past incidents where he treated his old mother disrespectfully and hurtfully. For instance, he evokes how, as a child, he would regularly avoid his mother when she was waiting at an intersection to pick him up after school. Because she looked embarrassing, he was anxious for her to disappear so that his classmates would not make fun of him. This memory and similar hurtful incidents still sting him with remorse, making him want to express his affection and love. But the AI mother airily brushes these incidents aside, dismissing them as the innocuous acts of a child. She understands the boy’s intention: I used to come here to pick you up from school. You did not want to see me. I know it is because you did not like how I looked… but that is okay. You do not have to worry about it. (32) ‘It is ok’ calmly brushes aside the painful and acute memory; it is as if ‘a balloon has been popped inside of Qian Rui’s head, like something burst inside his heart. He felt tears threatening to come out’ (32). Faced with the breezy ‘equanimous’ forgiveness over the entangled emotional knots, Qian feels the new mother is ‘emotionally deficient’ (19). Her ‘unusual level of lenience’ regarding his past wrongs may appear well-intentioned but belies ‘the artificial alienation beneath’ (19). If Qian is a trauma patient, the AI mother strips him of the means of healing. It robs him of a chance to work through the trauma. The alienating effect consists in the fact it simply suspends his anxiety and guilt, sweeping them under the rug. It is a commonplace in trauma studies that a workable therapy requires emotional resonance, connectivity, and sympathy. Therapy, as Rees and Sleigh write, ‘is built on a common-sense faith that there were other minds and that emotionally sound individual accommodates herself healthily to people’s demands upon her’ (87). The success of addressing trauma depends on sensuous, embodied, and immediate experience of resonance and interaction. Therapeutic power is ‘of an ­unpredictably emergent nature determined by the two persons involved’ (87). Verbal and emotional interaction ‘knits together both participants in the process as thinking—and, crucially, experiencing—beings’ (87). The to-and-fro exchange and transfer of feelings and memories are not bits of data or digital stream but ‘irreducible phenomena of experience’ (87). AI can think, perform, and calculate, but it does not experience and does not have interactive responses capable of bringing together the past and present memories. While the AI mother has all the data of past memories implanted and stored up in her brain, it cannot begin to understand and much less feel the sentiments of lived experiences and sedimented emotions, still alive and acute in Qian. The AI mother is a product of biotechnical and digital engineering. As the investigation reveals, the hospital engages in a bioengineering business of cloning: they grow cells and use the patient’s DNA to create a duplicate of the body. They then scan the ‘patient’s neural connections, recording the entire connectome, and convert ‘the neural connection model into a sequence that is implanted into the new body’s brain’ (26). ‘The new cranial nerves grow based on the past model, allowing the new body to emulate the brain of the replaced body’ (26) This process preserves the patient’s genes and cerebral memories in a new body, creating an AI species called ‘neogens.’ Are neogens human beings? That is the question and a traumatic one at that. Why is the AI humanoid not compatible with real human beings? These questions drive the investigation and lawsuit. Meanwhile, uncertainties make Qian Rui hesitate and force him to dive deeper into the question. The new mother’s emotional deficiency not only proves to 254

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be unsettling and causes him to take legal action but also raises a ‘philosophical’ issue that ­confronts humanist presumptions about people and things, humans and nonhumans. It also subverts his presumptions about what constitutes human identity. Qian oscillates between the AI mother’s performance of duties and care of the family on the one hand and the absence of emotional qualities and responses on the other. As the new mother performs her duties and manages family affairs smoothly, Qian begins to have misgivings about the lawsuit against her and the hospital. He asks the legal team if the two mothers are really two different people. The lawyers dismiss this ‘philosophical’ question as irrelevant and insist on the difference between the AI imposter and the genuine human, claiming that the neogens ‘are robots. They are bodies controlled by computer chips and program’ (37). This philosophical question comes up again in a conversation between Qian and the AI mother. When the investigation team stages a street protest against the hospital’s fraudulent practice, the news causes Qian’s father to suffer a heart attack, landing him in the emergency ward. Sitting in the corridor with his new mother, Qian finds his mother ‘totally unperturbed’ and ‘tranquil.’ This makes him so agitated and angry that his head seems to split open. Trying to calm him down, the AI mother smiles and says do not worry. The doctor has assured them that it is about time for his father to have a heart transplant. With advanced organ-generation technology, ‘it is quite simple to do surgery and switch hearts’ (39). The technology of switching hearts startles Qian, who goes on asking: ‘if you switch out every part of somebody’s body, are they still the original person’ (39)? The AI mother responds by justifying the equivalence of AI and human beings on the biochemical and cellular grounds: Of course they are… I heard that every cell in our bodies gets replaced after a while. The matter in your body now is already different from the matter in your body a year ago. But nobody feels they are not like themselves. People’s minds and bodies are continuous. (39) As Qian probes further he wonders if the brain is also changing. The answer is the brain changes too, and parts of your person may change, ‘the whole remains the same’ (40). Qian zeros in on his core concern: how do I know I am me? The AI mother answers: ‘that is not important. What is important is that everybody in your life knows you’re you’ (40). AI robots, writes Rees (‘Uncanny Valets’, 2021), are ‘unable to apprehend emotion and incapable of engaging with nuanced social interactions.’ Despite their performative effectivity and cognitive brilliance, they are unsettling because they have ‘brains but no heart or conscience.’ Their ‘intellectual brilliance is not matched by empathy or by ethical consideration.’ What unsettles and frustrates Qian is the premise that a human self needs not, and cannot, be distinguished from a digitalized and genetically engineered robot. From a purely biomedical and digital perspective, a person’s biochemical makeup works like a biomedical algorithm, undergoing changes all the time. This notion of what constitutes a human person is narrow and partial and fails to touch on the essential core of the human person. Instead, the self is constructed by data, social standards, vital signs, and biometrics. The human qualities of inner worth, self-representation, reflection, compassion, morality, and sympathy are cancelled out by the digital and genetic construction.

Biomedical Empire, Digital Control, and Death Qian Rui drops the lawsuit after he finds out that his dying mother has signed the document that authorized her transformation into a neogen. On top of that, he is told that he himself 255

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had been a ‘child’ patient at the hospital and was recreated and given a second life after a fatal accident. To dissuade him from pursuing the lawsuit, the CEO and director of the hospital justifies the AI recreation of life by appealing to the love of family members. Citing his own experience, the director recounts how in the past, as a busy businessman, he neglected his sick daughter, who died alone and uncared for. The guilt of losing his daughter is akin to Qian’s loss of his mother. As he ‘watched his daughter’s life slipping away before his very eyes’ (50), the director is guilt-stricken about his inability to make up for the loss. He resolves to do something that will save lives and absolve his guilt. Hence the neogen enterprise, a business venture that has grown into a biomedical and digital empire. Countering Qian’s assertion that neogens are not human beings, the director elaborates on the seamless and finely textured AI construction: Neogens are humans generated through genetic duplication… A computer chip directs the growth of the neogen’s brain, bringing them into a semi-intelligent state, but the chip is made of carbon nanomaterial capable of growing together with the organic brain. Most of the chip dissolves as the neural network is formed, allowing the neogen’s brain to operate independently so that they become truly human. Although there will still be traces of the chip in there, it is the new brain that does most of the work… the neogen is the patient, the patient brought back to life. (51) Unconvinced by the view that the neogens are different from cyborgs, Qian asks if the director would be ready to accept the neogen replacement of his dead daughter. This question evokes the emotion drenched memories and bonds that Qian has missed in the AI mother. It challenges the biogenetic justifications underlying the replacement of dead loved ones with a neogen. But the director dodges the question and says that that the patients can accept it and indeed countless families have accepted neogens as their new family members. They spend money to assuage their guilt of not taking good of care of their sick loved ones. After all, ‘They need solace, not truth’ (53). The truth of deep emotional trauma is neutralized and smoothed over by feel-good solace. Appealing to the individual’s consent and needs conceals the pervasive manipulation of c­ onsumers. The hospital plays on their desire and their heartstrings for profit. The ­consumer’s desire and preferences are not autonomous choices, not a sign of free will. Eternal life and robot-like ‘health’ are artificial and impersonal contrivance, not authentic living human beings. Health and eternal life seem to be desirable, but like the ever-upgraded iPhone, the desire is manufactured by new technologies and is commodified as a means of profit making. In her sf novel Vagabonds (2020b), Hao Jingfang critiques such manipulation of desire. She describes how human desire is manipulated by technology and capitalism into c­ ommodity. A  girl on Mars, a society based on public ownership of land and property, communal ­economy, and shared values, has designed an exquisitely beautiful dress. A businessman from the capitalist Earth tries to introduce the design to the consumers. The capitalist wants to advertise the exotic invention of the Martian girl as a symbol of mystery, art, and freedom that everyone on Earth desires. But Mars society follows different rules of production and enjoyment of products and goods. There, when a new dress is invented and produced, it belongs to the public. Everybody has easy access to and can use and enjoy it. In contrast, the Terran capitalist, by advertising and appealing to human desire, has no intention to satisfy the consumer need for use value and the public need for better life and beauty. Instead, he 256

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plans to make the dress a rare, expensive luxury commodity, accessible only to the wealthy and privileged. By appealing to desire, he ‘creates a status symbol and makes it even more desirable. The capitalist will wield desire like a weapon: a weapon for manufacturing desire, a weapon for generating a sense of status envy and feelings of inadequacy’ (Vagabonds 169), ultimately controlling the consumers. Manufacturing consumer desire is what motivates the director of Miracle Hospital to invoke people’s urgent desire to give solace to their dying relatives by giving them a rebirth: ‘they never feel they have done enough for their loved one. It is because of this need that our hospital exists. They need solace, not truth’ (53). The hospital’s neogen creation has dire social consequences. It aggravates the d­ isparity between the rich and the poor, the privileged and the disadvantaged. The creation of n ­ eogens obscures the reality of cashing in on family members’ sense of guilt and cancelling out their sincere love and care for their sick relatives. Miracle Hospital is a medical empire and a profit machine that charges exorbitant prices for recreating neogens. Qian’s lawyer denounces the profit motive: the hospital ‘can cure terminal illness of any moneybags that come in, sending them home to live a long healthy life’ (43). The hospital is a conglomerate rather than a ­medical institution. With concentrated capital and vast resources, the biomedical empire seeks to drive out regular healthcare services for ordinary people and devotes itself to the rich and privileged. It also extends and buys up IT and AI companies. Its dominion is extensive, ubiquitous, and overpowering, as the image of the director’s office symbolizes: ‘An abnormally spacious room three sides of which were covered in floor-to-ceiling windows that wrapped around the room, affording a vast vista of the city’ (48). Yet shrouded by dim lighting suggestive of secrecy and mystery, the office enables its boss to ‘appreciate the bustling glow of city lights outside’ (48). It is from this godlike commanding height that the director proclaims that 338,600 people of this city of thirty million have agreed to be remade into neogens and live happily hereafter. The last straw that convinces Qian Rui to drop his lawsuit is the discovery that he is a neogen himself. The director reveals that the empire is all seeing and all encompassing. Everyone in the hospital, among staff, patients, and neogens, is being monitored by the ­d igital system that scans the electronic cores implanted in the brain, body, or clothing. Every movement, thought or preference, is under surveillance. The fact that Qian manages to move in and out the hospital reveals that he has the electronic codes embedded in his body. This total control by AI and digital networks is well illustrated by Hao Jingfang’s novella Love Problems. Under a sinister and all-encompassing system, the human mind and body are constantly assessed and monitored by a network of algorithms and AI humanoids. Lin, the chief engineer of an AI corporation, falls victim to a murder attempt, is seriously injured, and is hospitalized in a vegetative state. An AI detective investigates the murder and deploys big data algorithms and statistics to identify the suspect. Lin’s housekeeper, an AI humanoid, assists in the investigation and provides the biometric data of the family members as evidence for the murder motive. The detective singles out Lin’s son Shanshui as the prime suspect. Shuanshui, a hot-blooded and romantic rebel, has an estranged and conflicted relationship with his father. His father wishes that the son will train to be an AI scientist, but Shanshui chafes under such paternal direction and drops out of college to pursue his artistic dreams in acting and script writing. The AI housekeeper keeps a tab on the biometrics, statistics, and the configuration of cellular changes of the family members, using the statistics to gauge the shifting moods of frustration, anger, and depression. The housekeeper serves as a councillor or analyst for the Lin family on digital terms—without a shred of psychological, moral, and emotional understanding of a human person as a living being. This biometrical ‘psychoanalysis’ is a travesty of 257

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Freud’s analytical method. Freudian psychoanalysis, a hermeneutic process of interpretation, plumbs the dark and unknown depths of the psyche embedded in family, social and cultural context, fully aware of the limits of consciousness to reach out to the obscure but dynamic recesses of the unconscious body. But the AI analyst presumes to be omniscient like God about the human mind based on cold digital data. In the murder trial, the AI housekeeper acts as a witness and presents evidence to prove Shanshui had a motive and a murderous grudge. Swayed by the statistics and algorithmic language, the jury finds him guilty and he is sent to prison. A few months later, Lin awakes from the vegetative state and reveals that the so-called murder was actually an accident. He had been working on a neogen reconstruction that would bring his dead wife back to life. The new wife would be an algorithm enmeshed with an organism invested with all the feelings, memories, and interpersonal relations of the family. But that project proved to be too complex and posed a threat to the digital data calculation of the cloud network, which presides over the universe as new Olympian gods. The gods acted to destroy Lin’s project by conjuring up images of his dead wife, causing a heart attack. He fell on something sharp and that is how he was injured. Hao Jingfang’s sf stories paint a dystopic world of AI, biomedical artifice, and digital networks. In this world, humans are rendered indistinguishable from neogens. Plugged into the vast biomedical and digital system, individuals incorporate into their bodies and brains a host of biometric devices and have bionic organs and nanomaterial meshing with human tissues. When algorithms are deemed organisms and vice versa, machines become or are mistaken to be humans. Devices within and without monitor and regulate their health, anxiety, moods, emotion, love, and hate. The ideas of individuality and humanity disappear when the human person disintegrates and disperses into parts and parcels reassembled into biochemical subsystems. The biomedical empire of Eternal Hospital, the humanoids, and the omniscient digital gods in Love Problems scan and survey these bio-algorithm subsystems with ubiquitous sensors and regulate their biometrics and vital signs as normal or abnormal, healthy and sick. Human life, body, and mind turn out to be nothing other than a subsystem controlled and monitored by an external agency. This dystopic picture of total control makes Qian Rui feel that ‘the whole world is crumbling all around him, smashed into jagged bits under the weight of the director Lu’s words’ (55). Eternal Hospital deploys genetic and digital engineering to prolong human life in ­a rtificial form. The AI achievement of human immortality constitutes a denial of and a defence against death. In Harari’s analysis, AI and bioengineering apparently strive to upgrade human ­persons, purging them of worries, doubts, and anxieties and making them efficient and resolute as functionaries and producers in the capitalist economy (2017, 368). But the upgrading is in fact a downgrading of human beings. Instead of autonomy and free will, instead of the ethic of healing and deepening emotional ties, AI technology ends up downgrading humans to automatons and unfeeling robots. AI-engineered brains would ‘lack some really disturbing human qualities’ (2017, 368). Unpredictably emergent and contingent experiences are disturbing because they rise from the dark recesses of the unconscious. They rise out of the human body to challenge the technocratic machinery and manipulation of capitalist production and consumption. Human qualities are disturbing because they ‘hamper the system and slow it down. As any farmer knows, it is usually the brightest goat in the herd that stirs up the most trouble’ (2017, 368). Trauma studies have shown that trauma symptoms from death can be coped with and healed by communicating with memories and shocks unprocessed and deposited in the unconscious body. Hao Jingfang’s stories indicate that trauma is eradicated by an AI brain 258

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that erases the body. Capitalism, driven by the imperative of growth, expansion, and infinite accumulation of capital, trains a consciousness powered by what Herbert Marcuse called the ‘performance principle’ (45). Driven by this principle, the individual scrambles in the jungle of economic competitiveness, productivity, and growth for self-preservation. The system requires a rational consciousness bent on power, productivity, and growth to the exclusion of essential human qualities of emotion, dreams, fantasy, decay, and death. It requires a performative ego, now digitally engineered, which single-mindedly pursues productivity, profits, and success. However, the ego must stave off death and loss, repressing elements of negativity and otherness in the unconscious drives. To philosopher Byung-Chul Han, to purge our awareness of death and dying from consciousness is to kill life itself, making human life an ‘undead life’ (8). The driv­ ing force of capitalism is the death drive that serves the purpose of growth, profit, and ­accumulation. Capital is accumulated as a power and defence against death and loss. The AI neogens seek to make life eternal but end up creating ‘a death in life’ (8). The artificiality of the neogen ‘deprives life of life’ (8). AI devices or humanoids may perform cognation and calculation quickly and efficiently, but they are bereft of vitality, moral complexity, lived ­experience, and emotional depths. The eternal life of growth and efficiency creates a ‘necropolis’ (8)—an ­antiseptic space of death, cleansed of human sounds, smells, anguish, pathologies, and ­emotional bonds, transforming a complex living human life into a lifeless mechanical thing. Marcuse’s ‘performantive principle’ is becoming a reigning ideology of productivity and growth encouraged by China’s neoliberal economy. But the AI-induced dystopic scenarios are more evident in the political and social realms. The ubiquitous uses of AI technologies nip the disturbing human potentials in the bud in order to foster productive and disciplined labourers and obedient consumers. Driven by the impulse to maintain social and political security at all costs, the authorities have built nationwide and global digital infrastructures that surveil and monitor every individual. AI technologies and big data algorithms collect personal data from individual consumers and keep tabs on private behaviour and sentiments deemed disturbing and erratic. While AI technologies may help the government to be sensitive to the general sentiments and demands of the population, they facilitate the censorship and repression of dissenting opinions, criticism, and protests.

Works Cited ‘AI Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,’ a Seminar by the Bergruen Foundation. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 11 June 2022). Chen Q. (2013) Waste Tide. Translated by Ken Liu. New York: Tor. Han, B. (2021) Capitalism and the Death Drive. Cambridge: Polity. Hao, J. (2020a) ‘Eternal Hospital.’ Neoma Magazine Oct (2020): 1–62. ——— (2020b) Vagabonds. New York: Simon & Schuster. ——— (2017) Renzhi bi’an [Beyond human]. Beijing: Zhongxin. Harari, Y. N. (2017) Homo Deux: A Brief History of Tomorrow. New York: Harper. Li, E. (2022) ‘Beyond Routine Understanding: The Traumatic Encounter in Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing and Eternal Hospital.’ An Honor Thesis in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University. May, 2022. Li, Kai-Fu and Chen Qiufan. (2021) AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future. New York: Currency. Marcuse, H. (1955) Eros and Civilization. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Rees, A. (2021). ‘Uncanny Valets.’ In Noema, online magazine. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 22 May 2022). Rees, A. and C. Sleigh. (2020) Human. London: Beaktion Books.

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PART 3

Taiwan

22 CONTESTED MEMORY IN TAIWAN’S JING-MEI WHITE TERROR PARK Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang

Introduction On 10 December 2009, Human Rights Day, Taiwan’s Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA, the predecessor of Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture) funded a series of exhibitions at the JingMei White Terror Memorial Park.1 The Park, which later became an integral part of the island nation’s National Human Rights Museum in 2018, is located in Xindian District, New Taipei City, in the southern suburb of Greater Taipei. It was built on the site of a ­derelict walled compound that housed an authoritarian-era prison—more specifically a detention and interrogation centre for individuals accused by the state of treason, espionage and sedition. Enclosed in the same compound were military courthouses, where the trials of the political prisoners took place, and an army law school that trained military prosecutors and judges. This judicial and correctional facility, run by the military, was one of the most powerful and terrifying instruments of the Nationalist (Kuomintang, KMT) anti-­ communist police state during Taiwan’s martial law period (1949–1987). The period was dominated by the father-son dictators of Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) and Chiang Chingkuo (1910–1988), the leaders of the KMT regime exiled from mainland China in 1949 after losing the Civil War to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The 2009 exhibitions were set up to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Kaohsiung Incident. They were also dedicated to the tens of thousands of political p­ risoners and their families who had suffered at the hands of the Chiang regime. The Kaohsiung Incident took place in 1979 on Human Rights Day in the southern port city of Kaohsiung when the KMT police and security forces cracked down on a massive pro-democracy rally. After suppressing the street demonstration, the Nationalist authorities arrested eight democracy activists and about thirty of their alleged ‘accomplices’ on charge of high treason with intent to topple the government. Many of those arrested were subjected to harsh interrogation and physical torture before being placed in front of a court of military judges who handed down long jail sentences. Today, the Kaohsiung riot and the ensuing televised trial of its eight ‘ringleaders’ in the Number One Courtroom located inside the concrete, barbedwire ramparts of the Jing-Mei prison are universally recognized as the genesis of a grassroots democracy movement in Taiwan. The movement would eventually force the ailing second-generation dictator Chiang Ching-kuo to grudgingly concede to the formation of an DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-25

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opposition party in 1986—the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The younger Chiang would then rescind the thirty-eight-year-old martial law the following year and lift state censorship of the media before he passed away in early 1988, paving the way for further democratic reforms by his successor, Lee Teng-hui (1988–2000). The 2009 exposition at the Jing-Mei compound was thus intended to honour those who made tremendous personal sacrifices, people who gave their freedom and even their lives to bring down the Nationalist tyranny. The main goal of the commemoration was to ­promote democracy, human rights and transitional justice: to educate the public, in particular younger generations, about the island’s painful past and its hard-won freedom. Yet, the exposition artwork by local artist Yu Wen-fu (游文富, 1968–) ended up angering the victims and causing heated public controversy. This unfortunate incident is by no means the only dispute that the Jing-Mei facility has generated since 2002, the year that the first democratically elected DPP President Chen Shui-bian (2000–2008) designated the site as a commemorative museum for human rights and White Terror history. The controversy, however, aptly illustrates the main issues and fault lines in democratized Taiwan’s struggle to come to terms with its traumatic past. Taiwan’s relatively smooth transition from a single-party dictatorship to a vibrant, multiparty liberal democracy has been extensively documented and studied since the early 1990s, mainly by scholars of comparative politics (Tien 1996; Rigger 1999; Fell 2005). The island nation’s efforts in advancing civil liberties, public-funded healthcare, indigenous rights, LGBTQ rights, and its stellar performance in the initial COVID-19 response have received international recognition. The World Democracy Index 2021 compiled by the UK-based The Economist ranks Taiwan eighth among democracies in the world and the first in Asia (EIU 2022). However, in a strange contrast to these achievements, Taiwan’s attempts to find adequate justice for its former political victims and to reach meaningful reconciliation between its polarizing mnemonic communities have remained a difficult, emotional and highly contested process. The island’s state-sponsored Transitional Justice Commission (TJC) was created quite belatedly in 2018 and it was only given a short tenure and a limited mandate. What is more, despite the establishment of the National Human Rights Museum also belatedly in 2018 under the incumbent DPP President Tsai Ing-wen, authoritarian-era monuments, especially those that glorify Chiang Kai-shek, remain in place. The most conspicuous examples are the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in central Taipei and Chiang Kai-shek Mausoleum (Cihu Mausoleum) in Daxi District, Taoyuan City. By examining the Yu Wen-fu controversy in 2009 and Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park’s current exhibitions of White Terror history, this chapter illuminates the reasons that hinder democratized Taiwan’s ability to critically reflect on its authoritarian past and carry out transitional justice. While issues concerning aesthetics, victim agency and historical authenticity remain part of the problem, Taiwan’s divided mnemonic communities ­constitute the greatest stumbling block for the island nation to find real justice, peace and reconciliation, both for its victims and for the society as a whole.

White Terror Art Gone Wrong: The Yu Wen-Fu Controversy On 23 November 2009, artist Yu Wen-fu arrived at the Jing-Mei park site with his assistant and several hired university students to construct a major installation artwork that the CCA had commissioned to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Kaohsiung Incident. Yu hailed from the mountainous region of central Taiwan, an area replete with immense natural 264

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beauty but lacking in economic development. As a diligent and dedicated artist who believed in the power of art to connect people and change society, Yu was devoted to his creation. He camped onsite at the Jing-Mei compound for a couple of days and laboured tirelessly with his team to transform the exhibit space from a greyish, dilapidated wall of a prison courtyard into a bright, whitish scene of otherworldly beauty and serenity. They first moved tons of earth to build a solid foundation for the installation. Then, thousands of thin, white bamboo sticks were inserted into the foundation to form a vast grove that surrounded the concrete prison wall. White doves that Yu carved out of Styrofoam were put on props and made to seem like they were flying across the bamboo thicket. Visually stunning and aesthetically pleasing, the work was a remarkable piece. Explaining his conceptual art now titled ‘Wall: Inside/Outside,’ Yu stated that the white colour and the simulated natural environment combined to symbolize the universal human desire for freedom. Accordingly, his artwork represented the political prisoners’ longing for liberty and justice ( Jing-Mei renquan). When the entire installation was completed on 27 November, Yu felt happy and satisfied. He did not anticipate the storm that was to come. The commemorative exhibitions at the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park officially opened its doors two weeks later on 10 December. Not long after the opening, a bizarre and unhappy incident took place. A guest of honour, a family member of a prominent political prisoner, reacted strongly and negatively to Yu’s artwork as she attempted to dismantle it. Chen Chia-chun (陳嘉君, 1968–) is the wife of Shih Ming-teh (施明德, 1941–). Shih was one of the eight imprisoned Kaohsiung Incident democracy advocates, a man who has been called ‘Taiwan’s Nelson Mandela’ due to his lifelong struggle against the Nationalist dictatorship and his more than two decades of imprisonment by the authoritarian regime. Chen was apparently enraged by Yu’s work. Upon seeing it, she frantically started to pull the bamboo sticks out of the foundation and toss them aside. The park staff could not dissuade Chen from destroying the artwork, so the police were called in to arrest her. Yu was also on scene for the grand opening. Confounded and upset by Chen’s sudden anger and violent behaviour, he bawled like a baby and even threatened to kill himself. It was extremely disorienting and heart-breaking for the artist to see his precious creation being wrecked by someone that the work was dedicated to. Shih Ming-teh was not on scene when the event took place. After hearing the news, he went to the local police station to secure Chen’s release. To demonstrate support for his wife and express his own condemnation of the artwork, Shih returned to the Jing-Mei park with Chen later that day and the two ripped apart more of the exhibit. The police and the staff did not intervene this time (Chiu, Pan, and Tseng 2009). What provoked the couple’s ire was not Yu’s installation per se, but where it was located. The courtyard wall was part of a specially constructed ‘prison within a prison’ built in 1985 to detain Lieutenant General Wang Hsi-ling (汪希苓, 1929–). Wang was the head of the Nationalist Military Intelligence Bureau. He was responsible for ordering the notorious 1984 mob hit that gunned down dissident writer Henry Liu (劉宜良/江南, 1932–1984) in San Francisco. Liu was a known critic of Chiang Ching-kuo who was at the time working on a damning biography of the younger Nationalist dictator. There is no definitive evidence to suggest that Chiang knew about the planned assassination. However, under tremendous American pressure, the younger Chiang had to put Wang and two of his deputies on military trial. Wang was given a life sentence. Nevertheless, a comfortable villa-style residence was built for him and one of his deputies (Major Gen. Hu Yi-min) inside the walls of the Jing-Mei prison. Wang and Hu were treated differently from other political prisoners. While regular detainees were placed in small, crowded, dirty cells, and were under constant surveillance, the disgraced Nationalist generals living in the enclosed villa enjoyed the privilege 265

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of entertaining guests, including female companions, and even returning home. Wang was only imprisoned at Jing-Mei for three years and then received a pardon and was released on account of his ‘poor health.’ Wang’s deputy General Hu stayed there only for a few months due to the brevity of his sentence (Ko 2020, 57). As such, Chen contended that ‘placing the artwork in such a context was an insult…to the real political prisoners who had suffered incarceration at [ Jing-Mei]’ (Denton 2021, 99). Chen also felt strongly that Yu’s work ‘glorifies a state butcher,’ meaning General Wang (Chiu, Pan, and Tseng 2009). She insisted that the display gravely injured the victims for a second time and as such was inconsiderate, irresponsible and unacceptable. This public denunciation cast an ugly shadow over the state-funded commemoration to promote freedom, human rights and democracy. It created a media firestorm and public relations nightmare for the ruling government. A local scholar describes the controversy that arose following the incident as ‘a dispute over historical interpretation’ (Lin C. W. 2014, 114). Both sides of the debate—the artists and the former political prisoners and their families—felt that they had been offended and their rights to speak on White Terror history (and other public matters) had been trampled. The Association of the Visual Arts in Taiwan (AVAT) came out in support of Yu. Many artists felt that their creative freedom guaranteed by Taiwan’s democratic constitution was infringed upon by Chen’s action. The artists emphasized that they had the utmost respect for individuals who had made enormous sacrifices for Taiwan’s democratization and could understand the lasting pains of the political prisoners and their families. Even so, they thought that Chen’s action was unjustified. The artists argued that publicly dismantling an artwork in such a manner threatened the very rights and freedom that she and her famous husband had been fighting for all their lives (AVAT 2009). In the meantime, Chen refused to apologize. She had no regrets about her action and continued to insist that Yu’s work had insulted the victims. Chen’s husband and many of the former prisoners sided with her (Chiu, Pan, and Tseng 2009). While both sides demanded an apology from each other, they placed the blame squarely on the event’s main sponsor, the CCA. As an official government agency, the Council for Cultural Affairs was under the direct control of the democratically elected KMT administration headed by President Ma Ying-jeou (2008–2016). Facing mounting criticism and tremendous public pressure, on 28 January 2010, the head of the CCA, Emile Chih-jen Sheng (盛治仁), a long-time political ally of President Ma, finally offered a formal apology to the former prisoners and their families and also to the artistic community. Sheng admitted that the site selection for Yu’s installation art was grossly inappropriate and that the CCA should have made more effort to study White Terror history before hosting the event. Sheng also stated that the government should have been more attentive to the views and the feelings of the victims and their families (Huang 2010). For their poor handling of the affair, Sheng and the CCA officials supervising the 2009 show were later censured by the Control Yuan, the independent government branch in Taiwan that inspects and evaluates the performance of civil servants and official institutions (Denton 2021, 99). As for the artist Yu, though still upset about not receiving an apology from Chen, he extended a gesture of goodwill and reconciliation by offering his own apology to the victims and to wider society. Yu not only agreed to disassemble his artwork but also invited former prisoners and their family to join him in doing so (Ko 2020, 30). In his public statement, Yu acknowledged that the people of his generation grew up not knowing much about the tragic history that his ill-fated work tried to represent. He maintained that through his art he championed human rights and freedom of speech, and in no way intended to glorify the dictators. He saw this unfortunate incident as an opportunity for mutual learning and critical 266

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self-reflection and hoped that the rest of the society could draw lessons from it ( Jing-Mei renquan).

Representing White Terror Trauma: Artistic Freedom, Victim Agency and Authentic History From the Yu Wen-fu debacle, two major issues can be observed regarding Taiwan’s ­commemoration and exhibition of White Terror trauma and ongoing efforts to pursue transitional justice. The first issue is the relationship between art and history. The second issue is contemporary Taiwanese society’s general lack of knowledge or mixed views on White Terror suppression. This situation is created by the nation’s divided and conflicting ­m nemonic communities on authoritarian-era history and on the legacy of the KMT’s fatherson dictators. The two issues are interrelated. The crux of the matter is where and how to draw the line between two imperatives: artistic freedom of expression and victims’ perspective or agency. A relevant and important question is the ‘appropriate’ aesthetics for White Terror art—whether abstract and s­ymbolic illustrations of contemporary art, or any artificially created exhibitions, can justly and a­ dequately represent the diversity of human suffering produced by the White Terror ­suppression. This latter question involves two further considerations: historical authenticity of the exhibits and the effectiveness or the effects of the exhibited materials on the audience. On the issue of artistic freedom versus victim agency, the officials and civilian advocates of transitional justice who were later put in charge as the administrators and curators of the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park did draw important lessons from the 2009 ­debacle. Although the prison museum still tries to promote human rights through art (and also ­literature), it now focuses more on either showcasing the works produced by the former prisoners themselves or having the prisoners or their surviving families participate in selecting the exhibits (CNA 2020; Chen and Chen 2022). When the museum curators commission designers to produce artworks, set up exhibits or renovate existing structures, they require them to join monthly creative workshops. In these workshops, the independent contractors must interact face-to-face with the victims, listen to their experiences, ask questions and receive feedback. Under the supervision of the museum curators, they also interact with other artists who have worked on similar projects and with selected members of the public to discuss their design proposals and get feedback. Explaining the practice, Chen Chun-hung, who served as the first official director the National Human Rights Museum from 2018 to 2021, maintains that the goal is to build a support network and a community of mutual learning and inspiration for artists and content creators (Chen 2021, 151–152). This workshop method gets the artists more intellectually and emotionally involved in the subject matter. For them, it becomes not just another job under contract. They need to think about the broader ethical and pedagogical implications of their works beyond the creative aspect and the aesthetic concerns. In doing so, the museum can not only avoid repeating past mistakes, but can also expand its role in public education. The Jing-Mei museum has also moved away from featuring too many indirect, figurative illustrations. When elements of contemporary or postmodernist art are incorporated into the existing structures of the compound or into the museum exhibits, the names, images or experiences of the victims must be included. The park’s main entrance, designed by architect Chien Hsueh-yi (簡學義, 1954–), is a good example. The original entrance was commissioned by the CCA and constructed in 2007. The configuration featured greyish, giant industrial-style concrete monoliths that cut through the compound’s former administrative 267

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Figure 22.1 The remodelled entrance to the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park by Chien Hsueh-yi with the latter-installed Human Rights Memorial at the base of the monoliths (author’s photo)

buildings, forming asymmetrical spaces and a long narrow corridor underneath. According to Chien, this visual layout was intended to ‘deconstruct the authoritarian dictatorship by dissecting the old edifices’ (ZLJS 2017). The narrow corridor framed by imposing concrete blocks with daylight shining from high above and at the end of the tunnel symbolized the political prisoners’ unyielding spirit of hope even during incarceration. Following the Yu Wen-fu fiasco in 2009, there had also been some pointed criticism of his work. Despite its impressive assembly, who and what was being commemorated seemed to be lost in all the aesthetic symbolism. In response, Chien added, ‘the Human Rights Memorial’ to his 2007 design (ZLJS 2017). The remodelled new entrance was completed in 2015 (Figure 22.1). The Human Rights Memorial is formed by a number of large display panels that are mounted at the base of the corridor and the monoliths. On the display panels are rolls of neatly arranged small black stone tablets. Each tablet contains the inscription of a victim’s name as well as the date of execution or the period of imprisonment. In total, there are close to 8,000 names inscribed (ZLJS 2017; Ko 2020, 87). When entering the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park today, other than experiencing the sombre atmosphere created by the giant monoliths and derelict prison structures, visitors are also made to directly confront the appalling human costs of the Nationalist dictatorship. In line with the design and symbolism of the modified entrance, the museum’s main exhibit areas also try to place the prisoners at the centre of the narrative. Different presentations are mounted in various buildings throughout the park to offer visitors a vast amount of relevant information. This information includes a concise history of the Jing-Mei facility 268

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itself, the larger historical context (i.e. Japanese colonialism, Chinese Civil War and the Cold War) that gave rise to the KMT state tyranny in Taiwan, Taiwanese people’s struggle for self-determination and democracy, and the current state of Taiwan’s transitional justice in comparison to other countries. This contextual information is skilfully combined with more ‘personal’ expositions that vivify the deceased victims for contemporary visitors. The items exhibited include authentic private artefacts such as the prisoners’ diaries, farewell letters to their loved ones before execution, small personal belongings and artworks (Figure 22.2). There are also reproduced or simulated exhibits: photos, paintings, film footage, soundtracks and dioramas that illustrate the interrogation and trial experiences and prison living conditions (Figure 22.3). Guests are also encouraged to pay visit to the Number One Courtroom/courthouse complex where the Kaohsiung Incident trial took place and to the walled villa-style residence which was General Wang Hsi-ling’s home. These two sites are located near the main entrance although the museum’s prescribed route first directs people away from them and towards the main exhibit areas, in particular towards the imposing prison structure located at the centre—the two-storey Renai Building (仁愛樓) (Figure 22.4). As Kirk Denton points out, the name of the building itself constitutes an irony since renai means ‘benevolence and love’ in Chinese (Denton 2021, 100). There was certainly no love and no benevolence here. It was inside this gloomy edifice that many instances of state-sanctioned torture and abuses took place. This prison building is the centrepiece of the entire museum since the actual life of the prisoners in captivity is the focal point of the memorial park’s presentation of White Terror history. Here, the museum curators strive to present a

Figure 22.2  A political prisoner’s farewell letter to his wife exhibited by the museum (author’s photo)

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Figure 22.3  A diorama of a 1950s lockup (author’s photo)

prisoner-centred narrative, a narrative backed by the tangible materiality and the historical authenticity of the rundown jail facilities. When guided properly, most of the visitors will presumably leave the Renai Building and the Jing-Mei memorial park with strong empathy for the prisoners and revulsion towards the cruelty of the Nationalist dictatorship. Human emotions are an effective tool for mass propaganda and hence public education. However, many researchers in Taiwan seem less optimistic and even a little sceptical about the overall pedagogic and social effects of the Jing-Mei museum. The same goes for similar sites dedicated to White Terror victims and other instances of KMT state violence (Chen 2014; TATR 2015, vol. II, 133–139; Hu 2017). As suggested previously, the two main issues are historical authenticity and the impact of the exhibited materials on visitors. On the issue of historical authenticity, different from the 1947 2–28 Massacre, another well-known instance of Nationalist brutality currently being commemorated in Taiwan, the White Terror covers a much longer period (four decades). It also encompasses broader forms of state violence and coercive actions against the citizenry. The complexity of this difficult history has yet to be fully explored by contemporary historians. Sociologists Lin Chuankai and Yeh Hung-ling have demonstrated that the dominant White Terror narrative, the one illustrated by the Jing-Mei museum and other sites today, is a result of the knowledge production system that emerged following democratization. This system is based mostly on the testimonies of surviving political prisoners, which have been profoundly shaped by the compensation legislation and commemorative apparatus of the democratized state (Lin C. K. 2014; Yeh 2015). 270

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Figure 22.4 Jing-Mei compound’s main prison structure: the two-storey Renai Building (author’s photo)

According to the latest statistics released by the TJC in late 2021, over 50 per cent of known White Terror cases occurred in the 1950s, particularly in the early 1950s. This was when the recently exiled Nationalist authorities from China conducted systematic purges to eliminate Chinese Communist-sponsored or -inspired anti-KMT groups, not only among the civilian population but also within their own displaced military. In fact, roughly 90 per cent of the known political executions were carried out in the 1950s (TJC 2021, 68–69). Thus, one major problem for the Jing-Mei prison as a ‘national museum’ for human rights and White Terror history is that a lot of the atrocities being commemorated did not actually take place there. The Nationalist military first developed the site in 1957 in the old Jing-Mei Township on the rural outskirts of Taipei, serving as a law school to train army lawyers, prosecutors and judges (Huang 2011, 82; Ko 2020, 7). Most of the exhibit halls in the compound today are actually cadet dormitories and school buildings originally installed in the late 1950s. The compound did not begin to function as a judicial and correctional facility for White Terror victims until the late 1960s when two primary enforcers of the KMT martial law—the law division of the Taiwan Garrison Command (TGC)2 and the military court of the Ministry of National Defence—were relocated to the Jing-Mei site from their previous facilities in Taipei City (Huang 2011: 80–81; Lin C. W. 2014: 113). The main prison, the Renai Building, was not erected until 1968. Although many human rights violations took place there, this site only involved cases after 1968. For the 1950s lockups, interrogation quarters and execution grounds in Taipei and throughout the island, sites that no longer exist physically, the Jing-Mei memorial park 271

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presents texts, photos, artefacts and dioramas in its current exhibits as supplemental material. Even so, the museum’s emphasis on prison life and prisoner suffering brings up two additional issues regarding historical representation and authenticity—gender bias and the lack of discussion about the larger political and social dynamics that made authoritarian suppression in Taiwan possible. The TJC stats show that 96 per cent of political prisoners were male (TJC 2021, 64). An exhibit narrative or guided tour that underscores the prisoners’ perspective inevitably marginalizes or overshadows the experiences of their family members, many of whom were female. These women and their children also became victims by living as social pariahs outside of the prison (TATR 2015, vol. III, Chapters 12&13). By the same token, the museum’s current displays shy away from exposing the complicity and actions of common citizens that directly or indirectly sustained the government’s suppression apparatus in what Huang Chang-Ling calls ‘everyday life authoritarianism’ (TATR 2015, vol. III, 164). In other words, the museum does not do enough to illustrate the much bigger prison outside of the actual prison: that bigger prison being wider Taiwanese society under martial law. As Denton opines: ‘With its emphasis on prison life, [ Jing-Mei] is consistent with other sites of prison tourism that satisfy voyeuristic or narrative desires more than they educate’ (Denton 2021, 100).

Divided Mnemonic Communities What about audience reception? Why are researchers in Taiwan sometimes less sanguine about the pedagogic potential of memorial sites like the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park? Notwithstanding the representation and authenticity issues d­ iscussed earlier, the museum exhibits do touch people emotionally. Its community outreach programmes in the artist groups, in schools and in the larger civil society have also continued to expand in recent years. In the words of the National Human Rights Museum’s first director Chen Chun-hung, the site now serves as a dynamic ‘human rights hub’ for social engagement and cultural intervention (Chen 2021, 149–151). Still, there seems to be a strong undercurrent that counters these efforts. To really get to the bottom of things, we need to examine the second major issue revealed by the Yu Wen-fu controversy: Taiwanese society’s general lack of knowledge (especially among the younger generations) or mixed views on White Terror history (for the older generations who lived through the authoritarian era). As we have seen, Yu grew up not knowing much about this history. The CCA bureaucrats who were put in charge of the doomed 2009 exhibitions either did not know or they just did not care enough. Why? Simply put, the situation is a result of the conflicting and divided mnemonic communities regarding the Nationalist single-party rule in Taiwan and the legacy of the father-son dictators, Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo. This clash of views on authoritarian-era ­h istory is crucial context for understanding the contentious Blue/KMT-Green/ DPP p­ olitical rivalry that has emerged following democratization. It is also tied to different positions on Taiwan’s national identity and the island-state’s future relationship with China—eventual unification (Blue) vs. permanent independence (Green). As French political scientist Stéphane Corcuff has argued, Taiwan’s democratization was ‘a process of reform, not revolution’ (Corcuff 2002, 96). The Nationalist Party during the final years of Chiang Ching-kuo’s reign and under Chiang’s successor, democratically elected Lee Teng-hui, was an integral part of this reform process. For this reason, the KMT has made a relatively successful transition from an authoritarian party to a democratic party. It remains an influential political force with a considerable following among the citizenry in democratized Taiwan 272

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vis-à-vis the DPP that grew out of the 1980s grassroots protest movement, a movement that ended the Nationalist monopoly of power. Because of this history, both sides hold a grudge against the other. Time and again, the KMT politicians mobilize their constituents and their allies in other smaller political parties, in the media and in academia—known collectively as the ‘Pan-Blue Camp’ or the ‘Blues’—to counter and contest many of the DPP-led efforts to change the status quo and carry out transitional justice. When Taiwan democratized, victims’ rights organizations consisting of former prisoners, prisoners’ families and their civil society advocates—lawyers, social activists and ­academics—began to campaign for a number of things: declassification of government documents, i­nvestigation, compensation, recognition, commemoration, an official apology from the state and, more importantly, some form of restorative justice that would involve accountability for the perpetrators (TATR 2015, vol. II 15–21). A majority of these groups, the most vocal ones in particular, were allied with the DPP or their smaller Pan-Green allies in the parliament (Yeh 2015, 20–22). The Blue-Green nomenclature is derived from the respective colours of the KMT and DPP emblems. Some of the former prisoner associations are pro-Beijing due to their history of being inspired by the Chinese Communist Revolution and are thus both anti-KMT and anti-DDP. The process of redressing the past got underway in the mid-1990s with compensation and commemoration for the February 28 (Massacre) victims under Lee Teng-hui’s presidency. This was followed by a similar process for the White Terror victims (Stolojan 2017). Though the White Terror legislation was passed during the final years of the Lee administration, it was only under the first DPP President Chen Shui-bian in the early 2000s that most of the actual work began. Within the newly elected DPP government, the discussion for turning the Jing-Mei compound into a commemorative museum for human rights and White Terror history started at this time. These conversations were closely related to the restoration of another infamous White Terror site—the Green Island Correctional Prison in remote eastern Taiwan. The renovation of that site had already commenced under the previous Lee administration (Yeh 2015, 20). High-profile victims such as the aforementioned Shih Ming-teh advocated for establishing the Green Island prison as a publicly funded museum (Denton 2021, 101). The Green Island prison and the Jing-Mei prison would later become the two main sites of the National Human Rights Museum when the Museum was formally constituted in 2018. Like the Green Island case, the support of influential individuals and politicians has been crucial for the preservation and museumification of the Jing-Mei compound. President Chen himself was one of the courageous civil lawyers who defended the eight imprisoned Kaohsiung Incident leaders in 1980. Chen’s vice president, Annette Hsiu-lien Lü (1944–), a renowned Taiwanese feminist and human rights activist, was one of the Kaohsiung eight. She and her fellow detainees were physically tortured in the Jing-Mei prison by the Nationalist interrogators before being put through the televised trial. Naturally, Lü became a staunch proponent for the preservation of the compound during her tenure as the vice president (Yeh 2015, 20; Ko 2020, 26; Denton 2021, 99). In fact, many of the jailed activists in the Kaohsiung Incident and their defence lawyers later emerged as prominent leaders in the DPP. Other than preserving the Jing-Mei prison for public interest, they had strong personal and emotional reasons to do so. Personal attachments aside, the DPP politicians also have a more practical reason for sponsoring these human rights museums. Once in power, they are under constant pressure from civilian advocacy groups to carry out transitional justice while the KMT does all it can to thwart such initiatives. In Taiwan, privately funded investigation, research and memorial projects have led the way and gone ahead of government projects as the KMT stonewalls 273

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transitional justice while state officials and institutions, caught in between, drag their feet. Consequently, many top DPP leaders, including former President Chen and the incumbent President Tsai, have come under scathing criticism from advocacy groups and sometimes from their own Green constituency for not doing enough to address the authoritarian-era human rights abuses (TATR 2015, Vol. I, 19–23). The DPP leaders are, without doubt, trying to do as much as they can to assuage the victims, to accomplish their own political agendas and to satisfy their voters and their disgruntled progressive allies in academia and in civil society. But certain transitional justice legislation—establishing memorial sites for White Terror history, removing authoritarian symbols and assessing perpetrator responsibility—has been extremely difficult in post-­ liberalization Taiwan. In a democracy, state authorities cannot make laws and implement policies on major issues without some degree of public consensus, especially when the said issues could provoke negative emotions and strong reactions from a large segment of the population. Many Blues see the Greens’ push for transitional justice not just as an attack on the Nationalist Party but also on their history, shared memory and identity. Though the Chiang regime imprisoned and executed tens of thousands of people, this was only a drop in the bucket of Taiwan’s population. Certainly, ordinary people came under state surveillance and the media was censored. But the majority of the island’s current citizenry were not directly affected by the most repressive aspects of the KMT rule, which happened mostly in the 1950s and the early 1960s. A considerable number of Taiwanese citizens affiliated with the Blue Camp, while supporting democracy, freedom and human rights in principle, hold a rather favourable view of the authoritarian era. They credit Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo for safeguarding Taiwan from the Chinese Communist invasion during the Cold War, and hence from Mao’s revolutionary anarchy in China. Many remain nostalgic about the remarkable economic success and unprecedented prosperity that the island achieved during the latter decades of the Nationalist dictatorship. For this ­m nemonic community, the two Chiangs, especially the son, made significant contributions to the making of Taiwanese democracy. In this narrative, the father first purged the infiltrated Communists with the son’s assistance and then the son developed the economy and liberalized the political system before he passed away. This sort of sentiment among the Blues makes the removal of Chiang Kai-shek statues and the restructuring of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall an emotionally contentious and a long-drawn-out process, and one that is still ongoing (Taylor 2010; Matten 2012; TJC 2021, 124–134). It has also made any discussion of perpetrator responsibility impossible. Political scientist Wu Nai-teh, one of the most steadfast proponents of transitional justice in contemporary Taiwan, points to an absurd situation. Since democratization, at least 10,000 White Terror victims have been identified and many had been compensated by the government; however, not one single individual has been officially declared responsible for these human rights abuses, not even the father-son dictators themselves (TATR 2015, vol. I, 59–60). Under these circumstances, it is not hard to understand why Taiwan’s Transitional Justice Commission (TJC) was established belatedly in 2018 and was only given a very short tenure and a circumscribed mandate. The TJC functioned for four years from May 2018 to May 2022. The Commission was able to make headway in certain areas, mainly in the investigation of facts and declassification of official documents. On perpetrator responsibility, it revealed the names of top officials, military judges and prosecutors in the KMT state’s oppressive apparatus (TJC 2021, 71–74). However, the TJC could only make policy recommendations to parliament. It was not invested with enough legal or administrative authority to make a real difference. In the meantime, the Commission was under constant attack from 274

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Nationalist politicians and their allies in the media and academia. It was also embroiled in numerous controversies and a major scandal in 2018 that crippled its leadership (Chen, Li, and Su 2018). Given Blue intransigence, it took more than a decade and a half to formally establish the National Human Rights Museum in 2018 as part of the TJC programme under President Tsai Ing-wen. The legislation for such a commemorative establishment was originally proposed in 2002 under the first DPP President Chen Shui-bian. Revisiting the Yu Wen-fu controversy, the lack of communication and consultation between the CCA and the political prisoners in 2009 also makes a lot of sense. In 2008, people in Taiwan voted the KMT back into power when its presidential candidate Ma Yingjeou scored a landslide victory against a DPP severely weakened by the outgoing President Chen’s corruption scandals. Though Ma has apologized publicly to the victims of Nationalist dictatorship on numerous occasions, these apologies are considered by the victims, their families and most of his DPP opponents to be rather disingenuous (Stolojan 2017, 30–31). After all, Ma and other senior Nationalist Party leaders have continued to visit Chiang Kaishek’s mausoleum in Cihu, Taoyuan City to pay their respects. The KMT legislators have also repeatedly blocked transitional justice bills and initiatives in the parliament proposed by the DPP and their Pan-Green allies, including the funding needed to establish the National Human Rights Museum (TATR 2015, Vol. II, 21). It is telling that in early 2009 the newly installed Ma government tried to alter the function of the Jing-Mei museum by changing its official title from a ‘human rights park’ to a ‘cultural park’ (Denton 2021, 96–97). It was a clumsy tactic to introduce ordinary business and cultural elements into the park to dilute or cover up the site’s dark history. This underhanded manoeuvre led to angry protests by the victims and their families, as well as by human rights/transitional justice advocates, concerned historians and, of course, the DPP (Yeh 2015, 5; Ko 2020, 27). In response, Ma’s government capitulated and the CCA put ‘human rights’ back in the name. This clash generated further distrust and animosity between the victims and the Ma administration, paving the way for the Yu Wen-fu disaster later that year.

Conclusion The clash of memory between the Blues and the Greens has dominated Taiwanese society and politics since democratization. The advent of the self-proclaimed ‘middle ground’ parties in recent years, such as the Taiwan People’s Party or New Power Party, did complicate the island’s electoral scene. However, these newly formed smaller third parties reflect the effects of the 2014 anti-Beijing Sunflower Student Movement rather than the start of a reconciliation process between incompatible memory communities on the island. Today, Taiwanese citizens remain bitterly divided in their views on the Nationalist dictatorship and the legacy of the two dictators. When this division is perceived by many as part of a political rivalry, uninformed people not espousing a position or people with no strong party affiliation also become suspicious of the pleas for transitional justice. For people who consider themselves ‘neutral’ in the Blue-Green struggle, the calls from one side to address the past wrongdoings of the other side sound more like campaigning or politicking rather than genuine efforts to rectify the past. These attitudes clearly manifest themselves in the 2020 Taiwan national social survey conducted by the Institute of Sociology in Academia Sinica, Taipei. Only about a ­quarter of the survey respondents (24.8 per cent) said that they understood transitional justice while three-quarters (74.4 per cent) replied that they did not understand it (Wang 2023, 11). 275

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Even after the survey staff informed the participants about the basic tenets and goals of the concept, less than half (43.3 per cent) agreed with the idea that transitional justice could help promote reconciliation while 52.2 per cent of the interviewees said it would not help. On a related question, nearly half of the surveyed population thought transitional justice was just another way to attack the KMT (Wang 2023, 11–12). Moreover, only 26.6 per cent of respondents approved the removal of Chiang Kai-shek statues while 70.1 per cent said they were against doing so (Wang 2023, 13). The survey also showed that the opinions of the younger generations towards transitional justice were not that different from the older generations who had lived through the authoritarian era (Wang 2023, 16). In the final analysis, party affiliation and national identity were still two of the most important factors influencing people’s attitudes towards transitional justice and White Terror history in the 2020 survey (Wang 2023, 15). Based on these results, it is fair to say that Taiwan still has a long way to go in coming to terms with its authoritarian past.

Notes 1 The name of the Jing-Mei compound changed several times over the years. These name changes reflect the various controversies surrounding Taiwan’s White Terror history. In 2009, the site was referred to as the ‘Ching-mei ( Jing-Mei) Human Rights Culture Park’ (景美人權文化園區). Its official name is now the ‘Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park’ (白色恐怖景美紀念園區), an integral part of Taiwan’s National Human Rights Museum (國家人權博物館). 2 The TGC was a special branch of the Nationalist military in Taiwan that was responsible for internal security until it was disbanded in 1992 in the wake of democratization. It served as the main instrument of KMT suppression against all perceived enemies of the state.

Works Cited AVAT (Association of the Visual Arts in Taiwan) (2009) “Shijue yishu lianmeng lianhe xuanyan,” Art Emperor. 15 December. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 July 2022). Chen, C. H. (2014) “Jing-mei renquan wenhua yuanqu de daolan xushi yu renquan jiaoyu chutan,” Bowuguan xue jikan 28(3): 87–110. Chen, C. H. (2021) “Bowuguan yu zhuanxing zhengyi: guojia renquan bowuguan de minzhu s­ hiyan,” Taiwan minzhu jikan 18(3): 147–156. Chen, C. H. and Chen L. (2022) “Duitan: Jiyi wu yiwang, Chen Chun-hung vs. Chen Lieh,” Yinke zazhi 224: 44–61. Chen, Y. F., Li H. F., and Su Y. Y. (2018) “Wei dongchang fengbo fuze Huang Huang-hsiung ci cuzhuanhui zhuwei,” Liberty Times Net. 7 October. Online. Available HTTP: [accessed 26 August 2022] Chiu, T. Y., Pan H. H., and Tseng I. P. (2009) “Renquan yuanqu zhuangzhi Shih Ming-teh fufu ­y ingchai,” Zhongguo shibao. 11 December. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 1 August 2022). CNA [Central News Agency] (2020) “Buyi yizhi kongjian lishizhan yong yishu zhuanhua ­gonggong jiyi,” CNA. 17 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 10 August 2022). Corcuff, S. (2002) “The Symbolic Dimension of Democratization and the Transition of National Identity under Lee Teng-hui,” in S. Corcuff (ed.) Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the Search for a New Taiwan, Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe. Denton, K. (2021) The Landscape of Historical Memory: The Politics of Museums and Memorial Culture in Post-Martial Law Taiwan, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) (2022) “Democracy Index 2020,” The Economist. Online. Available HTTP: https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2020/ (Accessed 26 August 2022).

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Contested Memory in Taiwan’s Jing-Mei White Terror Park Fell, D. (2005) Party Politics in Taiwan: Party Change and the Democratic Evolution of Taiwan, 1991–2004, New York: Routledge. Hu, C. F. (2017) “Lishi de zhaohuan jihua: yi Jing-Mei renquan wenhua yuanqu weili,” Bowuguan yu wenhua 13: 45–88. Huang, L. H. (2011) “Yu fumian yichan zhong chongou chuangshang jiyi—cong Aosiweixin bowuguan dao Jing-Mei renquan wenhua yuanqu,” Wenhua zichan baocun xuekan 17: 73–88. Huang, M. H. (2010) “Jing-Mei renquan yuanqu banzhan shijian Sheng Chih-jen daoqian,” Taiwan News. 28 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 13 July 2022). Ko, Y. H. (2020) “Guojia renquan bowuguan baise kongbu Jing-Mei jinian yuanqu kunnan lishi zhanshi yanjiu,” Mater thesis, Graduate Institute of Museum Studies, Fu Jen Catholic University. Lin, C. K. (2014) “’Dazhong shanghen’ de ‘shi’ yu ‘huan’--tansuo ‘1950 niandai baise kongbu jianzheng’ de banben qiyi,” Lishi Taiwan 8: 35–81. Lin, C. W. (2014) “Guojia renquan bowuguan choubeichu de chuqi tiaozhan yu weilai de shiming,” Bowuguan xue jikan 28(3): 111–126. Matten, M. A. (2012) “The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei: A Contested Place of Memory,” in M. A. Matten (ed.) Places of Memory in Modern China, Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 51-89. Rigger, S. (1999) Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy, New York: Routledge. Stolojan, V. (2017) “Transitional Justice and Collective Memory in Taiwan: How Taiwanese Society Is Coming to Terms with Its Authoritarian Past,” China Perspectives 2017/2 Processual Change in Taiwan: 27–35. TATR (Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation) (2015) Jiyi yu yiwang de douzheng: Taiwan zhuanxing zhengyi jieduan baogo, Vol. I, II, III, New Taipei City: Weicheng. Taylor, J. (2010) “Qujianghua: Disposing of and Re-Appraising the Remnants of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Reign on Taiwan,” Journal of Contemporary History 45(1): 181–196. Tien, H. M. (ed.) (1996) Taiwan’s Electoral Politics and Democratic Transition: Riding the Third Wave, Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe. TJC (Transitional Justice Commission) (2021) Renwu tuidong ji diaocha jieguo baogao shu--zhaiyaoban, Taipei: TJC. Wang, H. L. (2023) “Tansuo zhuanxing zhengyi de shehui jichu,” Taiwan shehui xuekan (forthcoming). Yeh, H. L. (2015) ‘Taiwan baise kongbu chuangshang jiyi de tizhihua guocheng: lishi zhidulun ­g uandian,’ Taiwan shehuixue 29: 1–42. ZLJS (Zhujian lianhe jianzhushi shiwusuo) (2017) “Jing-Mei renquan wenhua yuanqu rukou y­ ixiang,” Taiwan jianzhu zazhi 264. 6 September. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 16 July 2022).

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23 TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN TAIWAN Truth and Reconciliation in a Contested State Ian Rowen and Jamie Rowen Introduction On 20 May 2016, Tsai Ing-wen, the chair of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was inaugurated as the president of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan. During her ­inauguration speech, she announced plans to set up a transitional justice commission (TJC) inside the presidential office. ‘For the new democratic system to move forward,’ she said, ‘we must first find a way to face the past together’ (Tsai 2016a). Tsai’s speech was preceded by a nationally televised, bilingual Mandarin Chinese and English performance that condensed 400 years of Taiwanese history into a thirty-minute song-and-dance routine called ‘The Light of Taiwan.’ The performance evoked the deepest scars in modern Taiwan’s political history, the 228 Incident of 1947 and the subsequent White Terror, when thousands of Taiwanese were killed by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuo Min Tang, or KMT) regime that ruled Taiwan as a party-state under martial law until 1987. In the show, soldiers pointed bayonets at crouched figures that crumpled to the ground in slow motion. Why would Tsai establish a commission under the banner of TJ, and what does this initiative tell us about the ways that leaders use TJ interventions for political ends? We argue that Tsai’s rationale for launching a TJC did not belong exclusively to a single domestic, regional or international domain. Although her speech focused largely on domestic issues, we suggest that Tsai’s interest in a TJC also reflects Taiwan’s contested space in the global world order of nation states. Specifically, we read Taiwan’s unsettled national definition and its fraught and dangerous relationship with the People’s Republic of China (hereafter PRC or China), which threatens to take Taiwan by force, as the subtle geopolitical foil underlying many passages of her speech. We examine the history behind Tsai’s proposal and argue that TJ serves as a component of a legitimation strategy that addresses domestic, regional and international policy goals. This regional focus is particularly salient for TJ commissions created in Asia, where there is a long history of contested boundaries. For the specific case of Taiwan, the goals of creating a TJC include forging shared understandings about authoritarian state violence in the early years of the ROC, performing cultural and political distinction from the irredentism and authoritarianism of China and demonstrating adherence to international norms of democracy and

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human rights. In other words, creating a TJC was not simply a domestic legitimation tactic, but part of Tsai’s broader geopolitical strategy. To provide comparative context to understand Tsai’s establishment of an TJC, we start by discussing how political leaders in Asia have used similar instruments, usually referred to as truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC), to legitimate new regimes when histories of violence implicate regional neighbours. We then provide an overview of Taiwan’s history to situate the state violence of early ROC rule over Taiwan. We continue by unpacking the instrumentalities of and challenges to Taiwan’s TJC, and distinguish between its domestic, regional and international functions. Overall, we ask what other case studies can tell us about Taiwan, and what Taiwan can tell us about the idea and practice of TJ more generally. We conclude that Taiwan’s contested sovereignty and its complicated relationship with both China and the US demand greater attention to the fact that political transitions are situated not only within nation states, but also in regions for which TJ may have profound geopolitical effects.

How Leaders Use TJ to Legitimate New Regimes Taiwan’s TJC reflects a broader trend of using TJ to legitimate new regimes. We use the term ‘legitimation’ to refer to the reasons that leaders provide to assert political authority (Winter 2013, 226). In both their creation and their published reports, TRCs tend to tell a linear ­narrative of progression towards democracy. The TRC itself produces and then becomes part of this narrative, representing the creation of a state-sponsored body that can analyse violence for which the state was responsible. Leaders can use TRCs to promote certain cultural values, particularly democratic values related to rule of law and human rights. When leaders use TRCs to shape collective memory about political violence, they are engaged in a strategy of ‘transregime legitimation,’ which is an effort to show that the new government is shifting its foundational claims to legitimacy (Barahona de Brito, González-Enríquez, and Aguilar 2001; Grandin 2005; Olick 2007; Winter 2013). For a contested state like Taiwan, which looks to liberal democracies as sources of international support, a national identity imbued with civic trust helps to support its continued existence. Where state violence has a regional dimension, leaders have used TRCs for transregime legitimation by contrasting themselves with neighbouring countries or building closer relationships with them. These geopolitical strategies are particularly useful to signal to foreign nations that the country creating the TRC is part of the international community of liberal states and that it seeks to halt regional patterns of violence. It is not coincidental that several TRCs with not just a national but a regional focus have been in Asia, where shifting borders reflect complex geopolitical histories. Much like the Taiwanese TJC, South Korea’s truth commission that aimed at establishing its history in relation to Japan and North Korea had to consider the geopolitics of the region and walk the fine line of pointing out human rights violations while not exacerbating the existential threat posed by its authoritarian neighbour. The TRCK’s mandate included a­ nalysing political killings, torture, forced disappearances, unfair trials and other human rights abuses ­committed through the ‘illegal exercise of state power’ (Suh 2010). Additionally, this commission focused on national independence movements. In so doing, it celebrated South Korea’s efforts to fight colonizers, celebrate its sovereignty and signal that, unlike North Korea, long considered a ‘rogue’ nation by the US, South Korea could be counted among the democratic nations of the world.

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Another example providing important insights into TRCs, regional violence and t­ransregime legitimation is East Timor. Though by no means comparable to Taiwan in terms of political stability and economic development, East Timor is similarly a small country engaged in a geopolitical struggle with a powerful neighbour. East Timor’s TRCs were created when the country became independent from Indonesia in 1999, after a violent twenty-three-year occupation to which both Australia and the US tacitly assented. While the first TRC focused on national identity, the second, the Indonesia–Timor-Leste Commission of Truth and Friendship, was regional in scope. Commentators have compared this commission with earlier Indonesian commissions that provided a ‘figleaf of legitimacy and neutrality for the Indonesian military’s terror campaign’ (APSNet Policy Forum 2008). Others have similarly noted that leaders in Indonesia and East Timor used this TRC to improve their political and economic relationship rather than ensure justice for the many victims (Strating 2014). Regardless, the commissions illustrate how regional geopolitics influence the design and implementation of TRCs, even when the countries creating them are independent states. Like the cases of South Korea and East Timor, Taiwan’s TJC addresses a legacy of violence in part produced by the country’s unsettled relationships with its neighbours. Tsai’s effort, we argue through an examination of Taiwan’s recent history, was in part geared towards legitimating her government by maintaining her support from a growing independence movement without actually declaring de jure independence, which would have risked ­m ilitary action from China.

How the Authoritarian ROC Is Still Becoming Democratic Taiwan When Tsai suggested in her inauguration speech that ‘the goal of transitional justice is to ­pursue true social reconciliation, so that all Taiwanese can take to heart the mistakes of that era,’ she was implicitly referring to the early rule of the ROC on Taiwan (Tsai 2016a). However, Taiwan has a much longer history of violence, migration and c­ o-existence that helps explain its contested sovereignty and Tsai’s interest in TJ. Immigration and trade between China and Taiwan have continued for hundreds of years, shaping the island’s unique ‘Taiwanese’ identity. This identity is distinct both from Chinese settler and indigenous identities, spurred by and in retaliation to Japanese colonial cultural policies from the late 1800s (Chang 2003). The political status of Taiwan, like Korea, was partly determined by its more powerful neighbours. China’s ruling Qing dynasty claimed and colonized Taiwan before ceding it to Japan in 1895. The Qing collapsed soon after and was succeeded in 1911 by the ROC, which staked most of its territorial claims on the preceding dynasty (Teng 2004). Sun Yatsen founded the KMT to rule the ROC a year later, and after his death, authority over the party passed into the hands of military strongman Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang fought both imperial Japan and the emergent Chinese Communist Party for control over China. It was in such a wartime context that the ROC, led by the KMT, occupied Taiwan with US support after Japan surrendered at the close of the Second World War in 1945. KMT rule alienated the Taiwanese by centralizing power under a brutal and corrupt authority, dismissing the Taiwanese as a colonized and ‘enslaved’ people, and pillaging resources to support its failing war effort in China (Phillips 2003). Calls for TJ in Taiwan usually focus on the 228 Incident and the White Terror because they signify the bloodiest instances of KMT repression. The 228 Incident is named for 28 February 1947, the day after policemen struck a female cigarette vendor and killed a bystander in a crowd that had formed to defend her. On the 28th, the KMT authority 280

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declared martial law as Taiwanese formed loosely organized brigades, occupied ­government buildings and articulated increasingly ambitious demands for self-rule (Lai, Myers and Wei 1991). Some mainlanders were also beaten up by small groups of Taiwanese. KMT forces killed approximately 10,000 people and wounded perhaps another 30,000, many of them educated elites. In the following years, the KMT consolidated its rule with ‘a mixture of anti-Communist ideology and [a] police state’ later called the White Terror, in which ­thousands more were killed or imprisoned until the lifting of martial law in 1987 (Phillips 2003). The violence of the 228 Incident and White Terror period was aimed at both alleged proponents of Taiwanese independence and possible communist collaborators, wiping out an entire generation of intellectuals. Both native-born Taiwanese and mainland Chinese exiles were subject to imprisonment, torture and execution. In 1949, the KMT was finally forced out of mainland China by the CCP, which established the PRC. Led by Chiang, the ROC entrenched itself in Taiwan along with approximately one million refugees (Yang 2020). The party-state regime favoured mainland Chinese over native-born Taiwanese and reserved most military, educational and police positions for the former. Native-born Taiwanese, who officially constituted roughly 80 per cent of the population and had been under Japanese rule for fifty years, were forcibly ‘reeducated’ as Chinese subjects. The authoritarian administration’s China-centric national history curricula, forced Mandarin pedagogy and media, and renaming of streets and public spaces after places in China definitively established the KMT’s identity as an illegitimate ‘alien regime’ in the eyes of many Taiwanese. This set the stage for decades of ethnic tension and helped fuel an initially illegal but increasingly vigorous independence movement.

Taiwan’s Early Efforts at TJ: ‘Forget the Past’ Taiwan’s earliest moves towards what later became known as TJ occurred under the leadership of Lee Teng-hui, who became the first Taiwan-born ROC president in 1988. Lee’s rise and later democratic reforms were made possible due to grassroots activism and changes in Taiwan’s diplomatic position, including the shift of official US and UN recognition to the PRC instead of the ROC. The crisis of international derecognition threatened the KMT’s national performance of its legitimacy to rule, pushing leader Chiang Ching-kuo to relax the party’s grip on Taiwanese civil society. Chiang officially ended the thirty-eight years of martial law in 1987 and passed away soon after, which led to Lee’s presidency. While Lee’s 1988 inaugural address ‘appealed to his fellow citizens to forget the past and to “look forward”’ (Wu 2005, 87) simmering social tensions and grassroots activism soon forced him to find a ‘new way’ to forge ahead by facing the past. This included commissioning a research report on the history of state violence, prepared by a team of academics and retired KMT-affiliated officials. Following this report and subsequent legislation, the government established and endowed several foundations to provide financial compensation to victims and their families. These official reports and institutional solutions did not directly name any perpetrators. No one was ever charged for any crimes. Yet, in a sign of growing acknowledgement of early KMT violence, both official and private 228 Incident memorials soon proliferated across Taiwan. Further calls to create a TRC languished, which scholar-activist Wu Naiteh attributed to the passing of the ‘repressive moment’ as well as to nostalgia for the image of economic growth and ‘law and order’ projected over Taiwan during the boom years of later KMT rule (Wu 2005, 90). Even Lee, who upon retirement from the presidency enigmatically transformed into one of Taiwan’s most outspoken independence 281

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activists and anti-KMT critics, did not actively promote more formal transitional justice interventions.

Not Quite TJ: ‘Taiwanization’ in the Shadow of China The next period of TJ activity came after Lee’s administration when Taiwanese activists sought to assert self-rule and promote Taiwanese cultural identity within the confines of the ROC. Revisiting TJ in this fraught context proved politically impossible due to the KMT’s entrenchment in Taiwan’s legislature and other state institutions. Lee was succeeded by the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian, the ROC’s first president from a nonKMT party. Chen promoted ‘Taiwanization,’ which included strengthening non-Mandarin ‘mother tongue’ languages and revising school history curricula to place greater emphasis on Taiwan (Makeham and Hsiau 2005). He also championed a number of highly symbolic name changes, including renaming the plaza around the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall as Liberty Square in honour of Taiwan’s democratization. These initiatives constituted an inconsistent and scattershot effort rather than the ­implementation of a comprehensive TJ agenda. Chen’s approach did not gain wide traction and instead fomented more activism for TJ. Activists and scholars, including Wu, complained that their early calls for TJ had been hijacked as election stunts (Wu 2005). In 2006, Wu and colleagues set up the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation as a civil society organization to conduct and publish independent reports on the past. While it provided a gathering place for significant research and lobbying, its status as a nongovernmental ­organization, with limited funding and no judicial privilege and therefore no power to subpoena or interview suspects, foreclosed its capacity to address calls for accountability and reparations. The KMT recaptured the executive branch in 2008 with the landslide election of Ma Ying-jeou, who campaigned on a platform of economic growth based on closer cultural, economic and political ties with China. While Ma participated in annual commemorations of the 228 Incident, a full revisiting of historical wounds was incompatible with his broader agenda. In line with longstanding KMT ideology and his China-focused economic platform, Ma frequently promoted Taiwan as ‘the standard-bearer at the leading edge of Chinese culture’ (Ma 2011) and attempted to reverse many of Chen’s cultural policies. The KMT, which he continued to chair for most of his time in office, held a strong majority in the legislature throughout both of his terms. He used this dual executive–legislative power to push a number of controversial trade deals with China. Activists argued that these arrangements were ‘selling out’ Taiwan through the ideological, personal and financial convergence of the KMT with the CCP, which is generally reviled in Taiwan, providing a further reminder of unsettled martial-law-era wounds, persistent KMT corruption and Taiwan’s tenuous place in the international order (Rowen 2015). Opportunities for TJ changed after Taiwan’s students took to the streets to protest these pro-China policies. The botched, near passage of the Services Trade Agreement, which activists argued would threaten Taiwan’s sovereignty, sparked the 2014 Sunflower Movement, ‘the greatest episode of collective contention in Taiwanese history,’ in which activists occupied the legislature for twenty-four days of protest (Ho 2015; Rowen 2015). The Sunflower Movement gained the support of a majority of Taiwanese, and its aftermath left the KMT, which lost many of its strongholds in the November 2014 local elections, in tatters. Following the Sunflower Movement, efforts to revisit Taiwan’s history gained momentum. The next major youth movement, in the summer of 2015, was a student-led campaign 282

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against the Ma administration’s ‘China-centric’ revision to national history and social studies textbooks. Students first stormed the Ministry of Education and then settled into a sit-in in the courtyard outside the building. The protest reached a climax of sorts with the tragic suicide of a student leader. While the protests did not galvanize as broad a swath of society as did the Sunflower Movement, they further demonstrated the continuing influence of ­collective memory on contemporary politics. Indeed, one of the Tsai cabinet’s first moves was to rescind the curriculum changes (Lin 2016).

The Inauguration of TJ under Tsai In January 2016, Tsai rose to power with the support of a new generation of youth and civic activists. Not only was she elected president by a wide margin, but her party, the DPP, gained a legislative majority for the first time in its history. Tsai therefore began her term with a clearer mandate and more legislative influence than had President Chen. While Tsai and the DPP’s triumph is not attributable solely to cultural or generational change, the wider electoral shift did correspond to the rise in Taiwanese national identity and independence sentiment, particularly among younger voters (National Chengchi University Election Study Center 2016). This shift played to the favour of the DPP, which has traditionally been pro-independence and pro-Taiwan. Tsai, unlike Ma, emphasized ‘Taiwan’ throughout her inauguration speech, mentioned the ‘Republic of China’ only in the context of her title and constitutional responsibility, made little reference to Chinese culture and history and continually evoked ideals of democracy, freedom and social justice. For activists still committed to rectifying KMT repression if not replacing the ROC outright with a de jure independent Taiwan, Tsai’s election provided a new political opportunity for TJ. However, given the regional nature of the country’s past violence, addressing the past implicates more than the particular interests of Taiwan’s politicians or parties.

Domestic, Regional and International Dimensions of Taiwan’s TJC Tsai’s early approach to TJ reflects a common, though contested, perspective in academic literature that ‘moving forward’ requires ‘facing the past.’ The English translation of the TJ segment of Tsai’s inauguration speech explains this vision: The third area the new government must address is social fairness and justice. On this issue, the new government will continue to work with civil society to align its policies with the values of diversity, equality, openness, transparency, and human rights, so as to deepen and evolve Taiwan’s democratic institutions. For the new democratic system to move forward, we must first find a way to face the past together. I will establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission inside the Presidential Office, to address the historical past in the most sincere and cautious manner. The goal of transitional justice is to pursue true social reconciliation, so that all Taiwanese can take to heart the mistakes of that era…From here on out, history will no longer divide Taiwan. Instead, it will propel Taiwan forward. (Tsai 2016a) Read alongside her later interviews, Tsai’s calls for TJ suggest a strategy of using a TJC as a discursive technique and policy tool to signal a departure from the ROC’s authoritarian past and to draw a distinction with China’s authoritarian present, while demonstrating 283

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adherence to international norms of human rights, democracy and self-determination. As the ­legitimacy of both the ROC and the PRC relies on discursive claims to exclusively represent the Chinese nation, Tsai’s commitment to ‘deepen and evolve Taiwan’s democratic institutions’ in order to ‘propel Taiwan forward’ marked a clear break from the China-centric economic policies and Chinese identity politics of her immediate predecessor. Indeed, it signalled her responsibility to the people of Taiwan rather than to the members of an imagined Chinese nation. In the next sections, we explain Tsai’s domestic, regional and international aims that are relevant not only for Taiwan but for other countries where governments have proposed TJ interventions.

Domestic Legitimation: Fostering National Identity through Collective Memory Tsai’s 2016 election promise to ‘maintain the status quo [with China]’ constrained her from declaring independence, rewriting the constitution or changing the name of the ROC. Thus, the TJC provided an additional mechanism to maintain the assent and participation of her more nationalistic Taiwanese supporters and sympathizers who wish to directly c­ ondemn the KMT’s colonial legacy and indirectly condemn China’s contemporary irredentism. This, however, was a hard square to circle, because the TJC implicitly reinforces the authority of the ROC state, which some of her most radical supporters reject. Collective memory of state violence has become a cross-generational issue, with the youngest segments of political society connecting their own activism with the legacy of state violence suffered by their (great) grandparents. Both youth and elders see efforts to revisit the violence of the KMT regime as a way to point out the enduring legacies of colonial violence and to develop a new political identity. An example of the politically instrumental and cross-generational appropriation of collective memory is the annual Gongsheng (co-existence) Music Festival, launched ­ by ­university students in 2013 to commemorate the 228 Incident. It features bands with pro-Taiwan independence and pro-democracy messages and hosts booths for affiliated civil society groups. Subsequent film festivals, book printing and crowdfunding efforts quickly grew it into Taiwan’s largest 228-related event. The Taipei chapter of ‘Friends of Tsai,’ a civil group with no formal attachment to her campaign, was listed as a sponsor. Attendance spiked in 2015, with youth political participation still high following the Sunflower Movement. Tsai herself attended that year and shook hands with volunteers. One of the festival’s student founders, Yeh Jiunn-tyng, stated that the festival’s promotion of TJ was aimed at the unresolved contradictions of the ROC (Hioe 2015), pointing to what he saw as a lack of political will to actually address the country’s violent history. By calling the ROC government (then under Ma) a ‘tyrant government,’ Yeh revealed that many Taiwanese would not passively accept even the new DPP administration’s narrative of the violence, as it is still constrained by the anachronisms of the ROC, which they consider illegitimate. Tsai’s base, however, was composed not only of social activists and Taiwanese nationalists but also of businesspeople with a financial interest in political stability and trade liberalization. Tsai therefore faced the difficult task of balancing calls for TJ with the otherwise technocratic aims of her administration, particularly economic growth and liberalized trade. In addition, the broad and open-ended announcement of a TJ agenda raised the possibility of future acrimony and infighting within Taiwan’s polity, including claims of political persecution. KMT chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu said that Tsai’s programme may ‘twist’ justice and aggravate divisions and hatred (Hsu 2016). 284

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While political acrimony and divided constituencies are endemic even in w ­ ell-established, diverse polities, Tsai’s TJC can be understood as a resource subtly aimed at reshaping Taiwan’s cultural and political sphere in ways more conducive to her broader political agenda. By fostering a new collective memory, one that fully acknowledges the repression of the 228 Incident and the White Terror, the TJC could show that Tsai’s government, although still working within the framework introduced by the KMT, was legitimate even to those who would like to see it ultimately replaced with a de jure independent Taiwan. In other words, the TJC could provide an authoritative, state-directed reinterpretation of the nation’s history and identity, resolve the ongoing textbook controversy and recover ‘ill-gotten’ KMT assets that distorted electoral competitions.1 Unsettled indigenous rights claims presented another challenge for Tsai’s TJ efforts. Tsai delivered an unprecedented national apology on 1 August 2016, stating that ‘we must face up to this history, we must tell the truth’ about indigenous peoples in order to ‘set this country and all its people on the path towards reconciliation,’ and announced the creation of a separate Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Commission (Tsai 2016b). While this Commission focused on domestic issues, it had a subtler regional implication: acknowledging that Taiwanese indigenous people have been subjected to multiple colonial projects and have endured ‘four centuries of pain and mistreatment’ subverts hegemonic narratives of the Chinese nation state that have been deployed on both sides of the Taiwan Strait ( Jenne 2016). These commissions, as part of a broader strategy at consolidating Taiwanese national identity, therefore aimed not only to stabilize a new regime but to signal to China and other nations that Taiwan is a modern, democratic and multicultural country willing to address its violent past and redress its victims.

Regional Redefinition: Distinction from China Tsai’s interest in a TJ, much like that of leaders in South Korea and East Timor, not only ­d istinguished her government from previous administrations but also implicated the country’s relationship with its powerful neighbours. Taiwan has been represented by state and media actors as part of the territory of the ROC or the PRC, or of a broader Chinese  cultural sphere (Callahan 2004). While Taiwan and China’s economies have grown deeply interpenetrated in recent decades, the TJC further sharpened their cultural and political distinction, presenting the spectre of a regional redefinition. Tsai and her party did not accept the ‘One China’ principle of the KMT and the PRC, and its omission in her speech caused consternation in Chinese state media. By revisiting the KMT’s past policies of not only physical but epistemic violence conducted in the name of ‘China,’ the TJC not only recast the KMT’s legacy but indirectly produced further distinction from the CCP’s cultural and territorial claims, and its approach to historical memory. Tsai’s inauguration roughly coincided with the 16 May fiftieth anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, a campaign instigated by Mao. Tsai’s choice of timing to focus on Taiwan’s fraught history spotlighted China’s unwillingness to do the same. This distinction, which posits Taiwan as a democratic nation capable of admitting the state’s role in past violence, appeals to Taiwanese nationals, realigns Taiwan regionally and legitimates Taiwan ­internationally. Much like East Timor and South Korea, countries with militarily-­ powerful neighbours, Taiwan must nurture the support of powerful democratic leaders who can defend the country if necessary. 285

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These TJ efforts aim to consolidate Taiwan’s stability as a democratic state, in c­ontradistinction to China. Short of a Chinese military takeover or the subversion of Taiwan’s institutions, Taiwan appears set to pursue further autonomy and a regional redefinition not as an appendage of ‘China’ but as a national peer in the wider regions of East and Southeast Asia. At the same time, its turn against top-down, KMT-driven Chinese identity and China’s own irredentist belligerence, coupled with intensified domestic repression within China under Xi Jinping, makes Taiwan’s democracy decreasingly likely to inspire democratic reform in China.

International Legitimation via ‘Democratic Normalization’ and Geopolitical Realignment Finally, Tsai’s policies confirmed her interest in legitimating Taiwan as a democratic nation worthy of protection and international recognition, as well as increased trade. Apart from its direct links with other nation states, Taiwan has extremely limited room for full participation in international bodies due to China’s political and economic influence. Taiwan is blocked from UN membership by a certain China veto and is forced to participate as ‘Chinese Taipei’ in everything from the Olympics to the World Health Assembly. These political restrictions make Taiwan’s performance as a politically stable, democratic member of the international community one of its only tactical options. The international legal shine of a TJC matches this performative approach to reorient Taiwan’s place in the international world order. Signalling her shift away from Ma’s China-centric economic policy, Tsai’s inauguration speech called for a ‘New Southbound Policy’ towards South and Southeast Asia instead of China. Even before her inauguration, Tsai’s transition team began drafting a free trade agreement with Japan. Shortly after taking office, Tsai’s administration also extended an olive branch to Japan by removing Taiwanese naval forces from a disputed reef. The language of ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom’ and ‘human rights’ repeated throughout her speech is consistent with this geopolitical shift away from China and towards Japan and the US. Further, the call for the TJC was couched within broader calls for rule of law reform, corresponding with efforts to represent Taiwan as a modern democracy with an active, ­competent judiciary. Tsai’s speech closed by positioning Taiwan as a model member of the international community, and emphasized her intention for Taiwan to ‘proactively participate in international economic and trade cooperation and rule-making, steadfastly defend the global economic order, and integrate into important regional trade and commercial architecture.’ The TJC afforded an opportunity to demonstrate Taiwan’s respect for and adherence to international norms, ideally leading to full participation in international trade agreements and organizations, and more normalized international relations.

Conclusion: Outcomes and Prospects for TJ in Taiwan and Beyond Taiwan’s TJC reflected the new executive’s broader goals to address the unredressed violence of the ROC’s past and the contemporary structural and cultural legacy of the KMT party-state, as well as to distinguish itself from China by signalling that it is a democratic nation. As a tool to legitimate the new regime, and one with international visibility, Taiwan’s TJC was advanced not only to reframe narratives of Taiwan’s democratic transition but also to affect its geopolitical position and participation in international institutions. In this sense, the creation of this TJC was not only contingent on regional context, but potentially affected the definition of the region itself. 286

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Questions about the politicization of Taiwan’s TRC were sharpened in late 2017, when a Transitional Justice Commission staffer leaked an unauthorized recording of a private ­meeting. In that meeting, then-Deputy Chairman Chang Tien-Chin suggested that the commission should ‘manipulate’ public opinion against New Taipei City mayoral candidate, Hou You-yi. Chang allegedly described Hou as ‘most despicable case [of concern] in transitional justice’ because of his role in the Taipei Police Department’s Criminal Investigative Division during the 1989 investigation of pro-democracy publisher Nylon Deng, who self-immolated in his office as police massed outside his door. Deng has since been remembered as a martyr to Taiwan’s pro-democracy and pro-independence movements. Chang’s comments were roundly criticized both by media outlets and the DPP leadership, including then-Premier William Lai. Not only Chang but four of the five members present in the meeting soon stepped down, as did Commission Chairman Huang Huang-hsiung (Hsu 2018). Another controversial and consequential outcome was the decision to divide the TJ process into two distinct institutional tracks—one Transitional Justice Commission to ­ address post-1945 injustices, and the other, the Presidential Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Committee with no specific temporal bounds. Because the former could only cover the era of KMT rule, it was unable to address the injustices committed during earlier colonial periods, during which Japanese and Qing rulers had seized indigenous lands that eventually passed into the hands of the KMT and its business partners. This limited the possibility of long-sought measures of redress for Taiwan’s indigenous people for both KMT and pre-KMT era violations. Despite her unprecedented apology, Tsai’s later response to indigenous demands for land rights was dismissed as inadequate by some prominent indigenous activists who had previously supported her (Simon 2017). Although the TJ legal process has been affected by partisan fractiousness and scandal, the communicative and informal institutional capacities of both the TJC and the Indigenous Justice Commission generated other political dividends. These have not yet been realized by, for example, a comprehensive rearticulation of indigenous land rights or formal moves towards self-rule, but rather in novel styles of national and international political performance. For example, in December 2018, the TJC exonerated 1,505 people it deemed wrongly convicted of crimes (Chen 2018). The performative effect of the exoneration was augmented by the commission’s conducting an indigenous Atayal ritual, attended by Vice President Chen Chien-jen, timed to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The choreography of this commemoration exemplified the ongoing ­convergence between discourses of indigeneity and international human rights norms that characterize Taiwan’s evolving approach to TJ. Such a convergence was made even more manifest following the January 2019 speech by Xi Jinping, which asserted that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belonged to the same Chinese nation, and that unification of Taiwan and Mainland China under a ‘One Country, Two Systems’ framework, similar to that of Hong Kong, was a historical inevitability (Xi 2019). This speech was widely panned in Taiwan’s public sphere. Tsai Ing-wen responded with a strongly worded rejection of Xi’s claims, which were articulated through a normative commitment to democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Her speech saw her approval numbers rise dramatically, a striking turnaround after the DPP suffered humiliating losses in the December 2018 city and county elections (Horton 2019). Importantly, transitional justice was articulated into this political shift not by the official TJC but by an unofficial statement written in two days in a Facebook group discussion and signed by twenty-six of the twenty-eight members of the Indigenous Justice Committee.2 287

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The letter took aim at the governments of both Taiwan and China, although given its addressee, it was assuredly more critical of the latter: We are the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, and we’ve lived in Taiwan, our motherland, for more than 6,000 years… Taiwan is the sacred land where generations of our ancestors lived and protected with their lives. It doesn’t belong to China… We the indigenous peoples of Taiwan have witnessed the deeds and words of those who came to this island, including the Spanish, the Dutch, the Koxinga Kingdom, the Qing Empire, the Japanese, and the Republic of China… We the indigenous peoples of Taiwan have pushed this nation forward towards respect for human rights, democracy, and freedom. After thousands of years, we are still here… The national future of Taiwan will be decided by self-determination of the Taiwanese indigenous peoples and all the people who live on our motherland…. (Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan to President Xi Jinping of China 2019) The statement appeared in Taiwan’s domestic media and was reported on by high-profile international outlets, including the New York Times, which seldom cover Taiwan’s indigenous people. This episode demonstrates that TJ discourse has suffused domestic and international narratives of Taiwan as a nation, and of democracy and human rights within and beyond it. More broadly, the Taiwan case points to the need for ongoing scholarly attention to TJ in Asia. A variety of studies focus on the East Timor truth commissions and on other countries, such as Nepal, where international actors have provided consultation and assistance on domestic TRCs (Pasipanodya 2008; Kent 2011; Robins 2012). However, these are not the only places where TJ interventions are being created in the region. Focusing on domestically driven TJ initiatives in Asia can shed light on why various political actors choose to promote tribunals, truth commissions and other interventions. In addition, given the history of colonization between Asia’s more powerful countries ( Japan, China, Indonesia) and their less powerful neighbours, studying TJ in Asia can cast further light on how regional dynamics shape the design, implementation and outcomes of different interventions. While this chapter examines the Taiwan case in detail, with reference to South Korea and East Timor, there is a need for further attention to how and why truth commissions, in particular, are increasingly used to address legacies of colonialism in the region. Finally, what this case demonstrates is that TJ instruments have regional and global geopolitical implications that extend beyond ‘transregime legitimation’ tools for bridging past and future governments or transforming authoritarian regimes into emerging democracies. The Taiwan TJC’s emergence in the shadow of China and the US hints that TJ, as a geopolitical strategy, can entangle a country’s diplomatic allies and antagonists. Taiwan’s political transitions involve the most powerful countries in the world, as its sensitive trilateral relationship with the US and China makes it a global flashpoint. Had the TJC been put to work to formally reframe Taiwan as ‘Taiwan’ and not the ROC, necessitating a new constitution, de jure independence may have appeared closer on the horizon, raising the spectre of a military confrontation. However, it was managed in a (geopolitically) ‘cautious manner,’ as Tsai had proposed, and wound down quietly in 2022, serving the domestic nation building project while incrementally redefining Taiwan’s place in the regional and international order. In having done so, it may be remembered as a landmark example for a new form of geopolitical TJ that other countries, particularly those seeking to assert or redefine their territorial boundaries, may emulate. 288

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Notes 1 One of Tsai and the DPP-controlled legislature’s first major wins was the July 2016 passage of a bill to recover the ‘ill-gotten assets’ acquired by the KMT after Taiwan was handed over in August 1945. By confiscating the former assets of the Japanese administration, the KMT earned the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s richest political parties, with over US$2 billion as late as 2001, which gave it an extraordinary advantage in election contests (The Economist 2001). While most of the assets may never be recovered, implementation of the bill put major limits on the KMT’s access to its remaining funds, which the bill requires to be returned to the state (Stratfor 2016). 2 This is according to a January 20 interview with Poiconx on Taiwan Indigenous Television ­available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsJW7rc3BWU. Quotes below are translated by the authors.

Works Cited APSNet Policy Forum (2008) ‘Indonesia and East Timor: Against Impunity, for Justice’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 May 2022). Barahona de Brito, A., González-Enríquez, C. and Aguilar, P. (eds.) (2001) The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies. New York: Oxford University Press. Callahan, W. (2004) Contingent States: Greater China and Transnational Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chang, M. (2003) ‘On the Origins and Transformation of Taiwanese National Identity’, in P. Katz and M. Rubinstein (eds.) Religion and the Formation of Taiwanese Identities. New York,: Palgrave Macmillan, 23–58. Chen, Y. (2018) ‘Commission exonerates 1,505 people’, Taipei Times. 10 December. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 9 June 2022). The Economist. ‘On the Brink’. (2001) The Economist, 6 December. Online. HTTP: (accessed 9 June 2022). Grandin, G. (2005) ‘The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History,  and  State Formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala’, American Historical Review 110(1): 46–67. Hioe, B. (2015) ‘Profile: Gongsheng Music Festival,’ New Bloom. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 May 2022). Ho, M. (2015) ‘Occupy Congress in Taiwan: Political Opportunity, Threat, and the Sunflower Movement’, Journal of East Asian Studies 15(1): 69–97. Horton, C. (2019) ‘Faced with Tough Words from China, Taiwan Rallies Around Its Leader’, New York Times, 19 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 9 June 2022). Hsu, S. (2016) ‘Hung Rejects Transitional Justice Plan,’ Taipei Times, 13 June. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 9 June 2022). Hsu, S. (2018) ‘Deputy Chairman Resigns from Transitional Justice’, Taipei Times, 13 September. Online. Available HTTP:  (accessed 9 June 2022). Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan to President Xi Jinping of China (Translated by Taiwanese Netizens) (2019) ‘Joint Declaration by the Representatives of the Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan serving on the Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Committee’. 8 January Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 20 January 2019). Jenne, J. (2016) ‘Taiwan’s Apology, Beijing’s Problem,’ Jottings from the Granite Studio. 6 August. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 May 2022). Kent, L. (2011) ‘Local Memory Practices in East Timor: Disrupting Transitional Justice Narratives’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 5(3): 434–455. Lin, S. (2016) ‘Guideline Changes to Be Undone’, Taipei Times. 22 May. Online. HTTP: (accessed 9 June 2022).

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(accessed 30 May 2022). Yang, D.M.-H. (2020) The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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24 REPRESENTING TAIWAN’S WHITE TERROR IN POP CULTURE Brian Hioe

Pop Culture and Historical Memory The history of transitional justice in Taiwan has been a contorted one. Namely, although Taiwan underwent a process of democratization in the 1980s and the 1990s, the former authoritarian party the Kuomintang (KMT) was not forced to dissolve. The KMT remains active in Taiwanese politics, now positioning itself as a party supporting unification with China—even if it originally fled to Taiwan because of its defeat by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which remains in power in China today. This political anomaly has made pursuing justice for crimes committed during the White Terror (白色恐怖) difficult. The White Terror (1949–1992) was an era of harsh political repression under KMT rule when thousands of dissidents and many others were arrested, tortured and executed on the pretext that they were communist sympathizers. In contemporary Taiwan there are concerns that individuals who committed crimes during the authoritarian era not only remain free but also remain active in politics and public life. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration under Tsai Ing-wen, who took power in 2016 leading only the second non-KMT presidential administration in Taiwanese history, and the Transitional Justice Commission formed under its auspices have sought to declassify records from the White Terror and ordered the KMT to turn over records from this period, but this reckoning has been resisted by the KMT (Liu et al. 2022). For its part, the KMT has attempted to reframe the White Terror, by justifying the crackdown as necessary or by claiming its scope was limited to a small number of individuals who were alleged communist infiltrators. Some in the KMT counter that the Tsai administration is carrying out a ‘Green Terror’ (綠色恐怖) worse than the White Terror. The KMT claim Tsai is attempting to negatively frame the public backlash against its pro-China views as part of state-directed efforts to crack down on opposition to her administration. But there is no evidence of state censorship under Tsai, which was indeed a feature of the White Terror. Neither is the Tsai administration executing its critics or disappearing those it finds politically inconvenient, as occurred on the KMT’s watch (Hsu 2016). At this stage, it appears unlikely that those who committed crimes during the White Terror will be held accountable. As the KMT remains an active force in Taiwanese politics and is blocking attempts to hold its members (former and current) responsible for the White DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-27

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Terror. Rather, it asserts that the Tsai administration is persecuting the KMT as part of a political vendetta to eliminate its democratic rival. The Tsai administration, representing the independence-leaning pan-Green camp (in Taiwan green is associated with the DPP while blue is the colour of the pro-KMT camp), insists that pursuing accountability is about upholding the rule of law. As such, the Tsai administration claims to be upholding Taiwan’s reputation as a democracy and differentiating the country from China, as evident in Tsai’s inaugural addresses (Tsai 2020). In this political context, there are limits to what the Tsai administration can achieve in terms of transitional justice, particularly regarding individuals who are still alive. For example, the Tsai administration often makes public proclamations regarding the 228 ­ Massacre (228事件) in 1947, when thousands of islanders were murdered on the eve of the White Terror rather than during the White Terror itself. This is politically safer because most ­v ictims and perpetrators of the 228 Massacre have already died while any survivors will soon pass away. It is against this backdrop that the historical trauma and memory of the White Terror is commemorated and contested by a generation who never actually experienced the authoritarian period directly and who have only ever known post-authoritarian Taiwan. The so-called ‘natural independence’ (天然獨) generation identify more strongly with Taiwan than China and find little inspiration in the mainland’s authoritarian governance (Fifield 2019). Taiwanese young people increasingly identify as Taiwanese and there is a decline in those who embrace an exclusive Chinese identity or identify as both Taiwanese and Chinese. The number who identify as both has declined to 31.4 per cent, while those who only identify as Chinese is at 2.7 per cent. By contrast, 63.3 per cent of the public view themselves as Taiwanese (Chien and Chung 2021). The rise of the ‘natural independence’ generation took place with the 2014 Sunflower Movement (太陽花學運). The movement involved the month-long occupation of the Taiwanese legislature in protest at a trade agreement that the KMT sought to sign with China, which would have allowed Chinese investment in Taiwan’s service sector (Fan 2014). After the Sunflower Movement, the Tsai administration was elected to power, with its victory owing much to the political momentum generated by the movement in favour of transparency, civil liberties and resisting integration with mainland China. The Sunflower Movement was a generational moment in which young people made their views of China—and of the KMT—clear. While many individuals are descended from the 10 per cent of the population who came with the KMT to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War concluded in 1949—known as ‘waishengren’ (外省人)—they do not have the direct experience of China that their forebears did, and many identify with Taiwan and not China. The Sunflower Movement was emblematic of how Taiwanese young people  had  moved beyond the sub-ethnic divisions between waishengren and the ‘benshengren’ (本省人), those descended from prior waves of Han migration over the past four hundred years, who ­h istorically have spoken Taiwanese Hokkien rather than Mandarin (Hioe ‘Taiwanese Identity’ 2018a).

Pop Culture and the White Terror In the past decade, commemorations of the White Terror have expanded into cultural domains, ranging from heavy metal and indie rock to video games and advertisements. The ‘natural independence’ generation has promoted commemoration of trauma in the realm of

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pop culture and it is now a significant aspect of Taiwan’s identity politics among Taiwanese youth. This is in part an adaptation, a means to keep the memory of the White Terror alive among those who did not experience it themselves. Yet this also reflects the commercial ­v iability of depictions of the White Terror in the culture industry. The use of the White Terror as a marker of identity in cultural products is different from past depictions of the period, particularly with regard to an emphasis on pluralistic cultural identity that transcends historical benshengren versus waishengren distinctions. Past depictions more strongly emphasized differences between benshengren and waishengren, but this has receded as the two groups have become less distinct, following decades of intermarriages and cultural interactions. However, the historical framing of the White Terror as a period in which benshengren were targeted by waishengren still persists, and this carries over to the gendered framing of White Terror victims, with this history remembered in terms of male victims, in line with the masculine gendering of Taiwanese Hokkien identity politics. The choice of which White Terror victims are memorialized is also coloured by contemporary views on Taiwanese independence. In a time in which Taiwan’s future vis-à-vis China looms large regarding the question of independence versus unification, commemoration of the White Terror that takes place in the realm of pop culture increasingly reflects contemporary concerns. This can be observed in how remembrance of the White Terror is framed in terms of independence advocacy and how the memory of the White Terror has become linked to popular understandings of more contemporary events, such as the 2019 Hong Kong protests and their implications for Taiwan. In this sense, the history of the White Terror is still contested. One of the ground-breaking representations of the White Terror is Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢)’s 1989 film, City of Sadness (悲情城市). The film is now seen as a classic of Taiwanese New Wave cinema, the first that examines the consequences of the 228 Massacre. It is notable that City of Sadness does not represent the events of the 228 Massacre directly, but instead focuses on the aftermath of the incident. Although it was an arthouse film, rather than a purely commercial movie, it was popular and influenced collective memories of this shared trauma, by virtue of being the first film to depict the 228 Massacre, risking political retaliation by doing so. It is worth noting that much of the dialogue for City of Sadness takes place in Taiwanese Hokkien. Later films, notably Lin Cheng-sheng (林正盛)’s 1999 March of Happiness (天馬茶房), directly depict the events inciting the 228 Massacre, but they were also confined to the arthouse circuit. Subsequently, recent Taiwanese films about the White Terror are more commercial in their marketing and appeal. One prominent example is the Detention (返校) franchise, which began with a 2017 indie video game that was then adapted into a movie and television series. Detention initially received a great deal of critical attention because it was novel for a video  game to depict the White Terror and because of its use of Taiwanese ­mythological  ­elements  in the gameplay and artwork. Detention’s developers, Red Candle Games (赤燭股份有限公司), later made international headlines after a humorous jab at Chinese President Xi Jinping hidden in Detention’s follow-up game, Devotion (還願), led to the game being banned from Chinese markets. As a depiction of the White Terror, the Detention video game, like earlier films, targeted a small market segment of connoisseurs. Compared to other commercial video games, Detention focused on the intricacies of the story and the uniqueness of its aesthetic sensibilities, blending traditional folk religion with

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a horror video game framing, all on a limited budget. Elements of the plot and aesthetics for Detention seem to be drawn from Taiwanese New Wave film that previously engaged with the White Terror, while the story is based on an actual historical incident. By contrast, the film adaptation of Detention is a horror film that uses the White Terror for its historical backdrop and targeted a larger commercial audience. In fact, it proved a hit at the box office, becoming the most successful Taiwanese domestic film in 2019 and m ­ aking it one of the top five top grossing domestic films of the decade (Wong 2020). Detention was successful because it tapped into a recent trend in Taiwanese commercial horror films that draws on contemporary Taiwanese urban legends, such as the Tag-Along (紅衣小女孩) ­f ranchise. The emergence of this genre of horror films overlaps with rising Taiwanese identity among young people, which Detention catered to by playing up its ‘Taiwaneseness’ and incorporation of specifically Taiwanese elements. Featuring specifically Taiwanese elements distinguishes such films from movies made overseas and reinforces the shifting sense of cultural identity among younger Taiwanese. Commercial films about students in haunted high schools are commonplace, but the ­elements that make Detention distinct as a horror film are drawn from the White Terror, lending the film an emotional resonance for Taiwanese viewers with relatives who experienced political persecution or had first-hand experience of living during that authoritarian era. This localization had commercial logic in light of the Taiwanese film industry’s woes in recent decades. Despite the international successes of the Taiwanese New Wave, the Taiwanese domestic film industry collapsed after Taiwan’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2002 and the influx of Hollywood blockbusters appeared after barriers to foreign films were lifted. It was not until Cape No. 7 (海角七號) in 2008 that the domestic film industry showed signs of revitalization (Lin 2018). Detention’s emphasis on Taiwanese elements has made the franchise a success in markets far removed from Taiwan. The video game proved popular in China, and the movie performed well in Southeast Asian markets. Detention’s original creators credit the franchise’s success abroad to interest in uniquely Taiwanese elements by outsiders also intrigued by the island’s identity and culture, such as curiosity about the White Terror or traditional Taiwanese spiritual beliefs (Hioe 2017). Historical accuracy, however, is sacrificed for commercial appeal as characters in the film adaptation of Detention speak with contemporary Taiwanese accents and use contemporary vocabulary. Yet, that updating didn’t seem to matter to audiences who were not expecting a documentary and wanted a story they could relate to. For the most part, the KMT and members of the pan-Blue camp were silent on Detention, even as prominent pan-Green politicians weighed in with praise. At the same time, perceived inauthenticity sometimes causes controversy when young viewers are critical of the depiction of what they consider inaccurate representations of history. For example, Gold Leaf (茶金), a 2021 televised historical drama about a Hakka tea-growing family, was criticized after depicting Taiwanese inflation in the 1950s as a result of American pressure to enact currency reform, when in fact this was a reform advocated and enacted by the KMT (Gold Leaf 2021). This sparked allegations against the drama of having a pro-KMT slant, though later episodes of the drama did engage with the White Terror in ways that were critical of the KMT (Gold Leaf 2021). How audiences respond to biased depictions of White Terror or KMT authoritarianism is inconsistent. For example, 2020’s Island Nation (國際橋牌社), a historical drama depicting a fictionalized version of the Lee Teng-hui presidency and the process of Taiwan’s democratization, did not come under scrutiny for its relatively positive portrayal of the KMT 294

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under Lee, including its gang ties, and the caricature of the DPP—a party which emerged from Taiwan’s democracy movement—as something of a cartoonish villain. Considering that there have still been no official determinations about the murder of the families of DPP founding figures such as Lin Yi-hsiung by individuals suspected to be employed by state security forces, it is somewhat strange that there is no controversy about the depiction of the DPP in this way. What the different reactions to Gold Leaf and Island Nation highlight is that even as the White Terror period has been absorbed by and refracted through pop culture, this is still politically fraught territory, in which representations of the White Terror are contested. This is the case even for representations that circulate among those with no direct experience of the White Terror.

Commodification of Trauma The spread of White Terror-themed pop culture illustrates a process of commodification of a shared trauma that animates contemporary identity politics and amplifies lingering political differences rooted in that era. This trend is evident in a White Terror-themed advertising campaign by hypermarket chain PxMart (全聯) from August 2018 (Hioe ‘PxMart’ 2018b). A series of commercials released by the chain involved interviews with actors r­ esembling famous victims of the White Terror, such as university professor Chen Wen-cheng (陳文成) or Lin Jiang-mai (林江邁), the woman selling contraband cigarettes who was confronted by police during the incident that triggered the 228 Massacre. The woman resembling Lin wears a dress similar to that worn by Ting Yao-Tiao (丁窈窕), a woman who was executed in 1956 due to allegations that she was a communist. Another one of the historical figures depicted in the commercials is Yin Haiguang (殷海光), a waishengren scholar known for translating Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom into Chinese and who was politically persecuted by the KMT. The ad campaign was risky because the campaign takes sides in the major political fault line dividing the island where the KMT still enjoys considerable support despite its leading role in earlier harsh repression. It’s not clear how the campaign hoped to appeal to consumers looking for daily sundries, but the ads got attention. PxMart may have been hoping to improve its image among young people with these advertisements, a need related to former PxMart CEO Hsu Chung-jen (徐重仁) public statement justifying low salaries for young employees by insisting that they don’t work hard enough (Hioe ‘PxMart’ 2018b). As with the film Detention, the PxMart campaign draws on the supernatural. The Chen Wen-cheng character in the ad does not have a reflection in the mirror, suggesting that he is a ghost, and the calendar in the background reads Minguo 70, or 1981, which is the year that Chen died. Such details appeal to those who enjoy scrutinizing the content and who gain satisfaction from knowing and using social media to connect with others in virtual communities where contemporary identity politics is debated and defined. The advertising campaign included social media roleplay elements, including ‘alternative reality’ games that are increasingly a feature of digital advertising. Facebook and Instagram accounts were set up for the actor who played the Chen Wen-cheng character, giving a birthdate of 1950 and educational background at National Taiwan University from 1968 to 1972. These biographical details correspond to those of the actual Chen. The Facebook account also conducted a livestream dialogue with post-Sunflower Movement civic media outlet Watchout before the account was deleted, an effort by the campaign to heighten the sense of mystery. 295

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The ad campaign highlights the commodification of the White Terror in contemporary Taiwan in line with identity trends among young Taiwanese after the Sunflower Movement. The collective trauma of the grim authoritarian past, although experienced second-hand, generates a solidarity in favour of democracy, civil liberties and resistance to integration with China. In this way, the trauma of repression has been transformed into an uplifting and ennobling narrative of dissent and resistance. The ad campaign also features a pluralistic, multi-ethnic Taiwanese identity among Taiwanese young people, portraying a shared suffering that challenges the ethnic-based identity politics of the previous generation, in which political differences between ­ waishengren and benshengren are no longer as pronounced. While this moves away from the favouritism shown to waishengren under KMT rule, significantly this also reflects a movement away from the benshengren nationalism of the earlier DPP. The 2014 Sunflower Movement was seen as a clear moment in which Taiwan shifted towards a civic nationalism among the younger generation, in which both individuals of benshengren and waishengren descent p­ articipated in the movement, involving a rejection of the DPP’s older benshengren n ­ ationalism. The DPP sought to rebrand afterward to appeal to young demographics that its ­previous benshengren nationalism has turned off. The popularization of this new understanding of ethnic politics can be seen in the PxMart ad campaign as well.

Indie Music and the White Terror Perhaps most significantly of all, the indie music scene provides a rich source for contemporary commemorations of the White Terror in Taiwan. The largest commemoration of the 228 Massacre in Taiwan over the past ten years has been the Gongsheng Music Festival (公生音樂節), a rock festival held on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei featuring indie bands and artists that is attended by thousands. The music festival usually involves performances by indie bands, talks by academics and other experts on the 228 Massacre and White Terror and a small exhibition on history, and is significantly larger than more official 228 Massacre commemorations that take the form of smaller, quiet ceremonies. The Gongsheng Music Festival, which was first held in 2013, can be viewed as a crystallization of the activist subculture that took shape in the years prior to the Sunflower Movement. Many activists came to embrace indie bands who sang about social issue-related topics ranging from opposition to nuclear energy to the low wages facing young people. Venues catering to these activists became popular, including Backstage Cafe (後門咖啡), run by early Gongsheng Music Festival organizer Na Su-phok (藍士博), and other establishments. As part of this scene, activists came to develop a culture of attending indie music festivals, where politically active bands performed, and art film festivals, which often had a focus on documentary films about social issues. The Gongsheng Music Festival was one of the most significant of these indie music festivals (Laskai 2015). Some indie bands have become known for focusing on the history of the White Terror in their songs. These include bands and artists such as Chthonic (閃靈), Sorry Youth (拍謝少年), Fire EX (滅火器), Enno Cheng (鄭宜農) and others, ranging in genres from heavy metal to hip hop, electronica and more. Chthonic may be among the most well-known of these acts, seeing as frontman Freddy Lim (林昶佐) later ran for office as legislator in 2016 of the Zhongzheng-Wanhua electoral district in Taipei. Lim first ran as a candidate for the post-Sunflower Movement third party,

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the New Power Party (時代力量), then later ran as an independent. Lim has been emphatic on the need to remember the White Terror and the sacrifices made during the period in his music and as a legislator. Lim is distinctive in being the only heavy metal musician turned l­ egislator. His background also makes him unusual as he previously served as the president of Amnesty International Taiwan, all the while continuing to produce heavy metal albums. As a ­politician, Lim is emphatic on Taiwanese identity as distinct from China, conducting campaign rallies featuring significant usage of Taiwanese Hokkien. Chthonic’s costumes and makeup draw from Taiwanese temple culture and feature full makeup. Fire EX achieved national fame as the band that provided what became known as the theme song for the Sunflower Movement, ‘Island’s Sunrise’ (島嶼天光). Fire EX subsequently played ‘Island’s Sunrise’ at Tsai Ing-wen’s presidential inauguration and composed and performed songs to support her later campaigns (Wang 2019a). Sorry Youth is another emblematic act, frequently playing at protests in the years prior to and after the Sunflower Movement. Sorry Youth’s songs often call attention to the historical legacies that contemporary young people have inherited from forebears who were participants in democratic activism during the authoritarian period. The music videos for songs such as ‘Into the Silence’ or ‘Pilgrimage’ feature survivors of the White Terror, sometimes directly addressing viewers. It is import to note that Chthonic, Fire EX and Sorry Youth all sing in Taiwanese Hokkien, again illustrating a link between Taiwanese identity and commemorations of the White Terror. White Terror memorialization still intersects with benshengren identity, in that the KMT aimed to stamp out benshengren political dissidence through political purges, even if pluralistic depictions of the White Terror are on the rise. ­ However, the framing of the White Terror as being an inter-ethnic conflict between benshengren and waishengren is ebbing in favour of a view of both groups as victims of the White Terror. The gendered aspect of White Terror commemoration is striking in that these bands feature male frontmen, mostly male musicians, and often focus on male historical figures in their songs. More broadly, Taiwanese Hokkien has historically been coded as masculine in Taiwanese society, as associated with working-class benshengren masculinity (Baran 2005). There has been a wave of female singer-songwriters and artists who sing in Taiwanese Hokkien in recent years, such as Enno Cheng or Hsien Ching (陳嫺靜), with some music videos by Enno Cheng suggestive of the White Terror in depicting individuals in prison camps. But it is more often male victims of the White Terror who are remembered, and this memorialization still occurs in gendered terms. For example, the gender bias is evident in the 2020 art project ‘Piànn-Tiûnn’ (拚場) that incorporates indie rock into an audiovisual performance featuring Nylon Deng and other male martyrs of the democracy period, portraying them as something like contemporary Taiwanese gods. This effort to make them seem ‘cool’ aligns with the depictions of activists from the authoritarian period in indie rock music videos, but activists and artists have not yet mainstreamed a more gender diverse representation of this dark past and the traumas endured by women. Likewise, there has been relatively little focus on indigenous victims of the White Terror in such depictions. There is also a political agenda in selecting which martyrs to commemorate. Many of the historical victims of the White Terror were members of the pro-unification left, that is, individuals who advocated for the unification of Taiwan and China because the PRC was

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viewed as the motherland of socialism. In contemporary Taiwan, however, this rosy view of China has been overtaken by events, as Taiwanese indie bands or artists pay tribute to pro-independence activists involved in street protests, armed resistance or other forms of militant direct confrontation with the KMT. This contemporary trend also influences how the trauma of the 228 Massacre is remembered. This bloody crackdown is not just about passive Taiwanese being slaughtered by the KMT, but it has been recast as an epochal event that involved Taiwanese bravely defying KMT authoritarianism at the cost of their lives.

Reviving the White Terror: Hong Kong’s Present, Taiwan’s Potential Future Taiwanese artists have increasingly drawn parallels between the White Terror and the eruption of protests in Hong Kong in 2019. The 2019 protests originally broke out in response to an extradition bill that would have allowed Hongkongers to be deported to China to face charges. It was feared that the bill would be used to persecute political dissidents in Hong Kong and give Beijing a blank check for imposing strict controls on political activism and criticism. The bill was eventually withdrawn, but the demands of the movement eventually expanded to broader calls for democracy. Brutal police repression of these pro-democracy protests resonated with Taiwan’s authoritarian past, including collusion by security forces with gangsters to attack protesters (Wang 2019b). Subsequently, the term ‘White Terror’ has been increasingly used in Hong Kong to refer to the present era of political repression, linking it with Taiwan’s traumatic past (Hioe 2022). It is ironic that the KMT’s ‘White Terror’ is used to describe current actions by the CCP rather than ‘Red Terror’ or some other term, given that the CCP was the KMT’s adversary in the civil war and the parties are poles apart ideologically. Historically, the term ‘White Terror’ originates from the political purges carried out by the KMT, often against CCP members in the 1920s, most famously in the Shanghai Massacre. Now it is used to indict the CCP for the same repressive tactics once associated with the KMT. The fate of Hong Kong carries ominous implications for Taiwan, and many Taiwanese worry that Beijing also seeks to undermine their democracy and deprive them of their ­political liberties. Given that democratic values are a core element of Taiwan’s contested identity politics, invoking the White Terror to describe Beijing’s crackdown serves to mobilize shared trauma to reinforce contemporary solidarity. Slogans such as ‘Today Hong Kong, tomorrow Taiwan’ (今日香港，明日台灣) or ‘Today Taiwan, tomorrow Hong Kong’ (今日台灣，明日香港) have been common in pro-democracy protests in both, whether the 2014 Sunflower Movement or the Umbrella Movement (雨傘運動) in Hong Kong (Hioe 2022). This has framed the relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan in temporal terms (Hioe 2022). It is understood that Taiwan’s past is Hong Kong’s present and that Taiwan’s future might come to resemble Hong Kong’s present if China realizes its goal of integrating the island with the mainland. In this sense, commemorating the White Terror is not merely about the past, but it is also about an undesired future under Beijing’s authoritarian governance. Some Taiwanese worry that the KMT may again play a role in political repression by serving as an intermediary between Taiwan and the CCP. These activists therefore consider it vital to commemorate the KMT’s past repression and thus remind fellow citizens of the dangers its cosy relations with China pose to Taiwan’s hard-won freedom and democracy.

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Conclusion The White Terror casts a long shadow, and how it is commemorated has significant political implications for Taiwan’s future. Collective memory of this trauma as represented in pop culture is mobilized mostly to discredit the KMT and mainland China, voicing the views of Taiwanese youth about their anxieties concerning reunification. The KMT and CCP are othered and conflated as representing the same threat to Taiwanese identity, values and civil liberties. The fault-lines of contention have sharpened in post-Sunflower Taiwan in the context of an escalating war of words between Taipei and Beijing and China’s military sabre rattling. In the past, the KMT tried to downplay and rationalize its repression during the White Terror, but now it tries to depict calls for accountability and a forthright reckoning about the past as indicative of a ‘Green Terror’ perpetrated by the DPP. This hyperbole confronts the awkward fact for the KMT that the DPP is not killing, jailing or torturing its critics as the KMT did. Ironically, by labelling the actions of the DPP as a ‘terror’, the KMT draws more attention to their own bleak historic record. All but the KMT’s most hardcore supporters see through this ploy to divert attention from its stonewalling on transitional justice. While the KMT accuses the DPP of reviving inter-ethnic conflict in Taiwan, it has not been able to convince the island’s youth, indicating that the main issue is generational. The party has experienced difficulties attracting Taiwanese young people, raising questions about the future of an increasingly geriatric party. In 2020, the KMT had less than 9,000 members under the age of 40, highlighting the party’s bleak prospects (Hale 2020). For young Taiwanese, the KMT and its agenda of reunification represent a discredited past and an undesired future. In this context, the ‘White Trauma’ of repression looms over domestic politics and cross-straits relations, highlighting how much is at stake for local aspirations and how deeply alienated the ‘born independent’ millennials are from advocates of reunification. It is not hard for them to imagine what they risk losing as they watch Beijing crushing the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and snuffing out all dissent on the mainland.

Works Cited Baran, D. (2005). ‘“Taiwanese doesn’t have culture”: Language ideologies and social identity in Taiwan’s education system.’ EATS 2005. Bochum, Germany. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 29 June 2022). Chien, Hui-ju and J. Chung (2021). ‘Survey shows “Chinese” identity at a record low.’ Taipei Times. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 12 May 2022). Fan, JoAnn (2014). “The economics of the cross-strait services agreement”. Brookings Institute. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 29 June 2022). Fifield, A. (2019). ‘Taiwan’s ‘born independent’ millennials are becoming Xi Jinping’s lost ­generation’. Washington Post. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 12 May 2022). ‘Gold Leaf: 40,000 TD for 1 NTD Plot Element Leads to Debate. Li Xiaofeng: Script Gets It Backwards.’ (2021). CNA. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 24 May 2022). Hale, Erin (2020). “Why is Taiwan’s Kuomintang on the ropes?”. Al-Jazeera. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 23 June 2022).

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Brian Hioe Hioe, Brian (2018a) ‘What was new about the sunflower movement in terms of Taiwanese identity?’. Daybreak Project. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 12 May 2022). Hioe, Brian (2018b). ‘Why would PXMart release a series of white terror-themed commercials?’. New Bloom Magazine. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 12 May 2022). Hioe, Brian (2019). ‘Indie bands hold solidarity concert for Hong Kong in Taipei last week’. New Bloom solidarityMagazine. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 12 May 2022). Hioe, Brian (2022). ‘Moving beyond projection: Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the China factor’. In Reorienting Hong Kong’s Resistance: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hsu, Stacy. (2016) ‘KMT director unleashes on DPP’s ‘green terror’’. Taipei Times. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 12 May 2022). Laskai, Lorand C (2015). “A Taiwan where policy is cool.” Foreign Policy. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 29 June 2022). Lee, Hsiao-feng (2022). ‘Memorial hall perfect home for legislature.’ Taipei Times. Online. Available HTTP:

(accessed 12 May 2022). Lin, Ting-yin (2018). ‘10 Years after Cape No. 7: The development of cinema in Taiwan.’ Taiwan Insight. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 12 May 2022). Liu Shih-yi, Wen Kuei-hsiang, and Matthew Mazzetta (2022). ‘KMT suit to block transfer of 228 Incident documents dismissed.’ Focus Taiwan. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 12 May 2022). Tsai, Ing-wen (2020). “Inaugural address of ROC 15th-term President Tsai Ing-wen.” Presidential Office. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 29 June 2022). Wang, Rath Chen She (2019a). “Music’s role in shaping progressive politics for youth visible during presidential office concert”. New Bloom. Online. Available HTTPS: (accessed 29 June 2022). Wang, Yanan (2019b). “Who are the men in white behind Hong Kong’s mob attack?”. AP. Online. pacificAvailable HTTPS: (accessed 29 June 2022). Wong, Silvia (2020). ‘EFM 2020: The buzz titles from Taiwan’. Screen Daily. Online. Available HTTPS:

(accessed 12 May 2022).

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PART 4

South Korea

25 CONTESTING TRAUMA IN COURT Korean Historical Claims and Their Radiating Effects Celeste L. Arrington

Over the past three decades, courtrooms around East Asia have become key sites of ­contestation regarding the perceived trauma and history of Japanese actions in the first half of the twentieth century.1 Koreans, who have been the most active litigants and are my focus, have filed lawsuits related to alleged forced labour in Japanese factories, sexual slavery for Japanese troops (the so-called ‘comfort women’), the atomic bombings, leprosy mistreatment and military conscription. Other plaintiffs have been Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipina and Dutch (Koga 2016; Webster 2022). While some of the hundred-plus lawsuits by Koreans settled or received partly favourable rulings from lower courts, most were dismissed or overturned on appeal. Japanese and U.S. courts ruled that the statute of limitations had expired, that the doctrines of political question and sovereign immunity rendered the case moot or that postwar treaties absolved the Japanese government of liability and individuals’ right to claim compensation. Recently, judicial outcomes in Korea were somewhat more favourable for plaintiffs. Notably, in 2018, the Korean Supreme Court upheld its 2012 decision that individuals could bring claims because of the illegality of Japan’s colonial rule over the peninsula and ordered Japanese firms to pay damages to Korean labourers. However, Korean lower courts have also dismissed several similar cases in 2021 and 2022. With such mixed results, why are historical traumas still being contested in court? In one sense, these varied and largely separate lawsuits seem to affirm scholars’ contention that litigation is a ‘hollow hope’ (Rosenberg 2008). Besides costing time and money, lawsuits are difficult to win and can divert energy from other tactics, such as media campaigns or legislative activism. The process of bringing legal claims tends to empower lawyers over affected parties or divide claimants (Albiston 2011; Scheingold 2004). In another sense, these lawsuits fit a global trend towards historical justice: individuals and NGOs are increasingly influencing disputes formerly settled between governments. Some scholars praise how long silences have been broken, transnational advocacy networks formed and public memory and perceptions of justice transformed (Neumann and Thompson 2015; Piper 2001; Tsutsui 2009). Others argue that lawsuits related to history complicate and constrain diplomacy (Slaughter and Bosco 2000) or that state apologies incite domestic DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-29

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counter-mobilization (Lind 2008). Korea-Japan tensions since summer 2019 affirm such pessimism. In a third sense, these lawsuits indicate that litigation’s indirect or ‘radiating effects’ are often more significant than formal judicial outcomes (Galanter 1983). Sociolegal scholars explore how the litigation process influences policymaking or social perceptions and how even losing lawsuits can be productive for movements (e.g., McCann 1994; NeJaime 2011). To date, however, the causal mechanisms behind litigation’s indirect effects remain undertheorized. This chapter conducts a meta-study of possible mechanisms to fill the gap. I follow Falleti and Lynch (2009, 1145) in defining mechanisms as ‘relatively abstract [and portable] concepts or patterns of action …that explain how a hypothesized cause creates a particular outcome in a given context.’ It is important to note that mechanisms do not always produce the same outcomes because they ‘play out differently depending on their sequence, combination and context’ (McAdam et al. 2001, 306). Yet fully understanding the growth and diversification of postwar compensation litigation necessitates analytically distinguishing the mechanisms by which such lawsuits have socio-political consequences beyond judicial ­outcomes, which are the focus of most scholarship (e.g., Chun and Kim 2014; Gao 2007; Levin 2008; Totsuka 1999; but see Webster 2022). This chapter highlights four types of radiating effects that benefited claimants and a ssociated activism despite few court victories. Litigation (1) helped build movements ­ and their capacity; (2) supplied discursive resources and certified evidence of past abuses; (3) ­bolstered claimants’ leverage in other arenas and (4) fostered interpersonal cross-national reconciliation. Rather than produce an exhaustive list of effects or definitively prove mechanisms at work, I identify and illustrate mechanisms that are associated with these four productive radiating effects and common in sociolegal scholarship. I also briefly acknowledge that litigation can be detrimental. The research draws on qualitative analysis of interviews, media accounts, movement and government publications, court rulings and secondary scholarship (Arrington 2019a, 12–14). This study makes three contributions to scholarship on legal mobilization and transnational activism for historical justice. First, by specifying the oft-overlooked mechanisms behind litigation’s indirect effects, it elucidates features of legal processes that have broader socio-political and policy implications. Second, I explore how these mechanisms operate across national borders. Research on litigation’s indirect effects has been largely U.S.-focused to date (but see Holzmeyer 2009). Third, my study uncovers how positive outcomes, such as cross-border collaboration and reconciliation, are emerging from even the most contentious disputes that roil Korea-Japan relations (see also Park 2006; Webster 2018). I do not attempt to adjudicate these fraught historical and legal debates. Nor do I pretend that improved relations among the Japanese and Koreans involved in these lawsuits, which the next section overviews, will overcome accumulated mistrust between the two societies. Rather, I highlight the need to look beyond formal legal outcomes and unpack how courtroom contestation has broader socio-political consequences.

Background: Historical Grievances against Japan Korean movements to redress alleged Japanese past wrongs use multiple strategies, but litigation has figured prominently. Lawsuits filed to hold the Japanese government or Japanese firms accountable have involved various claims, including tort, state compensation, unpaid wages and pensions, discrimination, the constitutionality of government actions or policies, free speech and defamation and international law. Additional activism has sought the creation 304

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of memorials and historical archives, the identification and repatriation of victims’ remains and official apologies. While litigation has achieved few definitive victories for plaintiffs, Japanese state and non-state actors have at times responded to activism with statements or official visits, joint commissions to draft textbooks, schemes to alleviate victims’ hardship (e.g., the Asian Women’s Fund or medical care provisions), exchange programmes and other initiatives. Moreover, even unsuccessful legal mobilization has had radiating effects on the claimants, supporters, public discourse and government policies. These effects deserve attention because they help explain the diversification of claims and the meaning of history issues in Korea-Japan relations. Naming past suffering, blaming a powerful entity for it and claiming compensation is particularly challenging for Korean survivors of Japanese colonialism, though it is never easy (Felstiner et al. 1981). Both Japan and Korea historically had legal systems with structural impediments to litigation, including state-mandated caps on the number of private attorneys, limited damages and narrow interpretations of the statute of limitations and state liability (Haley 1978; Yang 1989). Additionally, stigmatization deterred many from revealing past suffering, and victims often lacked the contacts with other victims that might have helped them organize to seek redress due to dislocation during World War II and the Korean War. South Korea’s authoritarian governments also curtailed freedoms of association and press and discouraged individual claims for compensation from Japan. Yet Korea’s democratization in 1987, as well as the death of Japan’s Shōwa emperor in 1989, created new opportunities for colonial-era victims to seek redress and released a ‘pent-up resentment of victimhood’ created by Japanese occupation, national division and authoritarian oppression (Shin et al. 2007, 20). Consequently, lawsuits over the postwar responsibility (sengo sekinin) of the Japanese government and/or firms proliferated in the 1990s, first in Japanese courts. Thirty-four former comfort women, forced labourers, conscripts and civilian employees of the Japanese Imperial Army sued the Japanese government in 1991. Separately, Korean and Chinese forced labourers began suing Japanese companies in the same year. Then, Korean hibakusha (individuals affected by atomic bombings), who had worked in Japanese factories, also sued for access to the medical subsidies that Japanese atomic bomb victims receive. As a result, the Atomic Bomb Survivors’ Assistance Law was expanded in 2008 to enable hibakusha to obtain certification overseas, and the Japanese Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that hibakusha are eligible for assistance ‘no matter where they live’ (Osaki 2015). Lawsuits by Korean and Taiwanese leprosy survivors similarly led the Japanese Diet to revise its Hansen’s Disease Compensation Law in 2006 to grant compensation to former residents of colonial-era leprosaria (Arrington 2014). Korean forced labourers left stateless on Sakhalin Island, in what was then the Soviet Union, have also tried to claim compensation and pensions from Japan and ROK citizenship. Due to space limits, I am unable to detail all these diverse claims. This proliferation of lawsuits is puzzling because most litigants lost. The primary legal justifications for rejecting victims’ claims in Japanese courts were Japan’s twenty-year statute of limitations, the sovereign immunity of the Japanese state, and postwar treaties and agreements that settled wartime claims and relinquished individuals’ rights to claim anything from Japan. Notably, Japanese Supreme Court rulings in 2007 closed the door to most further claims-making in Japan by Koreans (Levin 2008). American courts similarly dismissed cases related to postwar compensation as non-justiciable based on the political question ­doctrine or postwar treaties (Arakawa 2001). Korean plaintiffs turned to Korean courts, with more success, after President Roh ­Moo-hyun declassified records related to the 1965 normalization of Japan-ROK relations 305

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and the associated claims agreement in response to an administrative court ruling in favour of release in 2004. More than one hundred of Korea’s surviving registered comfort women filed suit with the Korean Constitutional Court (KCC) in 2006 to push their government to utilize the arbitration commission of the 1965 Japan-ROK Claims Agreement, which had never been used. The KCC subsequently ruled that the ROK government had a constitutional obligation to help the former comfort women obtain compensation from Japan. In 2012, Korea’s Supreme Court also recognized former forced labourers’ claims for the first time, contending that the state cannot waive individuals’ rights to claim compensation and that Japanese courts’ rulings ran contrary to Korea’s constitutional principles (Lee, 2014). It then remanded the case to a lower court, which ordered the defendant Japanese firm to pay compensation. The appeal returned to the Supreme Court, which issued a ruling in 2018 ordering compensation in this case and a similar case a month later (Lee and Lee 2019). These landmark rulings catalysed a sharp deterioration in Korea-Japan relations, which worsened when a court seized Japanese firms’ assets. In addition, forced labour litigation ballooned to more than 1,500 claimants against seventy-plus Japanese firms.2 Yet postwar compensation litigation in Korea has had mixed outcomes, even after the 2018 Supreme Court rulings, and has become politically charged (Kim 2022). For example, in June 2018, a court rejected a dozen former comfort women’s claims for damages from the ROK government over the agreement it reached with Japan in 2015. Another court dismissed a different comfort women lawsuit in April 2021 on the grounds that customary international law and Korean jurisprudence recognized the Japanese government’s sovereign ­immunity. However, a court in January 2021 had waived state immunity and ordered the Japanese government to pay compensation to former comfort women. Meanwhile, from June 2021 onwards, several courts dismissed claims against Japanese companies, including the largest collective lawsuit by eighty-five former forced labourers against sixteen ­companies (Shin 2021). I argue that fully understanding such diverse and transnational legal ­mobilization requires examining how litigants activate litigation’s radiating effects.

Litigation’s ‘Radiating Effects’ and the Mechanisms behind Them Combining several different academic literatures illuminates why and how victims and their families use litigation to contest historical traumas. First, research on transitional and historical justice shows how burgeoning human rights ideas and transnational activism facilitated multi-pronged campaigns to right past wrongs, but they rarely unpack the litigation process. Second, legal scholars study the case law of postwar compensation lawsuits, albeit largely without connecting them to related socio-political developments. The legal mobilization approach in sociolegal scholarship offers a corrective that pays attention to distinctive aspects of the litigation process, while also acknowledging the mutually constitutive relationship between activities inside and outside the courtroom. None of these literatures, however, has explicitly elaborated the mechanisms behind what Galanter (1983) called the ‘radiating effects’ of courts. Hence, we turn to scholarship on social movements and social psychology, which details numerous potential causal mechanisms. This section brings these literatures into dialogue to analyse four primary radiating effects of litigation, using examples from postwar compensation litigation to illustrate how the mechanisms work. One way to analyse postwar compensation lawsuits is to see them as part of the global trend towards righting past injustices (e.g., Barkan 2000). Torpey (2015) notes that the tendency towards framing historical grievances as legal ones—juridification—accelerated a

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shift from inter-governmental settlements to individual claims-making because individuals not communities bear rights. Moreover, Tsutsui (2009, 1412) argues that historical justice movements worldwide resonated with emerging human rights norms, which in Japan gave victims and Japanese progressives the language with which to articulate a ‘remorse frame in the national discourse’ and pressure the government to comply with international norms. Growing global awareness of women’s rights and sexual violence also rendered transnational networks sympathetic to former comfort women (Piper 2001; Richardson 2021). Critics of these trends argue that postwar compensation litigation complicates diplomacy, distracts government officials and constrains diplomats’ options for pursuing the national interest (Slaughter and Bosco 2000). Indeed, in addition to multiyear hiatuses in Japan-Korea summit meetings in 2012–2015 and 2018–2022, Korean campaigns for historical justice have fueled right-wing counter-mobilization in Japan (Kim and Sohn 2017). While helpfully attuned to cross-national dynamics, few scholars of historical justice have examined how the process of contesting historical trauma through the courts affects plaintiffs, their supporters and broader publics across the multiple arenas of activism. By contrast, sociolegal scholars have long studied such dynamics, examining how law shapes socio-political outcomes. Studies demonstrated the limits of legal remedies or the ‘myth of rights’ (Scheingold 2004), concluding that litigation is difficult, costly, time-consuming and generally maintains the status quo. The dearth of judicial victories in postwar compensation lawsuits supports this view. However, ‘glass half-full’ interpretations drew on Galanter’s notion of ‘radiating effects’ to posit that focusing too narrowly on formal judicial misses how different actors perceive and leverage aspects of the legal process (1983). The resulting legal mobilization approach acknowledges the challenges of litigation but emphasizes the need to analyse court-based tactics in constitutive and relational terms (e.g., McCann 1994). Many of the radiating effects identified in this literature are not dependent on winning in court but follow from the processes of filing and adjudicating legal claims. Indeed, NeJaime (2011) illuminates the indirect effects (for both the movement and its external outreach) of litigation loss, which is relevant for postwar compensation litigation. Building on such work, I unpack four indirect effects: (1) building movements and their capacity, (2) supplying discursive resources and evidence, (3) enhancing leverage in other venues and (4) fostering interpersonal cross-national reconciliation. These four radiating effects are not intended to be exhaustive. The universe of possible indirect effects of courts is boundless—and thus undefinable—because it depends on the creativity, will and interactions of various actors. I selected these four radiating effects because they are common in the legal mobilization literature and span the full claims-making process. This section elaborates the individual-level, group-level or society-wide cognitive and relational mechanisms behind them (summarized in Table 25.1). Though I focus on productive effects from the perspective of social movements, I acknowledge that litigation also has negative effects, as summarized at the end of this section. My goal is to illuminate how contesting historical traumas in court can be productive for claimants, drawing insights from studies of social movements, social psychology and policymaking, which increasingly specify causal mechanisms. The mechanisms I detail rarely operate in isolation but analytically distinguishing them offers us theoretically informed labels with which to understand the impacts of multi-sited and transnational activism around contesting historical traumas in court. Rather than proving causation, my aim is to theorize and illustrate potential causal mechanisms with evidence from Korea postwar compensation lawsuits.

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Celeste L. Arrington Table 25.1  Some of Litigation’s Productive Effects and the Mechanisms behind Them Effects and Mechanisms

Brief Definition

Sample Citations

Stronger Movements with More Capacity Attribution of similarity Highlighting similarities among individuals to motivate collective action Cultivating rights How people’s evolving understanding and consciousness use of the law shape their self-worth Raising expectations and Similarly affected people gain hope of collective efficacy remedies and thus mobilize Fostering solidarity and Group identification makes people want to thus commitment stay engaged in collective action Brokerage Connecting previously unconnected entities, including across borders Discursive Resources and Certified Evidence Framing Interpreting and labelling what’s going on to help mobilize constituents and supporters Certification and Reduce costs of discerning speakers’ validation credibility Issue dramatization Individuals’ stories to illustrate what happened Personalization Real people embody past suffering Focal events Trial dates are events, punctuate court process and sustain controversy Heightened Leverage in Other Forums Information transmission Litigants assist their legislative allies with and subsidy policy-relevant information Expanding the scope of a Draw in bystanders, redefine who is a conflict stakeholder in an issue Agenda setting Increased media/public attention begets political attention Anticipatory policy Lawmakers enact legislation before any changes rulings Venue and/or scale shift Moving activism to another level or place

Cross-Border Interpersonal Reconciliation Activating empathy, Personally experiencing the other group’s re-humanization diversity undermines stereotypes Inter-group discussions Repeated, cooperative interpersonal interactions that build trust Formation of a new social When members of two groups realize they identity share membership in a third group Cross-border networks Friendships across group boundaries to reduce prejudice, facilitate mobilization Counter-narratives Embodying alternative versions of history

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McAdam et al. (2001, 334) Scheingold (2004, 132) McCann (1994, 48, 280) Passy (2001) McAdam et al. (2001, 26), Arrington (2014)

Benford and Snow (2000) Allen (2010, 121–132) Gitlin (1980, 146–147) Arrington (2019b, 329) Kidder and Miyazawa (1993)

McPherson (2016) Schattschneider (1960) McCann (1994, 58) Alter (2000, 493) Tarrow and McAdam (2005)

Halpern and Weinstein (2004) Paluck and Green (2009) Hewstone et al. (2002) Piper (2001) He (2009), Arrington (2014)

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Building Movements and Their Capacity Legal activism has the potential to augment the size, infrastructure and capacity of movements by mobilizing other victims, experts and bystanders. Five main mechanisms operate in these concentric circles around claimants. The first three are what Tilly (2001) called cognitive mechanisms. The act of framing grievances as rights violations, which lawyers often help do, highlights commonalities among individuals’ experiences and raises rights consciousness (Scheingold 2004, 132). Attribution of similarity with first movers and rights consciousness, in turn, encourages mobilization as other victims realize the utility of collective action, particularly through the courts (McAdam et al. 2001, 334; McCann 1994, 280). Pioneering early lawsuits that are not summarily dismissed, as well as landmark rulings like the ones from Korea’s Supreme Court in 2012 and 2018, can also raise expectations among similarly affected people and lead them to mobilize. So can moving personal testimonies by claimants (Park 2006, 57–58). The fourth mechanism is relational: solidarity. Claimants develop solidarity around shared grievances and missions (Arrington 2019b, 317). Studies show that a sense of solidarity and collective identification breeds commitment because individuals are unlikely to abandon their friends, and commitment helps sustain activism (Passy 2001). For example, a Korean hibakusha who won a landmark case in Japan in 2002 later travelled to Japan repeatedly to support other overseas hibakusha lawsuits. He explained, ‘I felt I had a mission, imposed on me by history, to fight to put an end to discrimination’ (Mainichi 2008). Uneven rulings also triggered claimants’ sense of solidarity. As one hibakusha declared, ‘I cannot accept that a different judgement was handed down on my fellow plaintiffs, who have fought together’ (Kyodo 2004). Thus, movements were strengthened and sustained through victims’ attribution of similarity, increased rights consciousness, heightened expectations and sense of collective efficacy and solidarity. Fifth, litigation builds movements and their resources through the mechanism of ­brokerage. Brokerage is when third-party actors connect previously unconnected groups (McAdam et al. 2001). Lawyers, for example, are key agents of brokerage because they connect movements with other legal experts and elite allies (Kidder and Miyazawa 1993). In the case of Sakhalin-related litigation, nearly 2,000 lawyers in Japan and Korea joined the cause, advising and donating about $100 each per year to cover plaintiffs’ lawyers’ travel (Chosun Ilbo 1990). Some also subsequently started researching Korean hibakusha cases, which shows how professional connections forged in the context of litigation facilitate subsequent legal mobilization. Similarly, Korean lawyers’ activism alongside Japanese lawyers in the colonial-era leprosy lawsuits in Japan inspired their litigation against the ROK government over forced vasectomies and abortions after 1945 and then civilian massacres by ROK soldiers during the Vietnam War (Ahn 2016; Arrington 2014). Brokerage also forged coalitions with other sympathetic civil society groups, whose ­networks sustained activism during lengthy court battles. The support groups (shien dantai) that Japanese citizens organized around the plaintiffs and their lawyers echoed the Japanese practice of supporting political dissidents on trial since the 1960s (Steinhoff 1999). Support groups chronicled court cases in newsletters for their members (Webster 2022). In one ­comfort women’s lawsuit in Shimonoseki, local civic groups also helped subsidize the cost of litigation and associated travel (Totsuka 1999, 54). Transnational networks were often brokered through the enterprising efforts of individuals who had access to unique evidence of past wrongs and/or were motivated to personally atone for Japan’s past. Consider, for instance, Takahashi Makoto, who was given a document containing the names of young 309

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Korean girls who had worked at a Mitsubishi airplane plant during the war while he was teaching high school history in Nagoya in the 1980s ( Jung 2017). Using the document, he found survivors of the so-called Korean Women’s Volunteer Labour Corps and mobilized more than 1,000 Japanese lawyers, scholars and citizens to support their litigation, first in Japanese courts and then in Korea. In short, both the cognitive shifts and the networks forged in the litigation process bolster movements.

Discursive Resources and Certified Evidence The second cluster of mechanisms concerns the communicative resources of claimants. While courts transmit messages by hearing cases and issuing rulings, the ‘influences of courts mingle with [influences] from other sources’ in the real world, sometimes with unintended consequences (Galanter 1983, 135). Therefore, litigants must frame their cause in compelling ways. Research on framing indicates that factors like claims’ empirical credibility, the issue’s salience and frame articulators’ credibility enhance the likelihood of frame resonance (Benford and Snow 2000, 619–622). Gaining bystanders’ support is important for sustaining a movement’s momentum in civil law systems, like Japan and Korea, where courts hear a particular case only once every few months. The court process itself has distinctive features that facilitate claimants’ efforts to cultivate frame resonance and publicity. First, claimants gain credibility when judges certify plaintiffs’ right to bring claims—their standing—by agreeing to hear the case. Such external recognition lowers the costs for audiences of discerning the validity of victims and/or their claims (Allen 2010). As parties to lawsuits, plaintiffs and lawyers in postwar compensation lawsuits also became recognizable points of contact and credible sources for journalists, whose media coverage educated Japanese and Korean publics about victims’ claims (Park 2006). Second, courts can certify litigants’ claims through fact-finding during trials (Webster 2018, 191–200), or indirectly by spurring state and non-state actors to conduct inquiries. Such inquiries are significant because discovery is not available in Japanese or Korean courts. For example, the Japanese government responded to new scholarship and lawsuits by launching an official inquiry about the comfort women; Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yōhei then issued a statement in 1993 acknowledging the Japanese military’s role in establishing and maintaining comfort stations. Japanese historians and citizens also formed the Network for Research on Forced Labour Mobilization in 2005 to gather evidence for ­litigation (Underwood 2006). Courts’ certification of claims can even occur in the context of judicial defeat. In April 2007, for example, the Japanese Supreme Court handed down two landmark rulings that rejected Chinese forced labourers’ and comfort women’s claims but used ‘unprecedented, strong language [to describe] the violence and injustice committed by the Japanese government and corporations during the war’ (Koga 2013, 494). As the lead attorney on a forced labour lawsuit explained, ‘though we were unable to win in Japanese  courts, at least the fact that the courts acknowledged the plaintiffs’ suffering should be counted a success… [because] it has helped [subsequent] litigation in Korea’ (Han 2017). Additionally, the drama of courtroom disputes and claimants’ personal stories appeal to news outlets’ bottom line (Gitlin, 1980). For instance, defendants’ denials of liability substantiate claimants’ narratives of Japanese injustice for the Korean media and public (Webster 2018, 195–199). Plaintiffs and their lawyers also capitalize on the media’s interest in personalizing issues by giving interviews that supply vivid details of their suffering or courtroom 310

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impressions. Often plaintiffs emphasized their age, as Kim Gyeong-seok did: ‘Victims of the Pacific War are dying today and will die tomorrow. Please help us while we are still alive’ (Shin 2005). Public seminars organized by lawyers and supporters also gave plaintiffs ­opportunities to experience rehabilitation by gaining agency over their stories and seeing Japanese audiences’ sympathetic reactions. Finally, court dates entail an element of public performance and institutionalized r­ itual that provide moments to rally supporters and media attention. Japanese lawyers have ­experience turning court dates into focal events to maintain commitment among participants and recruit new supporters with rallies and debriefing press conferences (Kidder and Miyazawa 1993, 618–619). For instance, news photographs from the leprosy survivors’ lawsuit in 2005 show Korean plaintiffs in wheelchairs covered in sheets of handwritten notes from Japanese and Korean supporters entering court. Japanese rulings are also traditionally announced by unfurling a banner outside the court, as supporters await news, making for good photo-ops for journalists. Thus, court procedures and rhythms can supply discursive resources, focal events or new evidence that help claimants reach external audiences and maintain issue attention.

Increased Leverage in Other Forums Litigation can improve claimants’ leverage in other forums, such as by citing ‘costs, ­remedies, delays, uncertainty, legitimation [etc.]’ of judicial processes when lobbying or bargaining with state actors (Galanter 1983, 134). Leveraging such synergies through multi-sited ­advocacy activates some or all of the following five mechanisms. The first is information transmission and subsidy. Capitalizing on the fact that legislators have limited time, resources and attention, claimants supply information and issue framing to sympathetic political elites (McPherson 2016). Korean forced labourers, for example, used the Japanese courts’ unfavourable rulings, despite acknowledgement of suffering, to lobby for special legislation in Korea establishing a truth commission in 2004 and providing unpaid wages in 2007. The commission collected evidence showing that almost 500 companies used Korean labourers, which bolstered litigants’ claims in Korean courts. It also led the ROK government to increase diplomatic pressure on Japan. Second, the process of litigation can expand the scope of a conflict and gain bystanders’ support (Schattschneider 1960). In transnational legal mobilization, foreign claimants aim to mobilize the target country’s citizens to pressure their own government. Doing so activates a grassroots correlate to Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) boomerang. In Japan, movement leaders also aimed to fill observers’ seats with supporters on court dates to signal Japanese public concern for the plaintiffs to Japanese judges and officials. Using litigation to raise awareness of an issue activates the third and fourth mechanisms: agenda setting and anticipatory policy changes. Often, claimants turn to the courts because politicians ignore small groups with few resources and resist tackling controversial or difficult questions (Zemans 1983). Especially in Korea, media coverage and public outrage over perceived Japanese denials of responsibility made postwar compensation an attractive agenda item for Korean politicians across the political spectrum. In the 2017 snap election after Park Geun-hye’s impeachment, all five major candidates called for revisiting the controversial 2015 comfort women agreement with Japan (Yi 2017). Ongoing litigation can also lead claimants’ own lawmakers to enact policies in anticipation of judicial outcomes (Alter 2000, 493). In addition to the forced labour legislation and truth commission already mentioned, Korean women who worked in Japanese munitions plants for free started receiving 311

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livelihood subsidies from local governments in Korea in January 2014, even as Japanese businesses continued to fight claims in court. Such measures lend support to claimants amid protracted court battles. Fifth, litigation, even if ultimately unsuccessful, can catalyse venue or scale shifts. The uncertainty of judicial outcomes may encourage political or private settlements, and ­litigation often structures the parameters of negotiation (McCann 1994, 144–145; Webster 2019). Litigation can also fuel scale shifting to third countries or the UN (Tarrow and McAdam 2005). The Korean comfort women’s movement, for example, tapped into rising international awareness of women’s rights and sexual violence to obtain supportive reports from UN bodies in the 1990s and criticism of the 2015 Japan-ROK agreement on the issue ( Japan Times 2016). In sum, litigation may enhance litigants’ leverage in other forums by sending messages about an issue’s definition, salience or partisan utility that motivate legislative action or transnational activism.

Interpersonal Cross-Border Reconciliation Finally, the process of contesting historical traumas in court can foster unexpected cross-­ border reconciliation. War crimes trials and truth commissions aim for societal reconciliation, but I highlight interpersonal reconciliation. Adopting what Holzmeyer (2009) terms a ‘transnationally attuned legal mobilization framework,’ I identified five mechanisms that are activated in and around courtroom contexts. First, since Japanese civil procedure rules require attorneys admitted to local bars to represent plaintiffs, individuals from former perpetrator and victim nations come into repeated, cooperative contact over long periods of time. While litigation does not necessarily involve close attorney-client relations, trust-building is an explicit tactic of Japanese legal activism (Arrington 2014, 573). Studies of social psychology and reconciliation indicate that such relationships re-humanize the other and activate empathy (Halpern and Weinstein 2004). Second, while collaborating with Japanese lawyers and activists towards the shared goal of winning a lawsuit, plaintiffs personally experience the other group’s diversity, weakening negative stereotypes (e.g., the Japanese are unrepentant) (Paluck and Green 2009). For example, a Japanese student who participated in an exchange in Korea and met forced labourers reported that ‘my thoughts about Korea have changed’ (Choi 2013). Similarly, after testifying in court in Japan, one Chinese comfort woman acknowledged, ‘There are good Japanese, actually’ (Koga 2016, 419). Third, studies have shown that prejudice declines when members of two groups realize that they share membership in a third group and identification sustains activism (Hewstone et al. 2002; Stürmer et al. 2003). These mechanisms primarily affect people directly involved in activism, although they can influence others in their social networks. Through activities in and around the court, Koreans and Japanese forged a new social identity as members of cross-border movements for historical justice. For example, Toyonaga Keisaburō (2001, 393) explained his activism on behalf of Korean hibakusha thus: ‘even more than to provide aid to Japanese hibakusha like myself, I believe that we must work even harder to offer aid to victims residing in places other than Japan.’ Fourth, transnational networks formed, or litigation bolstered existing ones. For instance, the comfort women movement had its roots in the anti-sex tourism movement founded by Korean and Japanese women’s groups but grew markedly as a separate movement (Piper 2001, 162–163). Cross-border activism transformed participants on both sides. Take the

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example of Takahashi noted above. He visited Korea more than a hundred times over thirty years. Calling his work ‘destiny,’ he notes that his daughter married a Korean man and that his ashes will be scattered in Korea ( Jung 2017). Fifth, such cross-border cooperation erodes the entrenched animosity that stymies interstate reconciliation (He 2009). For many Japanese citizens involved in these lawsuits, whether as lawyers or supporters, personal desires to atone for Japan’s past wrongs motivated them (Koga 2013). A leading Japanese lawyer on the leprosy lawsuit offered a personal apology for his country’s mistreatment of Koreans affected by leprosy during the colonial era (Arrington 2014, 576). Koga (2016, 415) reports how a Chinese lawyer involved in comfort women litigation was initially ‘skeptical of [ Japanese lawyers’] motives… [but then realized that] working for Chinese victims pro bono is a way of redeeming their own nation.’ Interpersonal reconciliation is unlikely to erase mutual distrust in East Asia, but it highlights the multiple understandings of history.

Negative Effects In addition to such productive effects, litigation can have negative consequences for social movements, as well as broader efforts to address historical traumas. For activism, litigation can take precious resources and energy away from other tactics such as media campaigns and lobbying or require more moderate tactics (McCann and Silverstein 1998). Plaintiffs also often come to depend on lawyers; the procedural and formal complexities of the courts mean that legal professionals can easily dominate (Scheingold 2004). Rules governing standing and legal categories can also privilege some claims and claimants over others or homogenize the diversity of experiences (Kidder and Miyazawa 1993). Rulings, which frequently differentiate among claimants for technical reasons, can divide or sap movements. Governments may also try to limit concessions by compensating only certain types of victims—for example, the Japanese government legally differentiates wartime labourers from China versus from Korea (Koga 2016)—or require confidentiality after settlement negotiations, and thereby deter future claims-making (Upham 1987). Of greatest concern for elderly victims of historical wrongs, however, is the duration of most lawsuits. For example, 48 of the 109 plaintiffs on the comfort women case brought to the Korean Constitutional Court passed away before that court’s landmark 2011 ruling (Son 2011). Political and diplomatic settlements can also take time and may involve compromises, but they are usually faster and apply to larger number of victims. Korean plaintiffs’ Japanese and Korean lawyers were generally aware of the downsides to contesting historical traumas in court and sought to minimize them, including by leveraging litigation’s radiating effects through multi-pronged activism, as detailed above. Socially and diplomatically, litigation may spur a backlash. Resistance by citizens of the target country may influence court rulings or their enforcement and create incentives for officials to block concessions. Counter-movements sometimes also use litigation. Consider the lawsuits filed by nearly 25,000 Japanese citizens against the Asahi newspaper over articles it published about the comfort women issue decades ago. The lawsuits, ultimately dismissed, sought redress for ‘damaging Japanese people’s personal rights and honour’ even after the newspaper retracted the articles (Murai 2016). Diplomatically, the tit-for-tat downward spiral of Korea-Japan relations in 2019 after the Korean Supreme Court rulings on forced labour exemplifies how wartime compensation lawsuits can constrain policymakers’ options.

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Conclusion Traumas related to Japanese colonial-era and wartime actions have been contested in Japanese, and later American and Korean courts. Although such legal mobilization has ­produced few definitive legal victories, these lawsuits and related activism in other venues have had ­significant radiating effects on the victims, their supporters, broader publics, historical memories, diplomacy and foreign affairs. Litigation has facilitated movement building domestically and transnationally, augmented the historical record about the first half of the twentieth century, spurred symbolic and financial initiatives to alleviate survivors’ hardships and fostered trust-building and reconciliation at the individual level, even while also frustrating interstate relations. This chapter used postwar compensation lawsuits and insights from studies of social movements, legal mobilization and social psychology to specify causal mechanisms—including transnational ones—through which litigants obtain litigation’s radiating effects. It demonstrated how litigation can be a political resource, a source of ideas and normative claims for activists and a site for meaningful interactions among different actors. Thus, it contributes to scholarship, highlighting how seemingly technical aspects of judicial procedure can have significant political consequences. Future research might explore the synergies between court processes and court-like forums such as truth commissions or national human rights institutions, which are also addressing historical grievances. In sum, narrow empirical analyses of legal outcomes in lawsuits against the Japanese government or Japanese firms overlook the significant radiating effects of such lawsuits.

Notes 1 This is a condensed and updated version of my 2019 article ‘The Mechanisms behind Litigation’s “Radiating Effects”: Historical Grievances against Japan,’ Law & Society Review, 53(1): 6–40. 2 The attorney Yamamoto Seita maintains a list of Korean and Chinese postwar compensation ­lawsuits on his website: http://justice.skr.jp/souran-kr-intro.html, cited in Webster (2022).

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26 COMMEMORATIVE WITNESS ‘Gwangju in 1980’ and Unresolved Transitional Justice in Twenty-First Century South Korea Nan Kim

The footage is silent. A series of film clips, shot in black and white, capture moments that took place in May 1980 in Korea’s southwestern city of Gwangju (Kwangju)1. The scenes are emblematic of what would later come to be known as the Gwangju Uprising, or South Korea’s May 18 Democratization Movement. Early on, the footage shows a rally of people amassed on city streets, as they are confronted by uniformed troops in riot gear. Another clip resumes in the wake of violence and atrocity, showing grieving family members amid funeral processions in what is believed to be the first video record of the dead being laid to rest in Mangwol-dong (Mangwŏl-dong) Cemetery. In another clip, a group of women gather in a makeshift alleyway kitchen to make jumeokbap (‘fists of rice’, or rice balls wrapped in dried seaweed), the signature provisions which volunteers would hand out to members of the Citizen’s Army. The discovery of this footage came about when, in December 2017, an anonymous ­collector contacted the May 18 Democratic Archive about the existence of these film recordings. Representatives of the archive eventually purchased the recordings, which were three reels of unprinted 16 mm film negatives. After processing, the film yielded ­seventy-two minutes of video recorded between May 20 and June 1, 1980. They capture historically important scenes of which there had previously been no known film footage, such as bodies being placed at the morgue, patients receiving treatment in the Red Cross Hospital and in the Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital, and members of bereaved families holding funerary rites at Mangwol-dong. The video compilation of this footage was shown for the first time at a screening in Gwangju on May 9, 2018. The video was then posted online on May 18 as part of that year’s commemoration of the Gwangju Uprising (Kim 2018). Regarded as singularly pivotal for the democratization of South Korea, the Gwangju Uprising refers to the series of events that occurred in 1980 when citizens of Gwangju fought against the military coup by South Korean Army General Chun Doo Hwan. At the time, Gwangju had become the epicentre of a nationwide democracy movement. After martial law soldiers used lethal force in an attempt to quell anti-authoritarian demonstrations in Gwangju, ordinary citizens joined student protesters in what became a popular rebellion. During the ten-day-long uprising, they held the city until a brutal military crackdown resulted in a civilian massacre. While the official figures put the death toll at 170—­including 318

DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-30

Commemorative Witness

144 ­ civilians, twenty-two soldiers and four police officers—reports by ­ journalists and human  rights organizations cited unofficial estimates between 1,000 and 2,000 deaths (Palais 1986). The contemporary public remembrance of May 18 is embedded in a larger trajectory that has seen the meaning of Gwangju change dramatically over time (Na 2001). In Korea, the term ‘5.18’ (o-il-pal), or May 18, refers to both civilian uprising and the subsequent massacre by martial law soldiers, and the impact of both was decisively consequential for the movement that led to direct elections in 1987 and South Korea’s achievement of d­ emocratization. During the June Struggle of that year, ‘Remember Gwangju’ was a rallying cry among members of the democracy movement in the face of hardship and sacrifice, and even today social activists have continued to make Mangwol-dong Cemetery a pilgrimage destination to acknowledge their identification with and indebtedness to the spirit of ‘Gwangju in 1980’ ( Jung 2003, 241). Yet, May 18 was initially the object of wholesale suppression by the state. In the aftermath of the uprising and massacre, news of the events in Gwangju circulated underground but otherwise became taboo. The military government under Chun not only prohibited public discussion of May 18th, but outlawed commemorations of those who had died (Kim 2011). In recent years, the events of Gwangju in 1980 have become known to a wider ­contemporary audience through the international success of the feature film Taeksi Unjeonsa (A Taxi Driver, 2017), the K-drama series Oworui Cheongchun (Youth of May, 2021) and Han Kang’s novel Human Acts (2016), originally published in 2014 as Sonyeoni onda. Despite this renewed visibility of the Gwangju Uprising in public memory, actual visual documentation of occurrences on the ground—whether photographic or filmed—remains limited with many crucial gaps. Such fragmentation of the archival record is the outcome of a 1980’sera suppression campaign when authorities systematically confiscated sensitive photographs and films. Regarding the seventy-two minutes of previously undisclosed film recordings recently made available, that footage was significant not only for the content it revealed. These film reels also figured into a wider pattern in recent years of what may be called ­commemorative witness, whereby activities dedicated to reanimating public memory of May 18 have brought to light a significantly expanded array of visual documentation dating back to 1980 in Gwangju, including several hundred images never-before seen by the public. Given that eyewitness testimony and first-hand documentation were crucial to overcoming historical distortion of May 18 in the twentieth century, the recent emergence of unprecedented visual evidence is vital for informing public memory in the twenty-first century and renewing advocacy and support for those seeking historical redress regarding the still-unresolved historical trauma surrounding Gwangju. The recent developments addressed in this chapter have arisen since the 2016–2017 Candlelight Movement, when mass protests in Korea brought the pressure of public accountability to bear upon the democratic institutional processes that eventually brought about the impeachment of Park Geun-hye (Kim 2017; Lee 2022). After being formally removed from office, Park would later be convicted and imprisoned on charges related to bribery and coercion. Although Park Geun-hye came to office during the post-authoritarian era, her administration’s practices of black-listing, censorship and state-mandated revisions of history textbooks indicated disturbing parallels to the authoritarianism of her late father, the military dictator Park Chung Hee. Following her removal from office by impeachment, Park was succeeded by her former electoral rival, Moon Jae-in, a progressive politician and human rights lawyer who himself had once been arrested for having taken part in pro-democracy rallies against the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee while a law student in the 1970s. 319

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Within days after taking office in 2017, President Moon Jae-in marked the anniversary of May 18 by giving a historic address during the commemorative events in Gwangju. President Moon announced the formation of an independent fact-finding commission tasked with investigating crucial but unanswered questions that have remained more than four decades since the 1980 uprising. Such questions include who had ordered the use of violence and the opening of fire on civilians by soldiers. In his address, Moon stated: ‘The new government will fully restore democracy on this land by upholding the spirit of the May 18th Gwangju Democratization Movement and candlelight vigils’ (Bae 2017). Among those who had lived in Korea during the 1970s, the Candlelight Movement demonstrations of 2016–2017—which reached more than two million protesters at their peak—were said to evoke a sense of historical déjà-vu regarding the experience of participating in and witnessing months of mass demonstrations when citizens throughout the country called for societal reform and democratic accountability. However, this time it was not to protest against the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee but instead to call out authoritarian creep under Park Geun-hye—or what Youngju Ryu has called ‘Yushin redux’ (Ryu 2018, 279), in a sardonic reference to the 1970s-era system under which the elder Park had wielded dictatorial power. Furthermore, for those with lived memories from Korea in the 1980s, it was a poignant outcome for the demonstrations of the early twenty-first century to have culminated in the citizenry d­ ramatically reclaiming the mantle of democratization, soon followed by resolute calls from the nation’s highest office to finally get at the truth behind what had happened in Gwangju.

Collision Course between the Democracy Movement and the Military The conditions that had led to the May 18 Gwangju Uprising grew out of that earlier period in the 1970s, when popular movements around the country had been clamouring for p­ olitical change and democratization. On May 16, 1961, General Park Chung Hee had orchestrated the first military coup d’état in modern Korean history, later taking office as president from 1963 to 1979. Park aggressively implemented an export-driven industrialization strategy, which would utterly transform South Korean society (Kim and Vogel 2011). Following a ‘growth first’ model built on low-wage labour and state repression against workers and dissidents, Park’s developmental state achieved increasing rates of economic growth until the Second Oil Shock in 1979 sent export-oriented economies into a tailspin amid surging crude oil prices after the Iranian Revolution. As stagnant growth and rising inflation increased pressures for political change, anti-government resistance in Korea expanded beyond student activism into a broad coalition that included workers, journalists, lawyers and Christian activists (Chang 2015). In October 1979, Park targeted opposition party leader Kim Young Sam and ordered his expulsion from the National Assembly, which triggered the mass resignation of opposition lawmakers and sparked street protests in his home region. The unruly Busan-Masan Democratic Protests quickly grew to a mass scale until quashed by violent military force. Yet, the challenge presented by defiant demonstrations, encompassing workers as well as students, signalled a new stage in the democracy movement. The increasing political threat to Park’s government posed by dissident movements in the late 1970s generated diverging opinions about how the state should handle the growing protests. This rift lay at the heart of a heated argument on October 26, 1979, between Park Chung Hee’s bodyguard Cha Ji-cheol and Park’s head of intelligence Kim Jae-gyu. Arguing that harsh repression could not be indefinitely sustainable, Kim estimated that, to put down the demonstrations by force, they would have to be prepared to kill 3,000 people. Park’s 320

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response was only to double down, saying he would be willing to kill ten times as many demonstrators if necessary. Cha, who had increasingly become more influential in Park’s inner circle, upped the ante. Referring flippantly to how the Pol Pot regime had stayed in power despite having slaughtered up to three million Cambodians, Cha speculated that Park’s government could get away with killing one or two million demonstrators if that is what it took to quell future protests (Kim 2005, 206). As they continued to lambast Kim for not having been more ruthless in suppressing dissent, Park’s refusal to reconsider his ­hard-line position—or to question Cha’s judgement—registered as a crossing of the Rubicon for Kim Jae-gyu. After leaving the room to return with a revolver, Kim shot Cha and then Park, bringing a shocking end to the Fourth Republic. Despite the power vacuum that resulted from the assassination of Park, several senior ­generals and the Martial Law Commander declared that the military would maintain political neutrality. The ensuing liminal period seeded hopes for the revival of the democratization movements that had been suppressed under Park. However, Lt General Chun Doo Hwan, head of the Armed Forces Defence Security Command, led a revolt within the military in a power struggle against the existing leadership, which he displaced with his hard-line ­m ilitary faction on December 12, 1979. Pro-democracy student demonstrations nevertheless continued peacefully despite the persistence of martial law. Meanwhile, Chun’s faction continued its consolidation of power and by April took command of the KCIA. That marked a serious escalation, signifying a power grab that extended beyond the military. Protests and strikes erupted in cities nationwide, as students and citizens demanded the end of martial law and the removal of Chun from office (Ahn 2002). Democracy movement leaders sought to build pressure ahead of May 20th, when a provisional session of the National Assembly was expected to deliberate on the question of ending martial law. Calling upon the National Assembly to hasten their completion of a new constitution and to announce a firm date for direct elections, anti-junta demonstrations around the country reached their peak on May 15, 1980, when an estimated 100,000 students gathered in the capital city to march at Seoul Station. In response, on May 17 Chun’s military faction issued Martial Law Decree No. 10, banning all political activities, shutting down the National Assembly, closing universities, outlawing strikes, intensifying censorship restrictions and arresting prominent leaders of the pro-democracy movement. The rolling coup had escalated into a full military takeover of the country. The next morning in Gwangju, small groups of students making their way to a demonstration at Chonnam University were attacked and severely beaten by martial law forces. After the students fled to regroup downtown, a much larger sit-in demonstration of several hundred protesters soon coalesced in front of the provincial government building, the seat of South Jeolla’s regional government. By afternoon it became clear that the usual riot police had been replaced by elite paratroopers—commando units who were inexperienced with handling civilian unrest and were instead trained in using lethal force for frontline combat. Once deployed, these forces unleashed repressive violence of an intensity that had not been inflicted on prior political demonstrations in Gwangju or elsewhere. They set upon students with brutal force, using batons and bayonets and firing live rounds. Among those attacked without provocation were pregnant women, young female students and elderly bystanders. Appalled at the savagery and indiscriminate violence, Gwangju citizens joined the students in citywide protests, as those who rose up in defence of their home city soon became embroiled in urban warfare and a fight for survival. Protesters had armed themselves with rifles and other munitions taken from police stations and local armouries, eventually forcing the martial law soldiers back into a retreat to the edge of the city. 321

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During this reprieve from the onslaught, the period of ‘liberated Gwangju’ from May 21 to May 26, residents organized themselves into a self-governing community that would be remembered for its spirit of collective care and mutual aid. Despite the brevity of this period when the city was governed autonomously by a citizen-led committee, its memory as a time of orderly and spontaneous cooperation has been crucial to countering the military junta’s depictions of Gwangju as a site of chaos and lawlessness. Instead, even in a major urban ­centre among a population reeling from extreme trauma, the people of Gwangju demonstrated the capacity of ordinary citizens to look after one another, to live peacefully and to govern themselves (Katsiaficas 2013). On May 27, despite a final standoff by the Citizen’s Army, the provincial government building was besieged by commandos armed with guns, helicopters and armoured vehicles, which overwhelmed the headquarters of the resistance. The martial law troops had isolated Gwangju by barricading the city’s perimeter and cutting off telephone lines to create a cordon sanitaire within which to execute their carnage. While local activist groups have estimated over 600 fatalities, including those who later died of injuries (Son 2005), unofficial estimates by human rights organizations put the figure closer to 2,000 deaths. Regarding such uncertainty, many who went missing were never accounted for (Hwang, Lee and Jeon 2022, 336). Families were presumed to have hidden their victimization in fear of further military terror (Han 2005, 1002).

Four Missing Albums: The Partial Recovery of Confiscated Photographs When events in Gwangju were covered internationally, visual footage of the paratroopers’ brutality had the most explosive impact among all reportage. Although German journalist Jürgen Hinzpeter is widely remembered and celebrated for his role in bringing Gwangju to international attention through his filmed footage, at least a dozen overseas correspondents—including US and Japanese camera teams—were also on-site during the crackdown and reported for foreign news outlets on the violence and killing of civilians which they had witnessed ( Jackson 2020). In the wake of the massacre, Chun issued a personal directive to suppress all visual documentation related to May 18. Though South Korean activists had sought out photographs and live-action clips to support their attempts within the country to make known what had happened in Gwangju, this became an extremely difficult and risky endeavour. A grassroots genre would nonetheless emerge called Gwangju Video, compilations of video footage containing scenes from the 1980 uprising, which eventually comprised a key element in the consciousness-raising that later culminated in the 1987 June Struggle for the country’s democratization. In an article on Gwangju Video, Park Nohchool considers the impact and legacies of Chun’s suppression campaign, citing this passage from a classified U.S. National Security Agency document June 25, 1980: Chun Doo Hwan has issued a personal order to government investigators to find either photos or films in which the scenes of student or civilians beating soldiers are contained. The intention is to terminate the images of the atrocities that the paratroopers inflicted on civilians, which foreign news agencies such as Time and Newsweek have reported. Another intention is to use the photos to arrest the personages involved in anti-­government activities. (Park 2010, 190–191)

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The NSA document also referred to a presumption that the military junta had been ­unsuccessful in collecting any photographs, stating ‘no such things have been found so far. It is presumably because residents in Kwangju (Gwangju) resist cooperation with the delegates of the government’ (Park 2010, 191). What made these records even more sensitive was the likelihood that images of the uprising’s suppression would be used by martial law soldiers to persecute democracy activists. However, whether the authorities had not in fact confiscated visual materials by the time of the report, Chun’s martial law forces would ultimately amass well over a thousand images taken during the period of May 18. The military kept secret these photographs of Gwangju in 1980 as classified information, and the fact of their existence would remain hidden from the public for several decades. During the official address in Gwangju at the outset of his presidency, Moon used the occasion to issue the May 18th, 2017, Presidential Directive No. 8630 ‘to prevent the destruction of May 18th-related data and distortion of history’ (Im 2019). That directive prompted the unprecedented transfer of thirteen photo albums to the National Archives of Korea, yielding several hundred newly disclosed images from photographs of the Gwangju Uprising. Shot mostly in black-and-white interspersed with a handful of colour images, the prints had been compiled into albums by the then Armed Forces Defence Security Command. The albums were later sent to the National Archives in July 2018 by the Defence Security Support Command. They were publically released in November 2019 at a press ­ rganized by then-member of the National Assembly Park Jie-won, who had conference o once been chief presidential secretary to Kim Dae-jung. The albums include a total of 1,769 photographic prints, materials that had been confiscated from journalists and Gwangju citizens as well as photographs apparently taken by those working for the military. Several of the album pages circulated online following the press conference. Some of these photographs capture the massive scale of the demonstrations, such as one image of a plaza filled with a dense crowd of protesters. Another photograph captures what looks to be a melee among civilians and martial law soldiers wielding batons and riot shields, a moment of hand-to-hand combat taking place in broad daylight in the street. In another photograph, a mourner visibly beset with grief stands alongside a row of coffins ritually wrapped in cloth and laced in white rope. At a December 2018 briefing session held in Gwangju the following week, an advisor to The May 18 Memorial Foundation, Seong-choon Lee, observed that an extensive and critically important set of photographs appeared to have been excluded from the released material. All of the released albums were identified according to a numbering system that began with volume #5 and continued up to #17, meaning that at least four other volumes were missing. Given the sequencing of photographed subjects, Lee deduced that it was likely the excluded albums would have included sensitive images, such as the scenes when soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians in front of the provincial government building on May 21 (Kang, 2019). Park Jie-won, who had called for the public release of the albums, reported at the briefing session how he had inquired into the whereabouts of the missing volumes, but his office’s requests to the DSSC yielded only the reply that nothing further was known.

Transitional Justice and Commemorations, Evolving and Contested Remarkably, such images had remained hidden for the intervening decades, despite the processes of transitional justice during the 1990s (Kim 2010). Transitional justice refers to the range of procedures and mechanisms used by a society to deal with the legacy of mass atrocity

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and other large-scale abuses in order to transition from a time of oppression or v­ iolent conflict to one of peace, democracy, the rule of law and respect for individual and c­ ollective rights (Ramírez-Barat 2011). Among the myriad issues of contested h ­ istorical memory addressed as part of this process in Korea, the Gwangju Uprising is regarded, according to Gi-Wook Shin, as ‘the most important issue of transitional justice in the d­ emocratic era’ (Shin and Hwang 2003; Tiezzi 2022). In the wake of South Korea’s democratization in 1987, the National Assembly established the Special Hearing Committee, which considered the public testimony of politicians and military officers and whose hearings were televised as national broadcasts, watched avidly by a domestic audience of millions. In 1993, Kim Young Sam became the first democratically elected civilian president, marking a major break with the military past. Notably, official efforts since 1993 to valorise those killed and wounded in Gwangju were central to the restoration of honour and in transforming victims into heroes. Yet, such portrayals also reflect an appropriation of the uprising by official entities to claim legitimacy as the heirs of Korea’s historical democratic movements (Lewis 2002; Baker 2003). In 1997, the Gwangju Uprising became officially recognized as a “democracy movement” (Baik 2012, 177), rejecting the term ‘riot’ in an effort to repair the reputations of those who had been targeted by the Chun regime and falsely accused of having taken part in a Communist provocation (Hwang 2022, 185). By that year, the ‘Special Act on the May 18 Democratization Movement’ extended the statute of limitations for prosecuting perpetrators in court, and the resulting investigations regarding the Gwangju Uprising culminated in a series of subsequent trials. Those most famously included the ‘trial of the century’ which took place in 1996 and ended in the conviction and imprisonment of two former South Korean presidents for their roles as the main perpetrators (West 1997). Both Chun and his successor Roh Tae Woo were convicted on charges of ­bribery, corruption, treason and insurrection, with Chun receiving a death sentence. In December 1997, President Kim Young Sam granted a special pardon to both Chun and Roh, and Chun’s death sentence was commuted. The pardon was a concession made to political conservatives at the request of then-incoming President Kim Dae-jung on the grounds of promoting national unity and reconciliation. In 2000, Kim became the first South Korean president to give the keynote address at the May 18 commemoration in Gwangju, beginning a tradition of presidential addresses and symbolic endorsement of the annual ceremonies by the Blue House, which would continue throughout the term of his successor Roh Moo-hyun. In contrast, the subsequent conservative presidents, Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, departed from that tradition with actions perceived as attempts to downgrade the event (Mosler 2020, 66). For example, Lee sent his prime minister in his place in 2010, and in other years when Lee and later Park did attend the May 18 commemorations, they curtailed government support while modifying the ceremonies in ways that alienated local stakeholders. For example, the annual ceremonies include the recitation of a statement regarding the historical meaning of May 18, and that role had been assigned to the head of a civic group every year since 1997. However, this changed under the Lee Administration beginning in 2009 when the customary interpretive role was given instead to the head of a conservative veterans’ organization. Such changes so offended members of bereaved families of the Gwangju Uprising that, from 2010 to 2016, they held ceremonies separate from the official state-sponsored ones. Meanwhile Gwangju-based groups organized an application to UNESCOs Memory of the World registry on behalf of the Archives for the May 18 Democratic Uprising, whose nomination for inscription was approved in 2011. With the election of Moon Jae-in in 2017, the observance of the Gwangju Uprising again took on the character of a national memorial day 324

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for Korean democracy. Even after the conservative former prosecutor Yoon Seok-yeol took office in 2022, participation in May 18 official ceremonies by members from both conservative and progressive parties was described as having signalled a broad consensus (Tiezzi 2022) regarding the meaning of the Gwangju Uprising. Nevertheless, Gwangju continues to be targeted by South Korean right-wing extremists who have renewed efforts to turn May 18 into a trigger for controversy within the landscape of ideologically charged domestic Korean politics. Contemporary far-right extremists continue to falsely paint the Gwangju Uprising as a North Korean provocation. Without substantiation, they claim that a large North Korean army unit had been poised to invade South Korea, representing a recursion to the military junta’s discredited 1980 propaganda (Martin 2021). Tim Shorrock has painstakingly shown, based on his analysis of declassified US cables secured through FOIA requests, that in May 1980 US intelligence agencies considered reports of impending invasion as lacking credibility. Indeed, both the US military and their South Korean counterparts at the time had been aware of the indigenous nature of the rebellion (Shorrock 2017), and this mutual understanding was later confirmed in an early post-democratization hearing on the Gwangju Uprising held in 1988 (Kim 2019). The former US military intelligence specialist who attested to this, Kim Yong-chang, testified again before the May 18 fact-finding commission in 2019, when he stated that undercover South Korean soldiers, dressed in worn-out clothes to pose as civilians, were deployed to Gwangju in 1980. Kim also testified that Chun Doo Hwan himself was present in the city on May 21, when soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians (Kim 2019), refuting Chun’s controversial 2017 memoir where he denied his role in the mass killings. Although Chun was found guilty on charges of defaming the late Catholic priest Cho Pius, a May 18 eyewitness, Chun died in 2021 without having issued an apology or acknowledging his role in the Gwangju massacre.

Litigating on Behalf of Transitional Justice, Redux In this context, the recent emergence of rare film footage and photographs from Gwangju in 1980 has taken on a timely significance. While transitional justice is most often associated with its manifestations on an institutional level, such as through the convening of truth commissions and other legal mechanisms, transitional justice also plays out on a cultural level. The legal scholar Han In-Sup has analysed how Korea developed its own strategy for redressing historical wrongs committed by the state, identifying five guiding principles that were declared and put into action with respect to the Gwangju massacre: truth, justice, compensation, honour-restoration and commemoration. He writes, The [G]wangju principles, as they were called, were widely accepted as basic propositions for righting the effects of state atrocities. After a heated debate within all sectors of Korean society, the [G]wangju principles became nationally recognized as the guiding principles for resolving past wrongs. (Han 2005, 1022) Notably, in this process, concepts commonly invoked in legal proceedings—namely, truth, justice and compensation—are juxtaposed alongside concepts whose meaning would be regarded as more culturally mediated: the restoration of honour and commemoration. After a decades-long movement achieved recognition for the historical significance of the Gwangju Uprising—endorsed by authoritative legal, political and cultural institutions both nationally and internationally—it may seem laughable that a small minority of 325

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far-right conservatives have revived discredited allegations claiming the popular ­rebellion of May  1980 to be a North Korean operation. Nevertheless, these Gwangju massacre deniers must be refuted and revealed for what they are. Indeed, Bradley K. Martin, an American journalist who reported on the Gwangju Uprising in 1980 for the Baltimore Sun, has taken pains over the decades to debunk the rightist theories about May 18 (e.g. Martin 2000, 2021). Providing point-by-point rejoinders based on evidence as well as his firsthand experience as a witness to the historical events, Martin has established how claims made by the military junta in 1980 were never credible. Nonetheless, these debunked conspiracy theories are lately being recirculated by Ilbe, an extreme alt-right nationalist group that targets women and attacks people from Jeolla Province where Gwangju is located (see Fahy Chapter 29 on Ilbe). Yoonkyung Lee explains that such illiberal political extremists in South Korea, as in Japan, reflect the international phenomenon of rising attacks on democratic institutions by the far right, while they also differ from their counterparts in Europe insofar as the continuities of the Cold War in East Asia have sustained the extreme right’s political power (Lee 2021). The extreme right in contemporary South Korea resorts to a cruel strategy in seeking to cause distress among survivors and the bereaved families of those victimized under military dictatorship. Even if the far right’s allegations regarding Gwangju in 1980 have been refuted, this matters little to the Ilbe network. Instead, in continuing to circulate hateful rhetoric and vicious jokes in their echo chambers online, right-wing extremists have attempted to sabotage transitional justice and the restoration of honour for victims and traumatized survivors. The far right has thus waged a culture war to attack the hard-won gains achieved through democratization and the processes of historical redress. Meanwhile, political organizing on social media by progressives has also gained momentum transnationally, and has merged with the global BTS phenomenon in recent years (Cho 2022). Estimated at tens of millions globally, ARMY—the collective moniker of BTS fans—is often called the most powerful fanbase in the world and is among the most diverse with its membership spanning dozens of countries (Kim 2022). To advocate for preserving the history of May 18 as a democracy movement, the K-pop group and their fans have taken up practices of memory activism, or strategic efforts to commemorate a contested past. In BTS’s upbeat 2015 song ‘Ma City’, the group’s lead dancer J-Hope pays homage to Gwangju as his birthplace. He raps ‘If you want to see me, then get together at seven o’clock. Everyone, dial it: 062–518’. The reference to ‘seven o’clock’ is to hit back at derogatory references to Gwangju by Ilbe, which insinuates a connection between the city and North Korea by citing their respective clock-hand positions relative to Seoul. Appropriating ‘seven o’clock’, the ‘Ma City’ lyrics neutralize what had otherwise been a disparaging connotation and instead elide the reference with the call for ARMY to text ‘062–518’, which refers to the combination of the area code for Gwangju, 062, with 5.18 for the Gwangju Uprising. Echoing the 2010 song ‘518–062’—produced in the group’s pre-debut period by Suga, another BTS member—the lyrics of ‘Ma City’ highlight ‘062– 518’ as a rallying call to marshal the millions-strong influence of ARMY. As a memory-activist strategy to counter the historical distortion spread by Ilbe, the phrase ‘062–518’ exhorts BTS fans to overwhelm the online hate of massacre deniers with ARMY’s massive numbers globally, encouraging them to do so by learning more about and remembering the Gwangju Uprising. At this juncture, it is extraordinary that an extensive set of previously unseen visual documentation of May 18 has emerged during the period since 2017 and that such materials

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have been made newly available to the public for the first time. Taken together, the recently disclosed seventy-two minutes of film footage and thirteen albums of photographs signify an unprecedented belated expansion of the existing visual record of what happened in Gwangju in 1980. What does the recent recovery of hundreds of photographs reveal about the ongoing search for accountability, despite the dramatic convictions in the late 1990s? Han In-Sup writes, ‘[B]ecause the defendants had been based in Seoul, the military headquarters, during the massacre, the public prosecutors focused their efforts on exposing the lines of communication between the Seoul headquarters and the martial troops in Kwangju. Thus, what actually happened in Kwangju (the actual massacre) was not fully presented to the court’ (Han 2005, 1023). Furthermore, the inability of those earlier trials to have retrieved these suppressed photographs and film recordings raises questions what had remained off-limits in the quest for transitional justice. Following the 2018 public screening in Gwangju of the untitled seventy-two minutes of recovered film footage, The May 18 Memorial Foundation announced its staff would arrange appointments for individuals to view the video, providing the opportunity for local residents to come forward if they wished to see the footage privately. According to representatives of the foundation, another motivation for sponsoring the screening and posting the footage online was also to encourage individuals to come forward if they had their own photographs, objects or testimonies to share (An 2018). Among those who visited, former reporters and others brought artefacts they had held in their own personal collections for decades and never disclosed, such as pages from a diary and the handwritten manuscript for a news article that had been written in May 1980. Donations also included a cache of forty photographs, as well as a 35 mm camera with zoom lenses used to document the Gwangju Uprising. In this way, the commemorative screening and public posting of footage opened spaces for ordinary citizens to contribute in personal, embodied and material ways that help to further the ongoing processes of transitional justice. Reflecting the ongoing continuation of the May 18 Democratization Movement, public disclosure of newly recovered visual evidence from Gwangju confirms the necessity of renewed advocacy on behalf of transitional justice in the twenty-first century—not only through formal institutions like fact-finding committees but also in cultural realms and in the public sphere. After all, eyewitness testimony and first-hand documentation provided the primary means for overcoming the isolation that had been imposed upon Gwangju under martial law, enforced physically by military barricades and through the censorship of information. To counter the historical distortion of brutal state repression which traumatized victims and survivors, social-justice advocates had to persist in exposing and countering the extensive groundwork that right-wing extremists had laid for their campaign of disinformation. While that approach was essential in securing the eventual legal vindication of the Gwangju trials in the late twentieth century, its necessity as a counterstrategy against rightist distortion remains true today, albeit on a broader scale and mediated by the internet. Events aimed at publicizing the newly available photographs and film footage as significant breakthroughs—including commemorative ceremonies, film screenings, press conferences, research-based briefing sessions and the posting of materials online—serve to encourage others to similarly come forward with eyewitness-based materials that may have been long kept private in hidden archives. The recent revelation of new evidence and release of newly available visual documentation of May 18 calls attention to the existence of other still-undisclosed sources which must be recovered to gain a fuller, more accurate picture of Gwangju in 1980.

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Notes 1. This chapter generally employs the Revised Romanization of Korean, the official romanization system used in South Korea since 2000. Some terms are followed in parentheses by its equivalent in the older McCune-Reischauer system, which was in use at the time of twentieth-century events discussed in this chapter and which remains widely used in academic scholarship. Korean personal names have the family name appear first, and Revised Romanization is used as the default. Exceptions include authors who have published in English, for whom their own preferred spelling is used. In addition, names of South Korean presidents reflect the spelling used by the end of their respective term in office because such references have become conventional (e.g. Park Chung Hee, Kim Dae-jung).

Works Cited Ahn, J.C. (2002) ‘The Significance of Settling the Past of the December 12 Coup and the May 18 Gwangju Uprising’. Korea Journal, 42 (3), 112–138. An, B.H. (2018) ‘5.18 Minjuhwa undong migonggae girongmul gijeung itttara’. Namdo Broadcasting Network. Online. Available HTTP: (Date accessed 24/04/2022). Bae, J. (2017) ‘Pres. Moon Vows to Restore Democracy by Upholding Gwangju Uprising Spirit’. KBS World. Online. Available HTTP: (Date accessed 18/05/2017). Baik, T.U. (2012) “Fairness in Transitional Justice Initiatives: The Case of South Korea.”  Buffalo Human Rights Law Review 19, 169-191. Baker, D. (2003) ‘Victims and Heroes: Competing Visions of May 18’, 87–108, in Contentious Kwangju: The May 18 Uprising in Korea’s Past and Present. Edited by Gi-Wook Shin and Kyung Moon Hwang. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Chang, P. (2015) Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970–1979. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Cho, M. (2022) ‘Anonymous, QAnon, Tik-tok Teens, K-pop Fans’. NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, 11 (1), 169–193. Han, I.S. (2005) ‘Kwangju and beyond: Coping with Past State Atrocities in South Korea’. Human Rights Quarterly, 27 (3), 998–1045. Han, K. (2016) Human Acts. Translated by Deborah Smith. New York: Hogarth. Hwang, I. (2022) Human Rights and Transnational Democracy in South Korea. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hwang, S., Lee, J.E., Jeon, Y.H. (2022) Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea. London: Verso Books. Im, D. (2019) ‘Boansa, 5.18 sajin 1769jang gonggaehanda’. Gwangju Ilbo. Online. Available HTTP: (Date accessed 24/04/2022) Jackson, A. (2020) ‘Jürgen Hinzpeter and Foreign Correspondents in the 1980 Kwangju Uprising’. International Journal of Asian Studies 17, 19–37. Jung, K.S. (2003) ‘The Experience of the May 18 Uprising and the Communal Imagination’. New Political Science, 25(2), 241–259. Kang, G.N. (2019) ‘5.18 sajincheop “Geu ane eomneun jinsil jumokhaeya”’. Gwangjudream. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.gjdream.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=501143 (Date accessed 05/07/2022). Katsiaficas, G. (2006) ‘Remembering the Gwangju Uprising,’ 13–35, in G. Katsiaficas and K. Na (eds.) South Korean Democracy: Legacy of the Gwangju Uprising. London: Routledge. Kim, B. and Vogel, E. (eds.) (2011) The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea, New York: Harvard University Press. Kim. B.G. (2019) ‘Former President Chun Doo-hwan was present in Gwangju on May 21, 1980’. The Korea Herald. Online. Available HTTP: (Date accessed 13/05/2019).

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Commemorative Witness Kim, D.C. (2010) ‘Korea’s Movement to Settle the Past Issues and Peace in East Asia’. Korea Journal 50 (4), 1–34. Kim, E.T. (2022) ‘How BTS Became One of the Most Popular Bands in History’. The New Yorker, 21 June 2022. Online. Available HTTP: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/­joiningthe-bts-army (Date accessed 24/06/2022). Kim, H. (2011) ‘The Commemoration of the Gwangju Uprising: of the Remnants in the Nation States’ Historical Memory’. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 12 (4), 611–621. Kim, J.N. (2005) Jinsil, Gwangjangeseoda: Minjuhwa undong 30nyeongui yeokjeong. Seoul: Changbi. Kim, J.S. (2018) ‘5.18 migonggae yeongsang, 38nyeon mane bicheul boda…geu nal ui ­hangjaeng saengsaeng’. Yonhap. Online. Available HTTP: . Kim, N. (2017) ‘Candlelight and the Yellow Ribbon: Catalyzing Re-Democratization in South Korea’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 15 (14), 1–21. Lee, Y. (2022) Between the Streets and the Assembly. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Lee, Y. (2021) ‘Cold War Undercurrents: The Extreme-Right Variants in East Asia’. Politics & Society 49 (3), 403–430. Lewis, L.S. (2002) Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Martin, B.K. (2021) ‘Gwangju Massacre Deniers Still Seek Comfort in North Plot’ Online. Available HTTP: (Date accessed 19/05/2021). Martin, B.K. (1997) ‘Yun Sang Won: The Knowledge in Those Eyes’, in Kwangju in the Eyes of the World: The Personal Recollections of the Foreign Correspondents Covering the Kwangju Uprising, ed. Amalie M. Weber, pp. 69–95. Seoul, South Korea: Pulbit. Mosler, H.B. (2020) ‘The Contested Political Remembrance of the Kwangju Uprising and Presidential Speeches in South Korea’. S/N Korean Humanities, 6 (1), 49–92. Na, K.C. (2001) ‘A New Perspective on the Gwangju People’s Resistance Struggle: 1980–1997’. New Political Science, 23 (4), 477–491. Oworui Cheongchun (2021). Created by Moon Jun-ha, KBS Drama Production. Palais, James B. (1986) Human Rights in Korea. Washington, DC: Asia Watch. Park, Nohchool (2010). ‘Gwangju Video and the Tradition of South Korean Independent Documentaries’. The Review of Korean Studies 13 (2), 187–214. Ramírez-Barat, C. (2011) Making an Impact: Guidelines on Designing and Implementing Outreach Programs for Transitional Justice. New York: International Center for Transitional Justice. Ryu, Y. (2018) Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shin, G.W. and Hwang, K.M, eds. (2003) Contentious Kwangju. The May 18th Uprising in Korea’s Past and Present. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld Publishers. Shorrock, Tim (2017) ‘The Gwangju Uprising and North Korea: What We Can Learn from Declassified Documents’. 38North. Online. Available HTTP: (Date accessed 07/10/2017) Son, S.W. (2005) ‘Owoldanche, ‘5.18 gwallyeon samangja 606myeong’’. Maeil Business News. Online. Available HTTP: (11/07/2022). Taeksi Unjeonsa (2017). Directed by Jang Hoon, The Lamp. Tiezzi, S. (2022) ‘Gi-Wook Shin on Gwangju and South Korea’s Democracy’. The Diplomat. Online. Available HTTP: (Date accessed 03/06/2022). West, J.M. (1997) ‘Martial Lawlessness: The Legal Aftermath of Kwangju’. Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 6 (1), 85–168.

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27 THE POLITICS OF FORGETTING Unmaking Memories and Reacting to Memory-Place-Making HaeRan Shin and Yerin Jin

Introduction This chapter examines the politics of forgetting and the unmaking of place-of-memory as a corollary to place-of-memory making. As the obverse of remembering, forgetting has received increasing attention in discussions on iconoclasm (Maddrell and Sidaway 2016) and dismantling memory places. However, those spatial practices for forgetting employed by authoritative regimes and right-wing actors wishing to obfuscate traumatic memories have not been studied nearly enough. Forgetting as ‘active reaction’ to place-of-memory making warrants examination—not as a mere addendum but as the main event. Forgetting practices include preventing, interfering, protesting, failing to engage and replacing places of memory as well as the misremembering of events. By focusing on how the rejection of a memory site strips it of its meaning and creates a void, we contribute to a larger discussion on the spatial and political practices and ramifications of forgetting, not least by governmental powers. To explore forgetting and place-of-memory unmaking, we examine two traumatic events in South Korea’s history: the May 18 Democratic Uprising in Gwangju and the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster. The May 18 Democratic Uprising in 1980 in the city of Gwangju was an anti-dictatorship demonstration that the national government suppressed using the military, resulting in 200–2,000 deaths, depending on cited sources (Yea 2002, 1557). The Sewol Ferry (Sewolho) disaster, however, claimed the lives of 304 of the 476 people on board (Daum Sewol Ferry 72 hours record) on a routine journey from Incheon to Jeju. Despite over thirty years separating the two very different events, both resulted in widespread anger directed at the national governments of the day, and both led to each government’s eventual downfall. Despite deposing the two corrupt governments that obstructed or blatantly prevented serial attempts to memorialise these events with memory places, efforts to forget these tragedies persist. Based on archival analysis, in-depth interviews and site visits, this study demonstrates that the politics of forgetting employed by the then-governing party to mitigate its culpability had the support of political allies. While we are not suggesting that the governmental methods of forgetting had the unanimous support of Koreans, we do argue that some citizens and organisations aligned with the right-wing national regimes seeking to marginalise or downplay these tragedies. To focus exclusively on the politics of forgetting, we selected 330

DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-31

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only twenty-eight interviews that directly addressed these subjects from the seventy-four ­interviews that we conducted for more comprehensive research on the two case studies.

The Politics of Memory and Forgetting Memories can survive by ‘temporally anchoring’ themselves to specific places (Huyssen 1995, 7). Places of memory (Connerton 1989; Said 2000; Yea 2002) such as a monument, a museum, a gallery (Edensor 1997; Mitchell 2003) or a landmark raise social awareness by providing for the physical rearrangement of relevant materials (Mayo 1988). From this place-making, the politics of memory has emerged (Hoelscher and Alderman 2004; Shin 2016a). In the initial stages, the first generation of actors influence collective memory formation and dictate which virtues and aspects of events should be stressed (Charlesworth 1994; Connerton 1989; Legg 2007). Eventually, however, succeeding generations come to be motivated by contemporary interests and needs that often supplant concern for preserving the past (Foote 1997; Huyssen 2000, 2003; Till 2005). External challenges from proponents who advocate forgetting (Lee and Yeoh 2006; Legg 2007; Muzaini 2015) present an a­ dditional complication. Those activities designed to stop, interfere or replace the place-making of memories constitute as important a part of the politics of memory as the place-making itself (Suleiman 2006). Forgetting can develop through inaction, hesitation and silence, but it can also arise from a need to submit to explicit suppression ( Jelin 2007). Whether actors advance remembering or forgetting, the endeavours of both constitute the politics of memory (Biggar 2003; De Brito et al. 2001; Hayden 1997; Mitchell 2003). With the focus being on forgetting, we borrow from the seven types of forgetting as outlined by Connerton (2008, 61–66). We have classified forgetting activities into categories based on three of the seven types of forgetting, namely ‘repressive erasure’, ‘prescriptive ­forgetting’ and ‘forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity’. Repressive erasure is defined as the active suppression of remembering through the destruction or dismantlement of places central to the collective memory and/or the prohibition of events or activities with a memorial agenda. Both governments in power at the time of these tragedies employed repressive erasure tactics. The authoritarian South Korean government in the 1980s threatened violent reprisals and arrest if events were held honouring the victims of the May 18 Democratic Uprising in Gwangju. In contrast, after two decades of civilian democratic rule the Park Geun-hye regime (2013–2017) could not be seen directly threatening citizens. It instead blacklisted artists who supported memorialisation activities for the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster in a bid to discourage artistic commentary on the disastrous response to this tragedy. Prescriptive forgetting unlike repressive erasure is a unanimous agreement to allow tragic events to fade from memory through inaction (Schindel and Colombo 2014). Citizens of Gwangju, fearing further repercussions if caught contradicting the fabrications and propaganda promulgated by the government on the uprising, by tacit agreement let the truth of events lie dormant. In the case of the Sewol Ferry disaster, it was the national government that attempted to impose prescriptive forgetting. By not responding to the bereaved families’ hunger strike, the government probably hoped that the families would eventually give up and forget. Forgetting in the formation of a new identity revises or manipulates the history of ­memory-relevant places, often to accommodate current purposes; in the process, the original significance is so altered as to be completely lost and forgotten (Strange and Kempa 331

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2003). However, this applies more so to place-of-memory making in Gwangju than to the Sewol Ferry disaster. When local elites proposed the Gwangju Biennale in 1995, it was not to commemorate the uprising but to transform the city’s reputation for civic unrest into one of civic engagement in art (Shin 2004). An anti-biennale movement, however, compelled the memorialisation of May 18 to be incorporated into successive biennales, a nexus of memory, art and politics.

The May 18 Democratic Uprising Following President Park Chung-hee’s assassination on 26 October 1979, ending his ­seventeen-year dictatorship, a series of democratic movements broke out nationwide. Hopes for democracy were frustrated when Chun Doo Hwan instigated a coup d’état on 17 May 1980, and declared martial law. Immediately after taking power, the new military authorities pressed the National Assembly to expand martial law to include all of South Korea. The National Assembly introduced laws that strictly circumscribed civic political activities, closed universities, censored the media and, in a final act, dissolved the assembly itself (Shin and Hwang 2003). South Korean college students’ outrage and desire for democracy was the catalyst for the May 18 Democratic Uprising in the city of Gwangju that lasted until 27 May 1980, some ten days later. The peaceful demonstration by nearly 200 students from the Jeonnam National University in Gwangju requested that the military regime step down and make way for democracy. The Korean Special Forces were dispatched to suppress the protest, an order that resulted in the infamous civilian massacre of May 18. The army indiscriminately beat ­civilians, maiming and killing numerous protesters and bystanders alike. In response, ­citizens armed themselves and formed a militia to defend their lives and their city from government forces. The standoff between Gwangju’s citizens and the militia ended 27 May when the last surviving protesters were killed in the Byeolgwan, an annexe of the South Jeolla Provincial Hall. From the moment the Korean Special Forces arrived, Gwangju was locked down and domestic news outlets were banned from reporting on events. Chun’s government eventually issued a statement claiming that military intervention had been necessary to suppress a rebellion by North Korean spies and anti-government conspirators to overthrow the regime. In the end, Mangwol-dong Cemetery where civilian casualties were buried and the Byeolgwan emerged as the two most important sites in the May 18 memory and at the centre of the politics of forgetting. In 1990, ten years after the uprising, the first democratically elected president recognised May 18 for the pro-democracy activism it represented and initiated projects to commemorate the victims of the military crackdown. Efforts to redress the wrongs continued with the first civilian government led by President Kim Young Sam inaugurated in 1993. Proposing a memorialisation project, Kim’s government meticulously designed a new cemetery and officially committed to creating it as the final resting place for the victims to replace the original Mangwol-dong Cemetery. In cases where the two sites are being directly compared, the term ‘Old Mangwol-dong Cemetery’ refers to the original cemetery to avoid any confusion. Though well-intentioned, Kim’s government inadvertently caused controversy as the symbolic power of Mangwol-dong was weakened by the relocation. President Roh Moo Hyun (2003–2008) continued these efforts to compensate Gwangju for the loss and deprivation suffered after the uprising, designating Gwangju the Hub City of Asian Culture. After selecting the former South Jeolla Provincial Hall to be remodelled as the Asia Culture Centre (Hub City of Asian Culture), protests followed when it became 332

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clear the building plans would demolish the Byeolgwan, a site central to May 18 places of memory, and construction halted (Shin 2016a). While the projects proposed by Kim and Roh were overtures of reconciliation, they both had elements of repressive erasure, though unintended, that inevitably offended the victims and their families. In addition to these commemoration efforts, Kim’s government opened a new investigation into the May 18 Democratic Uprising for an official re-evaluation of events that would offer an impartial report on what occurred. As of 2020, former President Chun Doo Hwan was found guilty of slandering the families of the victims but, despite evidence implicating him, he was never held directly accountable for the Gwangju massacre before he died in 2021.

The Sewol Ferry Disaster On 16 April 2014, a 6,835-tonne ferry carrying 476 passengers sank off the southwestern coast of South Korea near Jindo Island. Of the 304 people who died, 261 were teachers and students (12 teachers, 249 students) from Danwon High School in the city of Ansan in Gyeonggi Province. Though the captain sent a distress signal, the ship was 1.5 kilometres from land and rapidly capsizing. For reasons that have not been adequately explained, crew members repeatedly instructed passengers to remain in their cabins rather than initiating evacuation protocols. More than half of those who were pulled from the water were saved by sailors in fishing boats and other commercial vessels, not by the National Coast Guard. President Park Geun-hye waited seven hours to make a public appearance in an address on the disaster that was deemed inadequate considering the massive loss of young lives. The Park administration’s belated emergency response to the disaster was condemned and ­provoked widespread social anger. Ultimately, the negligent management of the Sewol Ferry disaster proved her political incompetence and was the initial impetus for her eventual ­impeachment in March 2017 (Choe 2018). While the government encouraged forgetting in the case of public gatherings in Gwanghwamun Plaza, it was regular citizens who were largely responsible for forgetting in the cases of the memory classrooms in Danwon High School and the 4·16 Safety Park. Gwanghwamun Plaza, the first site of place-making, is a 555-metre-long public square located in the heart of Seoul. In the area of the square that fronts the president’s office, a haphazard congregation of bereaved families and friends gathered in an outpouring of grief that quickly turned to anger when the government’s incompetent handling of the disaster became evident. The group of mourners expeditiously mobilised into an organised sit-in demanding answers and accountability and resulting in an unplanned place-making in commemoration of the Sewol disaster. From July 2014 to March 2019, victims’ families occupied a part of Gwanghwamun Plaza in tents the Seoul city government whose Mayor was from the opposite party provided. Though the sit-in was mainly comprised of the victims’ families, the demands for an explanation erupted across Korea as thousands of v­ olunteers collected more than ten million signatures petitioning the government for a proper investigation. Pope Francis in a visit to South Korea in August 2014 demonstrated his empathy for the victims’ families when he attended a private meeting with them. In March 2019, the mourners’ unyielding perseverance was rewarded when the government conceded to demands and enacted a special law that would appoint a non-aligned panel with the authority to investigate accidents ( Jin 2018), which did not clarify what caused the disaster. Public pressure, in this instance, prevented the disaster from being forgotten and the government simply ‘moving on’. 333

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The second site we discuss is Danwon High School in Ansan. For the city, news of 261 lives lost was distressing, but for the high school where teachers and students spent significant time together, it was devastating. In an innocent expression of sorrow, the students of Danwon High School placed letters and Post-its, flowers and candy on their friends’ and teachers’ seats in what came to be known as memory classrooms (Shin 2016b). These nine memory classrooms were opened to the public, admitting visitors to view these heartfelt expressions of grief. For just over two years these classrooms remained undisturbed shrines to the victims, but as time passed it became difficult to justify this use of space for places of memory to the exclusion of all else (Daum Sewol Ferry 72 hours). The school, other students’ parents and public officials in the government office of education reasoned that the memory classrooms should revert to regular-use classrooms in the upcoming year (Kim 2015). In August 2016, the tributes were removed from the classrooms and transported to a permanent installation open to public viewing in the Ansan Office of Education. The third site relevant to commemorating the Sewol Ferry disaster is Ansan 4.16 Safety Park. The Ansan Memorialisation Committee began serious discussions for the creation of the memorial park in July 2016. However, outspoken right-wing opponents of the park convinced the committee and city government officials to defer the proposal. Almost two years on, Mayor Je Jong Gil revived the concept for the Ansan Safety Park, officially announcing in February 2018 his decision to proceed with construction. Two months later, on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Sewol Ferry disaster, President Moon Jae-in provided muchneeded support when he endorsed Ansan Safety Park on his social network account ( Jin 2020). Protests delayed the park’s construction for eight years, but at the time of writing, there are plans to start building in September 2022 and for the park to be completed in 2024 (Tables 27.1 and 27.2).

Table 27.1  Timeline: May 18 Democratic Uprising and Remembering/Forgetting Date

Event

May 1980 June 1988

May 18 Democratic Uprising followed by media blackout. Special Committee formed for the Investigation of the Facts of May 18 Gwangju Democratisation Movement. Plans were announced that an Asian Culture Centre would be built at the site of the Byeolgwan of the former South Jeolla Provincial Hall requiring its demolition. May 18 organisation members and citizens opposed the construction of the Asian Culture Centre. Construction was temporarily stopped due to intensifying conflicts. Construction resumed. Asia Culture Centre opened. President Moon Jae-in promised to restore South Jeolla Provincial Hall to its original layout at the thirty-seventh May 18 Uprising memorial ceremony. A Taxi Driver, a movie about the Gwangju uprising, drew ten million viewers in a nation of about fifty-one million people. Protests against the creation of Ansan Safety Park held in front of city hall. Mayor of Ansan announced Ansan Safety Park would be added to Hwarang Amusement Park.

December 2005

February 2008 December 2008 February 2009 November 2015 May 2017 August 2017 June 30, 2017 February 28, 2018

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The Politics of Forgetting Table 27.2  Timeline: Sewol Ferry Disaster and Remembering/Forgetting Date

Event

April 16, 2014 July 14, 2014

Sewol Ferry sank killing 304 people. Hunger strike of victims’ families held in Gwanghwamun Plaza in central Seoul. Right-wing protestors staged eating spectacle in front of fasting victims’ families in the plaza. Parents Committee for Ansan Danwon High School demanded the dismantling of memory classrooms. Memory classrooms moved to Ansan Office of Education. President Park Geun Hye was impeached. President Moon Jae-in from the liberal opposition party was elected.

October 9, 2014 February 15, 2016 August 20, 2016 March 10, 2017 May 10, 2017

The Politics of Forgetting by Forgetting Places of Memories Overall Comparisons between the Two Cases It might seem that the armed suppression of a peaceful protest and the failure to properly address a nautical disaster are not comparable. The transition from military dictatorship to democracy over the thirty years separating the events transformed the political landscape and how governments reacted to these events. The military authoritarian regime that ruled in South Korea on May 18, 1980, could in autocratic fashion conceal the truth of events from the rest of the country. In 2014, the government could not unilaterally suppress news of their inept management of the Sewol Ferry disaster and instead relied on the politics of forgetting to obscure their missteps ( Jin 2018, 2020; Shin 2016b). The two cases also differed in terms of attaching meaning to memory-relevant places. The May 18 uprising had the dubious advantage of two physical sites for place-making and forgetting of places: the protesters’ last stand in South Jeolla Provincial Hall and their graves in Mangwol-dong Cemetery (Shin and Hwang 2003; Yea 2002). The Sewol Ferry disaster took place at sea, and thus lacked a physical location to which families could link memorial meanings. Furthermore, making and forgetting memory places such as the memory classrooms were transitory until spaces such as the permanent installation and park were created specifically for them. Despite appearing to be disparate events, however, there were several similarities. Most notably right-wing governments were in power at the time of both incidents and held responsible for the trauma, whether directly or indirectly. In both cases, the people stood up to state power to ensure that the tragedies were properly commemorated and sought to hold powerful leaders accountable for their actions, strong examples of people power and the vibrant spirit of democracy. Both the Chun and Park governments attempted to discredit the victims’ families, alleging that they were North Korean sympathisers or that they were members of the Jongbuk Jwapa (Pro-North Korea left-wing group), but these allegations have been debunked. In both cases, right-wing followers supported or actively joined forgetting activities whereas liberals tended to support remembering, aggravating existing societal and political divisions in Korea (Shin 2016b, 2014). In addition to similar attempts to denigrate the victims, the two presidents shared similar fates owing to their management of the events over which they presided. In June 1987, 335

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nationwide protests shook the military regime to its foundation and finished what the May 18 protests had started: the democratisation of Korea (Shin 2004, 2014; Vink 2010; Yea 2002). The truth of the May 18 Democratic Uprising that was the precursor to the democracy movement (Abelmann 1996, 15) was exposed, and in 1996 former President Chun was tried for his crimes and sentenced to death although he was pardoned and released from prison the following year. The Park regime was also toppled by protests as millions of citizens engaged in the yellow ribbon campaign, which was specific to the memory of the Sewol victims, and held massive street candlelight vigils against Park’s abuse of power every weekend (N. Kim 2017). President Park Geun-hye was finally impeached and convicted for her crimes in 2016. She was pardoned and released from jail in late 2021 after serving five years of a twenty-year sentence. In regard to the politics of forgetting, however, the two events differed once again. The May 18 uprising had elements of repressive erasure, prescriptive forgetting and later the formation of a new identity (Connerton 2008), while the Sewol Ferry Disaster was primaily about repressive erasure and prescriptive forgetting.

Repressive Erasure and Prescriptive Forgetting—May 18 Places of Memory Mangwol-dong cemetery endured repressive erasure and prescriptive forgetting under the military government and later the formation of a new identity under the civilian government after democratisation. Old Mangwol-dong is significant to May 18 as the unconsecrated ground where 137 dead civilians were interned after the government denied their burial in the official cemetery for their part in the resistance (Yea 2002). The cemetery’s significance is such that it was subjected to prescriptive forgetting under the National Security Act since 1948. After grieving families and nearly 400 citizens were arrested for congregating there on 17 May 1981, students, politicians and civic activists involved in the democratisation movement continued to commemorate the May 18 uprising at the cemetery covertly. The cemetery, already a symbol and rallying point for the democratisation movement, gained further recognition when other key activists in the democratic movement were buried there in the 1980s and 1990s. Chun’s government, endeavouring to diminish the significance of the cemetery, began to pressure families to move the graves to other locations in an act of repressive erasure. From 1982 to 1985, twenty-six bodies were moved to another cemetery. Those families that resisted the government’s intimidation tactics were kept under surveillance by the military and the National Security (Kong 2017). While Chun’s government attempted to compel forgetting, Kim Young Sam, the first civilian president to be elected in the democratic elections of 1992, quite unintentionally initiated forgetting through munificence. In a move that deliberately aligned his government with the spirit of the May 18 uprising, in 1994, the New Mangwol-dong Cemetery, also called the ‘May 18 National Cemetery’, was established on 9,000 m 2 of land roughly two kilometres away from the old cemetery. The New Mangwol-dong Cemetery was much larger than the old one and included monuments in addition to elaborate headstones. Opponents argued that the old cemetery should be preserved since it was the actual site of trauma and loss as well as being so vital to the South Korean democratisation movement ( Jung 2014). They argued that the history and symbolism attached to the old cemetery could not be exhumed like the bodies of the victims and reinterred in the new one (Yea 2002). When the civilian government moved the Old Mangwol-dong Cemetery to a new location, it had the unanticipated outcome of forgetting by forming a new identity for the place. 336

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Though the intent was to honour, not to strip the cemetery of its significance, by reinterning the graves at the new cemetery the civilian government accomplished the repressive erasure that the authoritative government had tried and failed to achieve. The civilian government’s initiatives, though well-intentioned, resulted in forgetting in the formation of a new identity extended to the renovation of the former South Jeolla Provincial Hall. The design that would transform the hall into the new Asia Culture Centre, a regeneration project emphasising the city’s new image as ‘the city of art’, included the demolition of the Byeolgwan. Of all the changes suggested, the demolition of the Byeolgwan, where the last protesters took a stand and were slaughtered, was intolerable to locals (Shin 2016a). The citizens involved in approving the changes did not at first understand that it was the Byeolgwan (Shin 2016a) that would be demolished. This confusion stemmed from the name Byeolgwan, which is the Korean word for an annexe. Expecting the Byeolgwan to be a small annexe-like space abutting the building, they did not realise the addition was larger than the hall itself. Once they understood that the area where protesters died would be demolished, local activists demanded the plans be modified to preserve it. After numerous negotiations, a revised plan that preserved a portion of the Byeolgwan was finally ratified (Figure 27.1). At the Asia Culture Centre’s opening ceremony, Gwangju’s citizens could see for themselves how the hall had been altered. The completed renovation included changes that had not been documented in the plans. For example, two new lifts not in the plans now occupied the area that had been the civilian army’s situation room during the May 18 uprising. According to one interviewee, citizens were frustrated with the undocumented renovations but angered with one aspect in particular. They saw that the Byeolgwan not only still stood after experts had claimed it was structurally unsound and were infuriated that the third floor was rented out to organisations in no way connected to May 18. Several civic organisations formed a coalition called the Citizen Committee for the Preservation of the Original Shape of South Jeolla Provincial Hall as the Last May 18 Resistance Site. Even the Gwangju city government and the city council that originally supported the renovations expressed interest in joining the committee (Kang, 2017). Conversion of the provincial hall to the Asia Culture Centre was meant as an act of urban renewal that would benefit present-day Gwangju, but the renovations diminished associations with the May 18 uprising. Although inadvertent, the planned alteration of the Byeolgwan involved elements of repressive erasure within the overarching forgetting in the formation of a new identity (Shin 2020).

Figure 27.1 Asian Culture Centre. A part of the Byeolgwan was demolished while the skeleton is remained (author’s photo)

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In June 2017, the Gwangju city government announced that it had decided to restore the original layout of the former South Jeolla Provincial Hall. This decision to reverse the forgetting in the formation of a new identity would help repair the damage done to the memory of May 18. During the thirty-seventh anniversary of the May 18 Gwangju Democratisation Movement, President Moon Jae-in pledged his government’s full support in cooperation with the local governments to restore South Jeolla Provincial Hall (B. Kim 2017).

Prescriptive Forgetting and Interfering with Place-Making: Sewol Ferry Disaster The prescriptive forgetting tactics utilised in the Sewol tragedy were carried out surreptitiously. The first example of forgetting targeted the victims’ families’ occupation of Gwanghwamun Plaza in the area adjacent to the Blue House, the National Government Office and the Seoul city hall. The victims’ families waged a prolonged hunger strike in Gwanghwamun Plaza to gain public support for urging the government to investigate events ( Jin 2018). Rather than cause more controversy and attract more attention to the bereaved hunger-striking families by physically removing them, the government employed a prescriptive forgetting strategy (Connerton 2008). In addition to outright ignoring the families, this strategy included inaction and neglect of duty by failing to provide legal, institutional and financial support to memorialise the social tragedy (Schindel and Colombo 2014). When the government could no longer ignore calls to explain its slow response, which contributed to the high death count, and launch an investigation into the tragedy, it stonewalled. The national assembly stalled for over 200 days before finally conceding to an investigation. Despite appearing to cooperate, the investigation was repeatedly delayed without reason, and several key senior officials in important posts who were being questioned about the accident refused to answer questions that might incriminate them (Cho 2016). Since relevant files would remain sealed for thirty years, this is still a grey area, but by delaying, it appeared as if the government hoped people would lose interest in the investigation and tire of the parents’ demands. On the first anniversary of the Sewol Ferry disaster, families of the victims had few answers to their questions and those few answers were incomplete. Anticipating trouble, the police set up blockades to prevent people from approaching the presidential Blue House and fired water cannons and pepper spray at protesters trying to cross the barriers. Anti-government demonstrations were countered by anti-Sewol demonstrations, organised mainly by the Union of Korean Neoliberal Extremists, a right-wing group ( Jung 2015). Participants of anti-Sewol demonstrations set fire to the memorial sculptures the families had erected and threatened to destroy their tents, their temporary homes. One of the most disturbing examples of right-wing disregard for the grieving families was a binge-eating sit-in staged across from the hunger strikers. Members from a far-right online community called ‘Ilbe’ organised the performance and provided the pizza and fried chicken to its members (Lee 2014). They argued that they were expressing their disgust with the annexation of a public plaza by the Sewol families and other activists as a way to express their personal grievances. In a manner, the right-wing counter-protesters’ destruction of the memorials and attempts to intimidate or bully the families into leaving were a form of repressive erasure. We argue that by not condemning these activities targeting grieving families, the ­governing elites gave their tacit permission to turn the plaza into a site of conflict rather than a place to memorialise a tragedy. Anticipating that the anti-Sewol demonstrations would taint the image of the memory place and lead to prescriptive forgetting, officials remained 338

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silent. It was later disclosed that the national government and Samsung Corporation had quietly encouraged the instigators to disrupt the hunger strike (Na 2018). Moreover, the Ilbe binge party was financially subsidised by the Federation of Korean Industries, with the bulk of the donations traced back to Samsung (Na 2018). Further eroding the government’s ­credibility, it was later revealed that the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism encouraged the Union of Korean Neoliberal Extremists, a politically conservative but non-­governmental ­organisation, to stage anti-Sewol demonstrations (Cho et al. 2017). By remaining in the background, government officials could appear to be impartial while secretly manoeuvring others to do what they could not: interfere with the grieving families. The memory classrooms, the ‘spontaneous shrines’ (Grider 2001; Senie 2006), are the second example of forgetting of places. While the presence of the memory classrooms was symbolically significant, the argument that the remaining students needed the space gained support across the country. The escalating tensions between the victims’ families and the other parents who wanted the spontaneous shrines dismantled could have been avoided had the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education provide the promised alternative space in a timely manner (Shin 2016b). Eventually, the shrines were relocated from the school in August 2016 (Kim and Hong 2016) to their new location in the Ansan Office of Education. The last example of forgetting we discuss is the Ansan 4.16 Safety Park. Families of the victims and activists petitioned the city of Ansan to create a memorial park on a portion of the land used by the Hwarang Amusement Park and to dedicate it to the Sewol Ferry disaster ( Jin 2020). Interviewees stated that opponents to the project established an anti-memorial park group consisting mainly of people living nearby concerned about how it might impact real estate values and those who thought the memory park was just more left-wing machinations. They demonstrated twice weekly outside Ansan city hall, with placards and banners calling for cancellation of the memorial park project. On the placards were written such phrases as ‘we agree on commemoration but not to an ossuary’. They drew an analogy between the safety park and a tomb, underscoring their message with images of skulls on their placards to express their belief that this planned memorial represented an unhealthy obsession with death. From our own observations on 3 December 2018, we noted that there were approximately twenty participants demonstrating against the planned park. One of my interviewees from the anti-memorial park organisation explained that the memorial park was just another example of the Jongbuk Jwapa (Pro-North Korea left-wing group) manipulating the politics of compensation and place-making in memory. He argued that this left-wing group uses memorialisation projects to keep memories of May 18 and the Sewol disaster in the forefront to control South Korean society through guilt. Another interviewee from this organisation repeatedly argued that a public park should be a place that functions for the well-being of everyone. A place where people can rest, exercise, and feel relaxed and comfortable without reminders of a tragedy. Though the number of anti-memorial park organisation members was few, they alleged that they had the support of conservative politicians. When a media outlet reported these claims (Kim 2018), activists for place-of-memory became aware that this small but vocal group of people was responsible for many of the forgetting activities. If there were confrontations or even physical altercations with place-making actors in Ansan, this group’s members were usually causing the disruption. According to an interviewee, for example, a walking tour of several memory places around Ansan and Hwarang Amusement Park was once blocked by anti-memorial park supporters. At other times, members of this group 339

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Figure 27.2 Anti-memorial park demonstration on the fifth anniversary of Sewol Ferry disaster (author’s photo)

would instead shadow the steps of those on the walking tour from start to finish, ceaselessly criticising the memorial park (Figure 27.2). One of the interviewees from this organisation confessed to collecting information pertaining to events in support of building the park on social media. In December 2017, a forum scheduled to discuss building the memorial park had to be cancelled when anti-memorial park supporters arrived and violent clashes with Sewol organisation members ensued. These activities to block the commemoration of the tragedy are a form of repressive erasure, and though they are not destroying a significant site, they are suppressing efforts to commemorate the victims of a tragedy.

Conclusion This chapter contributes to theoretical discussions on forgetting of traumatic memory and its memory places, demonstrating that forgetting as the inverse of memory is integral to the politics of memory. As an empirical case, forgetting is neither as tangible nor as high profile as place-making, and we are not in fact arguing in favour of the forgetting of places. We do suggest the initiatives and consequences of forgetting (Arnold 2012; Butalia 2017; Guha 1996; Huyssen 2000) merit attention. By focusing on the reactions to the memories in question, this expands discussions on the diversity of spatial strategies in the politics of forgetting and remembering. The politics of forgetting in contemporary South Korea taps into the deep divide between conservatives and liberals over history, commemoration, democracy, human rights, gender equality and transitional justice. Overall, conservatives support forgetting, invoking the North Korean bogeyman to discredit their opponents, while liberals favour transparency and accountability and invoke the dire repression during the Park Chung-hee era of authoritarian repression to remind supporters of why protecting democracy is essential and 340

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requires constant vigilance. Although there are clear differences in the political landscape and nature of the tragedies, there is some common ground in the May 18 uprising and the Sewol Ferry disaster. Central to the May 18 memory, the Mangwol-dong cemetery suffered aggressive repressive erasure and prescriptive forgetting under the military regime. This cemetery, together with the former South Jeolla Provincial Hall, then underwent forgetting in the formation of a new identity as a consequence of civilian governments’ well-intentioned initiatives. In the case of the Sewol Ferry disaster, the national government’s refusal to accept responsibility for the tragedy and the passive-aggressive approach to the families in Gwanghwamun Plaza was a form of prescriptive forgetting. However, the movement to dismantle the memory classrooms and the right-wing supporters’ active opposition to the Ansan memorial park were acts of repressive erasure by South Korean citizens, mainly those with affiliation to right-wing political groups. In the case of Gwangju and Sewol, it is clear that the alt-right internet site Ilbe has mobilised its supporters to wage culture wars virtually and in the real world, spreading disinformation and discredited propaganda that alleges their opponents are North Korean sympathisers and unpatriotic. These actions make it difficult to realise a consensus and reconciliation. The newly elected conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol (2022–) sang the anthem in the forty-second May 18 memorial ceremony in 2022, while his supporters and right-wing fringe continue to condemn the uprising. These twin traumas remain contested highly politicised spaces in South Korea and thus complicate commemoration and social consensus about a collective memory regarding the sacrifice of victims and lingering pain of their bereaved families. To the extent that the traumas fester, however, they don’t recede into the forgotten past and serve as reminders of what is at stake for Korean democracy.

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HaeRan Shin and Yerin Jin Foote, K. E. (1997) Shadowed ground: America’s landscapes of violence and tragedy, Austin: University of Texas Press. Grider, S. (2001) ‘Spontaneous shrines: A modern response to tragedy and disaster update’, in New Directions in Folklore, 5. Online. Available HTTP: Guha, R. (1996) ‘The small voice of history’, Subaltern Studies, 9, 1–12. Hayden, D. (1997) The power of place: Urban landscapes as public history. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hoelscher, S., & Alderman D. H. (2004) ‘Memory and place: Geographies of a critical relationship’, Social & Cultural Geography, 5(3), 347–355. Huyssen, A. (1995) Twilight memories: Marking time in a culture of amnesia, London and New York: Routledge. Huyssen, A. (2000) ‘Present pasts: Media, politics, amnesia’, Public Culture, 12(1), 21–38. Huyssen, A. (2003) Present pasts: Urban palimpsests and the politics of memory, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Jelin, E. (2007) ‘Public memorialization in perspective: Truth, justice and memory of past repression in the Southern Cone of South America’, The International Journal of Transitional Justice, 1(1), 138–156. Jin, Y. (2018) ‘Place-making of Sewolho Gwangjang through occupation’, Space & Environment, 66(Dec), 176–209. Jin, Y. (2020) ‘Production and reconstruction of the placeness of memory: A case on the local politics over places-of-memory of Sewol ferry disaster’, Seoul: Seoul National University Master’s thesis (in Korean). Jung, D. (2014) ‘What kind of place is the Old Mangwol-dong Cemetry where Lee Nam Jong will be buried?’, Hankyoreh. 4 January. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 29 August 2022). Jung, S. (2015) ‘The first anniversary of the Wewol Ferry disaster, the Union of Korean Neoliberal Extremists “Remove illegal camp of Sewol Ferry”’, NewDaily 16 April. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 29 August 2022). Kang, K. (2017) ‘The Citizen Committee for the Preservation of the Original Shape of South Jeolla Provincial Hall starts’, Gwangju Dream. 10 October. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 29 August 2022). Kim, B. (2017) ‘President’s promise, the restoration of Former South Jeolla Provincial Hall’, YTN News. 28 May. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 29 August 2022). Kim, J. (2018) ‘’Sewol Ferry Ossuary’? Conflicts and issues surrounding Sewol Ferry memorial park’, Kyunghyang. 16 April. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 29 August 2022). Kim, K. (2015) ‘Kyunggi government office of education suggests the relocation of Danwon high school victim students’ classes’, Yonhap News. 18 November. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 23 June 2020). Kim, M. & Hong, Y. (2016) ‘Danwon high school ‘memory class’ relocation after 858 days’, Hankyoreh. 20 August. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 14 July 2020). Kim, N. (2017). Candlelight and the yellow ribbon: Catalyzing re-democratization in South Korea. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 15, 1–17. Kong, Y. (2017) ‘Chun Doo Hwan’s order, ‘Pigeon Plan’ to remove Mangwol-dong Cemetery’, JTBC News. 26 October. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 23 August 2022). Lee, J. (2014) ‘Conservatives protest Sewol families by gorging on pizza and kimbap’, Hankyoreh. 10 September. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 12 February 2020). Lee, Y. S., & Yeoh, B. (eds) (2006). Globalisation and the politics of forgetting. London and New York: Routledge. Legg, S. (2007). Reviewing geographies of memory/forgetting. Environment and Planning A, 39(2), 456–466. Maddrell, A., & Sidaway, J. D. (eds) (2016) Deathscapes: Spaces for death, dying, mourning and remembrance, London and New York: Routledge.

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The Politics of Forgetting Mayo, J. M. (1988) ‘War memorials as political memory’, Geographical Review, 78(1): 62–75. Mitchell, K. (2003) ‘Monuments, memorials, and the politics of memory’, Urban Geography, 24(5): 442–459. Muzaini, H. (2015) ‘On the matter of forgetting and ‘memory returns’’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40(1): 102–112. Na, S. (2018) ‘Sewol couter-demonstration finanaly supported by Samsung’, MBC News. 22 April. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 29 August 2022). Said, E. W. (2000). Invention, memory and place. Critical Inquiry, 26, 175–193. Schindel, E., & Colombo, P. (2014) Space and the memories of violence: Landscapes of erasure, disappearance and exception, Amsterdam: Springer. Senie, H. F. (2006) ‘Mourning in protest: Spontaneous memorials and the sacralization of public space’, In Sanito, J. (ed.) Spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death, Amsterdam: Springer, 41–56. Shin, G., & Hwang, K. M. (2003). Contentious Kwangju: The May 18th Uprising in Korea’s Past and Present (Asia/Pacific/Perspectives). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Shin, H. (2004) ‘Cultural festivals and regional identity in South Korea’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22(4): 619–632. Shin, H. (2016a) ‘Re-making a place-of-memory: The competition between representativeness and place-making knowledge in Gwangju, South Korea’, Urban Studies, 53(16): 3566–3583. Shin, H. (2016b) ‘The territorialization of memory: The making of place of memory for Sewol Ferry accident’, Space & Environment, 57: 115–154 (in Korean). Shin, H. (2020). The cultural politics of urban development in South Korea - Art, memory and yrban boosterism in Gwangju. London Routledge Strange, C., & Kempa, M. (2003) ‘Shades of dark tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island’, Annals of Tourism Research, 30(2): 386–405. Suleiman, S. R. (2006). Crises of memory and the Second World War. Harvard University Press, Till, K. E. (2005) The new Berlin: Memory, politics, place, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vink T. (2010) ‘Contesting collective representations of the past: The politics of memory in South Korea’, Master’s Thesis, Wellington: University of Wellington. Yea, S. (2002) ‘Rewriting rebellion and mapping memory in South Korea: The (re) presentation of the 1980 Kwangju uprising through Mangwol-dong Cemetery’, Urban Studies, 39(9): 1551–1572.

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28 CULTURAL TRAUMA AND THE CHEJU MASSACRE IN TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE Kim Seong Nae

The Cheju April 3 Incident: The Cold War and Cultural Trauma This chapter examines state violence, cultural trauma, commemoration and inter-­generational transmission of memory with respect to the Cheju April 3 Incident (1947–1954), which was an opening salvo in the violent ideological conflict during the global Cold War. Historically and politically, Cheju Island, which is located on the periphery of the Asia-Pacific, has been considered a site of strategic importance and, hence, has had a continued military presence. Towards the end of the Pacific War, the Japanese colonial military prepared Cheju to serve as a frontline in their defence against the anticipated American landing. After World War II, Cheju was under the authority of the American occupation government (1945–1948). The Cheju April 3 Incident was a first formative genocide in Korea where the Cold War system continues today. The Cheju April 3 Incident is known as the ‘4.3 Incident’, or sasam sakon, which is named after the date of its initial occurrence on 3 April 1948, when the island’s branch of the South Korean Labor Party (SKLP) launched armed uprisings against the occupying American ­m ilitary forces and elections scheduled for 10 May 1948 that would reinforce national division between American and Soviet dominated zones. Tensions had been building since the 1 March 1947 civilian gathering originally planned to memorialize the Korean 1 March Independence Movement. However, this commemoration morphed into demonstrations opposing increased taxation, rice shortages and the oppression of the local autonomous People’s Committee by the American military government police, who eventually fired on the unarmed protestors, killing six and wounding eight (Cheju 4.3 Report 2003, 545). In the aftermath, radical leftist forces initiated armed attacks against police stations and right-wing youth organizations on 3 April 1948. The insurgency then developed into a civilian massacre that was a planned act of state terrorism. ‘A microscope on the politics of postwar Korea’ (Cumings 1990, 251), the 4.3 Incident, remains stigmatized as a primal trauma of Korean nation building and national division. After the establishment of the anti-communist state in South Korea on 15 August 1948, the violent events of civilian massacres continued through the Korean War period (1950–1953) and officially ended after the prohibition against entry into the Mount Halla volcano area, where the massacres were concentrated, was lifted on 21 September 1954.1 344

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Lasting for a total of seven and half years (March 1947–September 1954), the Cheju April 3 Incident resulted in a death toll of 25,000–30,000 people and the destruction of one-third of the island’s 300 village communities suspected of communist collaboration. The 4.3 Incident and the Korean War are linked to the evolution of the longue durée of America’s informal global empire under the Cold War system (The Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation 2018). Following the division of Korea, the anti-communist ideology of the South Korean authoritarian state effectively suppressed the memory of the civilian massacre and its ­a ftermath for over half a century until the liberal administration of President Kim Dae-jung established its first truth commission in 2000. The effects of the 4.3 Incident on collective consciousness and cultural identity constitute ‘cultural trauma’. Drawing on Jeffrey Alexander, 4.3 was undeniably a ‘horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways’ (Alexander 2004, 1). How and why did it take seventy years to exhume and destigmatize 4.3 such that it became a generalized symbol of social suffering and cultural loss? Two decades of democratization and transitional justice advocacy movements since the 1990s successfully resulted in the enactment of the Special Law for Truth and Restoration of Honour to Victims of 4.3 (Kim Hun Joon 2014). In the Special Law, the 4.3 Incident was defined as state violence against the civilian population, and President Roh Moo-hyun made an official apology in 2003. Ongoing commemorative public projects have been realized through regular memorial ceremonies, a memorial park, memorials at the massacre sites and also shamanic public rituals for the consolation of the dead victims at the massacre sites. However, public commemoration and memorial acts do not replace or abolish the p­ rivate and more ‘traditional’ practices of families and local communities, such as ancestor worship. Alongside public memorial formulations, there are personal and family domains of the 4.3 memory that embody the trauma of massacre and transmit its memory over generations. Transmission occurs through exhumation, reburials and ancestral rites, in which the ­wandering ghosts of the dead victims are reconnected to families and respected as ancestors. Here we envisage the possibility of embodied memory: memories that are carried in the body and may be transmitted between bodies, even across generations. Cultural and vernacular transmission of traumatic embodied memory resists the process of museum and archival representation in written language or discourse that dominates officially acknowledged 4.3 memory. This chapter gives an example of how these different beliefs, moral ideas and practices in the public and private spheres relate to the dead. I explore the way in which the ­cultural trauma of mass killing and social destruction of the family and community is inter-­ generationally transmitted and mediated not only through the diverse commemoration practices of the spirit possession, ancestor worship and the reburial of dead bodies exhumed from mass graves but also through literary recreation of the so-called ‘4.3 literature’ in transnational memory ­politics by focusing on Zainichi (‘living in Japan’) Korean engagement with the 4.3 event.

Scales of Trauma and Commemoration The trauma of the 4.3 event has persisted until the present because of its two temporal dimensions. The trauma of the first dimension is the direct wound suffered by the victims during the catastrophe of the 4.3 event. The trauma of the second dimension is the post-4.3 event experience that is reproduced through the actions of ‘remembrance’ and 345

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memory in contemporary discourse; this presentism of the traumatic past is important. The ­commemorative acts of the Cheju people surviving the 4.3 event have also borne the burden of ‘disgrace’, as the experience of the massacre and slaughter was distorted through the prism of the state’s anti-communist ideology. The insurgents were labelled Reds and thus honouring them was fraught with risk in the context of a zealous authoritarian state eager to supress this memory. Families linked to the insurgency were officially disgraced and subject to surveillance, adding to their trauma of loss. Commemoration is a mnemonic technique for localizing collective memory in particular images of space and time. The contested space of public commemoration of the 4.3 Incident represents divergent narratives that are embodied in the naming of the event as a ‘communist rebellion’, ‘people’s uprising’ or ‘mass killing by state violence’ where the border between perpetrator and victim is obfuscated. This very discordance tends to conjure up the spectre of a lingering ideological struggle among the survivors. To salvage the memory silenced over several decades, the people and community are revisiting the violence to overcome fractured memories and establish a new regime of truth. This divergence in 4.3 memory is mediated through literary works and ritual practices of spirit possession and public rites of reburial for victims exhumed from mass graves at the Jeju International Airport in 2008, sixty years after the massacre. These ritual forms ‘contain the particular mixture of mourning and recreation [repair of trauma] that characterizes the work of postmemory’ (Hirsch 1996, 669). Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, I explore the transmission of the 4.3 memory among diasporic Cheju people. The term ‘postmemory’ designates the ways in which witnesses of traumatic events and the generations that follow transmit the memory of events. Because the massacres of 4.3 caused a violent displacement of the dead, the remaking of place for the dead in a proper tomb or public cemetery shared with other dead was the most significant moral concern among the bereaved families. But acts of kinship also carry political connotations. Pierre Nora’s notion of the sites of memory is useful for delineating the intricate ­relationships between history, memory and the nation. According to Nora, the sites of ­memory are the places ‘where memory crystallizes and secrets itself: these include monuments, commemoration rites, symbols, activities, manuals and mottoes’ (Nora 1989, 9). Literary productions such as poetry and novels as well as ritual chanting could be added to Nora’s sites of memory and memorial representations.

Memory and Periphery in the Zainichi Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives In terms of scales of the postmemory practices, I include the diasporic memory of the Zainichi diasporic community of Cheju-related people, whether they were born in Cheju Island or born to Cheju parents. Constituting one of the sites of 4.3 memory, Zainichi diasporic memory has had connections beyond national boundaries since the Japanese colonial times. In the following sections, I aim to address the cultural significance of postmemory practices that frame the border and the periphery of transnational histories in contrast to the officially sanctioned ‘4.3 memory’ and its ripple effects across multiple scales of social relations involving families, local villages, the island and the Zainichi diaspora. More specifically, I examine contestations over the meaning of mass death and social suffering in the divergent works of personal, family and official memories of the 4.3 events and their memorial representations. Zainichi Cheju people account for 20 per cent of the total Zainichi Korean population in Japan (Mun 2001). They migrated to Japan as voluntary workers and settled down mostly in Ikaino District, Osaka, and subsequently some migrated to Tokyo and neighbouring 346

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areas such as Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa Prefectures. There was a significant degree of trans-local mobility of Cheju people since the 1920s for labour migration and settlement during the Japanese colonial era (1910–1945), including nearly 40,000 Cheju people smuggled to Japan as refugees from the mass killings during the 4.3 Incident (Mun 2001). After a direct steamer connection between Osaka and Cheju, the ‘Kimigayo Maru’, was launched in October 1922, the number of Cheju people moving to Osaka increased from 3,500 in 1922 to 50,000 in 1933, involving more than one-fourth of the Cheju Island population (Mun 2016, 83). Following the Japanese defeat in 1945 and dissolution of its empire, 60,000 Cheju-related Zainichi returned home to Cheju (The Cheju Commission 2003, 68). Subsequently, however, during the 4.3 event and the Korean War, around the same number of Cheju people illegally entered Japan to escape from the violence on Cheju Island (Mun 2001). After the borders between Korea and Japan were closed firmly during the American Occupation of Japan (1945–1952), trans-regional mobility became difficult. After Japan regained sovereignty when the occupation ended in 1952 and established the law of nationality, the remaining Zainichi’s residential status was transformed into that of non-state aliens. Cheju people desiring to enter Japan and their Zainichi families entering Korea could only do so if they chose to identify as nationals of South Korea, North Korea or Japan. Such a choice carried political implications. Some Zainichi Koreans already resident in Japan opposed the national division between South and North Korea, so refrained from making that choice (Mizuno and Mun 2015). In this way, the diasporic identity and community of Zainichi Koreans and Cheju people were historically constructed in line with shifting political contexts. Zainichi, the Japan-resident Koreans, are one of the largest minority groups in contemporary. Although the Zainichi diaspora does not occupy a specific geographic location, peripheralization is felt in that Zainichi do not belong to any nation state due to a lack of full citizenship and nationality, in many ways existing at the margins of Japanese society. Zainichi Cheju people’s diasporic consciousness originates from the historical centre and periphery relationship of the Korean peninsula and Cheju Island. Historically, Cheju Island is located on the remote periphery of the Korean peninsula and was known as the land of political exiles and for an abiding defiance towards the central government. This political alienation generated a sense of cultural autonomy and social distinction as a peripheral identity of the Zainichi community of Cheju people. This identity and sense of social solidarity was reinforced by the trauma of mass deaths and social destruction during the Cheju 4.3 Incident. In addition, Zainichi Cheju retained connections with their original village unit mutual aid associations (Kim Chang-min 2003). Until 1989 when the Cheju 4.3 Research Institute was established, testimonial p­ ublications or public commemorations on Cheju Island were prohibited due to ideological censorship in South Korea. In contrast, Zainichi Cheju writers, particularly Kim Shi-jong and Kim Seokpom, and activists took the initiative to define the historical truth of the 4.3 Incident as ‘the popular uprising’ for the post-colonial democratic rebuilding of the Korean nation (Kim Pong-hyun and Kim Min-ju 1963). The cross-border interaction and connection between the Zainichi Cheju diaspora and Cheju Island residents was made possible through family and kinship networks of transnational migration and communal rituals for ancestor worship (An 2010). For the fortieth anniversary of the 4.3 Incident in 1988, public commemorations could be held in both Cheju and Tokyo for the first time. Since then, interaction between the Zainichi Cheju diaspora and Cheju hometown and commemorative alliances of the 4.3 Incident became routinized (Kim Chang-hoo 2017). 347

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Trauma and Difficult Memory: Zainichi Poet Kim Shi-jong’s Long Silence There is the memory that is difficult to call up, but when called up, it causes real pain like the painful thrust of a sword. There is a certain gap, temporal and spatial, between the experiential facts and the intimate memory of the 4.3 Incident, a missing text of trauma waiting for figurative representation such as in poems and ritual laments. In Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, trauma is defined as that which cannot be represented linguistically, but instead needs to be re-enacted, embodied and performed (Caruth 1996, 87). Traumatic experiences are beyond representation, intrinsically unspeakable, and make themselves felt through contagious symptoms such as guilt or shame. Her idea of the mimetic and contagious transmission of psychic suffering to others or to later generations examines trauma in the form of flashbacks, dreams and related symptoms (see Burrett Introduction in this volume). However, if the victim keeps mute within the enclosure of the traumatic event itself and is thus unable to mourn, other forms of representation of trauma might involve ­re-enactment, embodiment and performance of trauma, which constitute the postmemory of the 4.3 event. In the case of the 4.3 memory, its regeneration and representation can become possible through the fictional imagination of the event in literary forms or in ritual laments of the dead in the mode of transcendent ghostly matters of spirit possession, as well as through the materialization of memory as human remains are excavated from mass graves. In order to explain the difficulty of diasporic memory and its forms of memorial representation, I examine three cases of first-generation Zainichi Cheju people: the poet Kim ­Shi-jong (1929–), the novelist Kim Seok-pom (1925–), author of ‘The Volcanic Island’, and the Zainichi Cheju woman Chung Pyung-chun/Kanamoto Haruko (1917–?) with two names and identities owing to Japanese colonialism. The case of Chung Pyung-chun/ Kanamoto Haruko is a typical case of a Cheju woman labour migrant in the 1920s who settled down in Ikaino, Osaka, and raised a family of seven children who scattered in three places of Japan, North Korea, and Cheju. Chung Pyung-chun’s life became publicly prominent due to the 2004 Fuji TV documentary ‘HARUKO’ (Haruko and Kim 2004). Aside from her celebrity life as ‘Haruko’, known by her Japanese marital name, she had another identity as Chung Pyung-chun who coped with her difficult 4.3 memories by arranging shamanic rituals commemorating the victims in her own family and also her hometown village of Tongbok-li on Cheju Island. The dialogue in 2001 between two prominent Zainichi Cheju writers, Kim Seok-pom and Kim Shi-jong, conveys the difficulty of commemorating the 4.3 events (Kim and Kim 2007).2 Kim Seok-pom did not have any personal experience of the event, and thus draws on known facts for his fictional construction of the event. In contrast, Kim Shi-jong kept silent for over fifty years until 2001 regarding his past experience as a twenty-year-old member of the South KoreaLabour Party (SKL) Cheju Branch before he escaped to Japan during the 4.3 Incident. In the following section, I discuss the divergent difficulties of diasporic memory in these three cases of Zainichi Cheju people: silence (Kim Shi-jong), nihilism (Kim Seok-pom) and spirit possession (Chung Pyung-chun/Haruko). Silence is often associated with forgetting while talking or writing is considered essential to memory. Yet, silence can also be used to facilitate preservation of a painful historical past. In the case of the Zainichi poet Kim Shi-jong, he chose to live as a Zainichi Korean with a new pseudonym Hayasi Daijo (Yim Tae-jo) and embraced a degree of forgetting in order to construct a positive sense of self while maintaining a secretive silence about his real experiences and identity. He defined himself as a ‘person who is repatriated to Japan’ against his

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will (Kim and Kim 2007, 163). His homeland was Cheju, but he now had to live in Japan involuntarily. Crossing the border illegally between the two nations in June 1949 during the 4.3 Incident, he did not belong to either Korea or Japan. Fearing enforced repatriation due to his illegal entry to Japan, he kept silent for more than a half century until he spoke up in public about his past as an SKLP activist in 2014 when his poem collection Niigata was translated into Korean. What is the meaning of Kim Shi-jong’s deep silence in relation to the 4.3 Incident? For more than fifty years after his escape and settlement in Japan, Kim Shi-jong did not write about his own personal traumatic experience. Instead, he examined 4.3 through the mirror of other traumatic events such as the Zainichi Korean’s North Korean repatriation project (1959–1984) and the Gwang ju 18 May Democratization Movement. The poems about the North Korean repatriation project were written in 1959 but published in Niigata (1970), while his poems about Gwang ju were published in 1983. After his first collection of poems, Horizon (1957), he left the pro-North Korea Association of Zainichi called So-ren (chongryon in Korean) and ended his nationalist activities. In his chronicle ‘Living in Japan as Zainichi’ ( jaeil ul sanda) (Kim 2018), 3 Kim identifies himself as a diasporic writer who survives on the borders and margins without a fixed nationality or sense of belonging. Although he was born in Pusan and grew up on Cheju Island, he decided to establish a new identity as Zainichi distinctive from his original national identity as a Korean. In the 2001 dialogue, Kim Shi-jong explains why he didn’t write about 4.3 as follows: I could not write at all. I’ve been trying to escape from that memory. I didn’t write anything related to the 4.3. The fugitive consciousness became a burden [emphasis added]. Language is completely powerless in the face of overwhelming facts. Languages come out literally, and they are rarely made into words while memories erupt hot like a lump of fire. If memory is like a strand of thread, you can pull it around and roll it up, but if you try to come up with it, it will be lumped and slumped up and become speechless. I experienced the 4.3 directly. As I was in debt of the trauma, my mind moved in reverse. What I was able to do with the memory work was to write poems of Gwangju instead of Cheju 4.3. In The Collection of Gwangju Poems (1983), I could look at the pain of 4.3 at the bottom of my thoughts, confronting the event. (Kim and Kim 2007, 157) Kim Shi-jong explained that 4.3 was a deeply engraved trauma and that he was unable to mourn the dead victims in his own family and hometown community on Cheju Island. During the 4.3 Incident, he worked as a clandestine activist in the South Korean Labour Party, but when he was exposed, he hid himself in his uncle’s stable. Tragically, his uncle was mistakenly killed by a guerrilla who actually was Kim’s comrade. Kim, then a twenty-yearold only child of his parents, was helped by his father to escape; he told Kim to build a new life in Japan and never return home. Kim fled to Japan in June 1949 in the middle of severe scorched earth operations and massacres conducted all over the island. Due to his escape, his father was held for a month in surrogate detention, subsequently dying in 1957 from severe injuries suffered during this incarceration. For Kim, the sense of responsibility and shame for causing the deaths of his uncle and father was overwhelming and unremitting. Kim Shi-jong’s traumatic memory of family loss could not be expressed in language. He felt haunted by the ghosts of his family and felt

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unable to appease these spirits as long as he could not mourn them properly in family rituals or public commemorations. It was not until his dialogue with another Zainichi Cheju writer, Kim Seok-pom, in February 2001, soon after the enactment of the Special Law for Investigation of the Cheju 4.3 Incident and Honouring Victims, that he could find his voice and address his filial responsibilities. He first visited his father’s grave in 1998, and in order to better care for his parents’ gravesite, for the first time he obtained South Korean nationality with a new home address on Cheju in 2003, although he is registered under his Zainichi name, Yim Tae-jo. In fact, his original Korean birth name, Kim Shi-jong, is used only in literary circles. He remains ­critical of the popular memory of a ‘people’s uprising’ because he thinks the event was a defeat resulting in civilian massacres and widespread destruction, and he is ashamed of his survival after defeat by escaping to Japan (Kim and Kim 2007, 175). Despite his active participation in the early months of the 4.3 event, he does not call 4.3 a ‘revolution’ as Kim Seok-pom does in his novel ‘Volcanic Island’’.

Writing for Liberation from Nihilism: Zainichi Novelist Kim Seok-pom In contrast to Kim Shi-jong’s half century of silence, Kim Seok-pom kept writing about the 4.3 event for over forty years, beginning with his first short novel Death of Crow (1957) and  continuing up until the completion of the seven-volume epic novel Volcanic Island (1976–1997). Kim Shi-jong refers to this prodigious output of Kim Seok-pom as the ‘­regeneration and reproduction’ of the 4.3 event through creative imagination (Kim and Kim 2007, 158). According to Kim Shi-jong, his direct experiences of trauma occupy the realm of memory, making fictional works look fake. Paradoxically, Kim Seok-pom’s lack of direct experiences and thus absence of memory inspired his continuous imparting of the 4.3 victims’ voices. Osaka-born Kim Seok-pom was part of the first Zainichi generation that did not directly experience the 4.3 Incident. He wrote about the 4.3 event on the basis of collected stories and testimonies from his relatives and other Cheju people who escaped the massacres across the Cheju Straits. In the 2001 dialogue with Kim Shi-jong, Kim Seok-pom said that he kept writing about 4.3 to overcome a sense of solitude caused by his lack of first-hand experience. Out of this void of direct knowledge, Kim Seok-pom adopted the posture of a nihilist and ideologue committed to commemorating and lamenting the people’s failed uprising. As a novelist, Kim Seok-pom emphasizes the Cheju people’s ‘revolutionary spirit’, which resists the colonial legacies of the American occupation government and the division of the Korean nation (Yoon 2015). The protagonist of his epic novel Volcanic Island embraces the nationalistic post-colonial passion for unification of the peninsula. However, he commits suicide at the end of novel as the people’s 4.3 uprising fails. After the victorious and murderous police and soldiers moved back to Seoul safe in their state-sanctioned collective impunity, the last paragraph inquires if there remains only the absolute nihilism of ruined landscape. However, the next sentence interrogates this pessimism, noting that the presence of dead bodies piled up all over the island negated his nihilism. This is the key message of Kim Seok-pom’s novel. Those dead bodies piled up on the island represent evidence of the 4.3 genocide and a means of overcoming the trauma. Kim Seok-pom visited the excavation site of a mass 4.3 grave near the Jeju International Airport runaway during his participation in the East Asia Peace Conference held from 9 to 13 November 2007. He was anxious to witness the visible evidence of the violent 4.3 event

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because he did not have any first-hand experience. He placed his palms on the forehead of a skull excavated from the mass grave, which functioned as an ‘actant object’, serving as an emotional intermediary of violence and memory (Latour 2005, 71). Initially, Kim expressed an intense feeling of sadness after seeing the mass grave, but when he returned home to Japan from Cheju, he felt the overwhelming joy of liberation, instead of sadness. He wrote, ‘Liberation is coming from the feeling of the skull and bones of the excavation site—in my mind, the memory of my fingers became a silent power’ (Kim 2010, 62, emphasis added). The memory of touching the bones with his fingers became a quiet force. Just as the buried remains were liberated from the ground, so his body and soul were lightened as he experienced the 4.3 event as an intimate memory. Touching the newly exhumed bones at the airport gave him a direct experience of that trauma.

Reconstituting Social Relations with the Dead The exhumed bones and remains of the dead bodies at Jeju airport indicated the political suppression of memory and the state-orchestrated act of forgetting that endured for sixty years. The bones restored a proper relationship between the living and the dead, allowing for the reconstruction of family and community and reparative justice. What effect do exhumed bones have in the memorialization of mass deaths? Once exhumed from the ground and displayed in the public sphere during the funeral ritual, the dead do speak for themselves (on ritualism in Vietnam see Kwon Heonik Chapter 33 in this volume). As Lambek (1996, 246) writes, ‘the dead are not framed and frozen in objectified, textualized memory, but rendered active in the present’ (emphasis added). Mass graves offer crucial evidence of extreme violence and are key to understanding what happened. Secretly buried underneath the airport runaway, most of the dead bodies were civilian prisoners who had been convicted of crimes, i.e. espionage and supporting the enemy, by court martial in June and July 1949 (The Cheju Commission 2003, 559). In June 2007, after the exhumation of the remains, an on-site funeral and ancestral rites for the hundreds of victims were performed. Giving the dead victims a funeral transformed the bones and bodily remains into a social person with a personal name as a family member, restoring the victims’ human individuality (The Cheju Commission 2008, 287).4 In the case of the Cheju 4.3, from the exhumation to the enshrinement of the dead bodies, the process of repatriating the dead to family and community ‘animated’ the post-memorial politics of 4.3 (cf. Verdery 1999). After more than sixty years of buried history, the missing people are now recognized as ‘victims’ and are eligible for official commemorations. By rearticulating bones, spirits and social relations, the reburial rites gave rise to shifts in social relations with the dead. First, ‘ghosts’ were made into ‘ancestors’. In other words, those who had died impure or ‘bad’ deaths, and thus had not received ancestral rites, became ancestors who are given their place among other ancestors. Second, ‘insurgents’ (pokto) were transformed into official ‘victims’ (hwisaeng’cha). As a result, those dead who had previously been labelled ‘communists’, ‘Reds’ or ‘insurgents’ were now recognized as ‘victims’ or ‘heroic souls’ (young’ryung) who were illegitimately killed. Through reburial rites, we may thus observe powerful and painful shifts in remembering the dead and their intersection with broader political shifts. The edifice of the military authoritarian state crumbled with the democratization of South Korea from the late 1980s, a process that empowered the living and gave voice to the numerous victims while rehabilitating their memories.

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Lamenting Dead in Spirit Possession: Chung Pyung-chun/ Haruko’s Diasporic Returning Prior to public commemoration activities in the 1990s, Cheju shamans (simbang in local terminology) had played a pivotal role in expressing cultures of emotions and trauma that had been otherwise hidden for several decades. Initially held in near secret and at private homes, their family-based rituals of spirit possession have now become the contemporary vehicle for mass-scale public memorialization. In shamanic spirit possession, the agency of grievous souls and ancestors intervenes in the moral politics of anti-communist nationhood in South Korea. The shamanic ritual dramatizes ‘the presence of the past in the present’ in such a way that the victims of violent past events become beneficent ancestral agents who bring social justice and prosperity to contemporary society. Together with the civilian-led Truth Commission Organization, since 2002 the shamans annually perform public rituals of commemorating the victims at massacre sites. Spirit possession embodies the vernacular memories of the Cheju Massacre. It is a form of embodied knowledge that produces human agency as manifested in the ritual practice of the double personalities of the ‘spirit’ and the ‘host’ (Kim Seong Nae 2013, 227). The ‘host’ is the spirit medium in ritual context. When the host is ‘inhabited by a specific, identifiable, or potentially identifiable spirit who maintains a stable, coherent identity’ as a family member, spirits operate not as an ‘other thing’ but ‘as social persons, distinct in public identity from their hosts’ (Lambek 1993, 320, emphasis added). However, in reality, the hosts who are obliged to enact rituals in proper response to the spirits are the actual descendants of the social persons of spirits. In formalized ritual communication, the spirits of the dead victims are granted new status as ‘ancestral spirits’ whose cognitive function is to organize the new order of social relations in the family and the community. In 2006, Chung Pyung-chun, a ninety-year-old Zainichi woman living in Tokyo, returned to her old home village, Tongbok-li on Cheju Island, in order to offer up the shamanic ritual of invoking and greeting the ten kings of the underworld, which is locally called siwang maji, for her dead parents and relatives who were killed during the massacre (Kang, Kang and Song 2008).5 This ritual event could have been the last one in her life among seven rituals she had already held for the dead family members. At the age of forty when Chung dreamt of those dead and fell seriously ill, she organized the first shamanic ritual for her own family victims around 1957. Over the next fifty years, Chung offered this ritual in Japan and Cheju seven times whenever she or her children had problems in health or business. Throughout Chung’s life, she accepted that it was her destiny to be selected by the spirits of her dead parents and brothers. Once selected, the hosts are destined to hold regular ritual offerings. If the hosts fall ill and suffer misfortune, it is recognized as a spiritual malaise which can only be healed by ritual reconciliation bondage with the spirits. Chung Pyung-chun was born in Tongbok-li village on Cheju Island in 1917. During the Japanese colonial era, she migrated to Japan at the age of twelve to work at textile factory and settled down in the Osaka area after marriage to a Cheju-born migrant worker. After the Pacific War ended in 1945, she and her husband repatriated to Cheju. During 4.3, however, she had to stow away on a boat and secretly flee to Japan to avoid the massacres in Tongbok-li village after her father and brothers were killed. In Japan, she barely survived as a pachinko parlour employee in Shinjuku, Tokyo, but later ran her own Korean restaurant. In 2003 she obtained South Korean nationality to construct family cemeteries in Cheju for her own Chung clan and her husband’s Kim clan. In spite of family dispersion across national boundaries her ritual acceptance of life-long spiritual bondage has maintained family and kinship 352

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relations, which were damaged seriously during the Cheju massacre and were also affected by the division of the Korean peninsula in 1953. The wandering and unappeased ghosts of these violent events were in need of consolation. This ‘ritualized hospitality’ towards the violent deaths of what Heonik Kwon (2010) would call ‘political ghosts’ goes beyond the morality of kinship and operates in variant forms of kinship rites, such as reburial and public commemorations.

Conclusion: Diasporic Memory and Coming Community of Loss Approximately 30,000 Cheju 4.3 victims were killed in the anti-communist state violence, and their families survived bearing the immense wounds of loss and suppression of memory. However, the Zainichi-diaspora community continually sustained this painful history and honoured victims in collective memory through literature and rituals. Ancestral veneration brings together the dead and the living, Cheju residents and the Zainichi Cheju people, separated by the violent events of their shared worlds. For seven decades, all dead were not equally worshipped. On Cheju Island, those identified as ‘communist sympathizers’ were not welcome in one’s kinship genealogy, and thus could not return home. However, through ritual practices ranging from shamanic spirit possession, exhumation of mass graves and reburial rites at family cemeteries, the ‘forgotten’ victims were rehabilitated. It was precisely due to their social alienation and historically liminal status that such non-aligned spirits served as the ideal object of ritual practices in ways that attest to a new paradigm of memory politics in which all dead are equally and permanently venerated, regardless of identity. The dead victims of 4.3 hovered in the land of the living by appearing in dreams, speaking through shamans or inflicting harm on the living. Shamanic ritual laments for the spirits went well beyond appeasing spectral apparitions, also constituting a radical critique of contemporary state violence and the Cold War system in Asia. The exhumed bones, as the traceable, material remains of the dead body, restored identity as family and kinship members, while serving as evidence of a massacre that was buried under a taboo of silence and forgetting. At last, we witnessed the community of loss created in the border zone of diasporic relations between Zainichi fugitive aliens living in Japan and ghostly figures of the 4.3 victims. Paraphrasing Heonik Kwon’s ‘ethics of memory’ (2010), this is a new paradigm of memory work in the post-Cold War era. This new kind of concern for victims of the violent past places the issue of suffering at the heart of public, common concern. The skeletal remains are material manifestations that not merely provoke potent emotional responses but also facilitate border-crossing flows between the living and the dead, transforming ghosts into ancestral spirits while liberating relations with the unsettled dead. In the politics of Cheju postmemory, all victims have become culturally and politically respectable, while trauma itself becomes an unassailable moral space.

Notes 1 The definition of the Cheju April 3 Incident is officially designated in this way according to Cheju 4.3 Sakŏn Chinsang Kyumyŏng mit Hŏisaengja Myŏngye Hoebok Wiwŏnhoe, Cheju 4.3 Sakŏn Chinsang Chosa Pogosŏ [The Cheju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report] (in Korean), 2003. Published in 2003, this is the first report of the massacre authored by the National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Cheju 4.3 Incident [or the “Cheju Commission”]. In 2013, translations of the report into foreign languages such as English, Japanese and Chinese were made

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2 3

4

5

available by the Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation. All translations as well as the original Korean version of the report may be found on the website of the Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation: www.jeju43peace. or.kr. Originally published in Japan in 2001 (Tokyo: Heibonsha Limited Publishers). My discussion and illustration of the life stories of two writers Kim Shi-jong and Kim Seok-pom follow this book which contains their conversations in February 2001 in addition to separate interview records. Kim Shi-jong, Horizon (trans. by Kwak Hyung-duk) (Somyung Publishers, 2018). Its appendix includes Kim’s 2017 essay ‘Poem is the revolution of reality consciousness’. Niigata (trans. Kwak Hyung-duk) (Kulnurim Publishers, 2014) has Kim’s statement of the reason why ‘living in Japan as Zainichi’ was a significant step toward creating the coming community that confronts the future in conflict. After this on-site funeral ritual, the remains were moved to the laboratory of forensic medicine at Jeju National University to conduct forensic examination and DNA tests. These tests were conducted to match the victims’ bodily remains with their respective bereaved families. The exhumed bones were kept in cinerary urns after cremation and enshrined in a special commemoration hall within the Jeju 4.3 Peace Park. Only forty-eight cases out of 259 remains could be identified with personal names. The cinerary urns of the dead whose personal identities were confirmed were then labelled with their personal names and their descendants’ addresses. Having regained their personal identity, the dead victims could eventually be returned to their home. This shamanic ritual for the dead by invoking ten kings of the underworld, siwang maji, was held for three days at a local shamanic shrine on Cheju Island, Korea, in 2006. This type of ritual is usually offered to family ancestors. But at this time, the shaman, Suh Sunshil simbang invited 140 more souls of the dead who were massacred on the same day together with the ritual host’s dead parents. Sunshil simbang explained that those dead souls should be greeted and treated as fellow elders who had lived as neighbors in the village before the massacre. Thus, this shamanic ritual was actually performed as a community commemoration ceremony for all 138 victims of the massacre in Tongbok-li.

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29 COMMEMORATING AND CONTESTING GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE IN KOREA Sandra Fahy

In the early hours of 17 May 2016, a twenty-three-year-old woman entered a public toilet in the Seocho Gangnam district of Seoul, South Korea. A man waiting nearby followed the woman in and stabbed her to death. The attacker later testified that his hatred of women caused him to kill, because he felt ‘ignored and belittled’ by them (Im 2016). Referred to as the ‘Gangnam Station Murder,’ the killing sparked a commemoration outside the station. On Social Networking Services (SNS), netizens called for mourners to gather, light candles and leave notes to commemorate the woman, and other innocent victims of sexual violence (Yeon 2016). The commemoration and the claims left on sticky-notes blaming the killing on misogyny were met with a nasty online backlash. The claim of misogyny was also contested by several leading newspapers. Mainstream media in South Korea reported that the murder had resulted from the man’s mental illness. Newspapers Chosun Ilbo and Dong-a Ilbo, as well as television news programmes such as Yonhap News, SBS News and MBC Newsdesk reported the incident as a mutjima sarin, which translates roughly as ‘random killing or ‘motiveless crime’ (Kim 2021, 38). MBC Newsdesk said the murder was a result of ‘paranoia [i.e. mental illness] not misogyny’ (ibid., my emphasis added). Yet misogyny, quite like mental illness, involves delusions. Delusions involve a belief that is firmly held, but that defies rational argument. In this way, it might be reasonable that a link is sometimes drawn between the most hostile of misogynist acts, such as killing, and mental illness. Nevertheless, claims of mental illness are attempts to explain away the killing as random and to render society benign towards women. What is more compelling to me in this case was the evocation of a seeming non sequitur—men’s deaths in military service—to debunk claims of misogyny. This chapter examines what that might mean for gender-based violence in Korea. This chapter begins by defining gender-based violence. It then provides a description of the murderer’s explanation for his actions before describing the commemorative notes and speeches at Gangnam Station. The chapter then moves to its main discussion which explores how claims to misogyny were contested. To investigate why men’s deaths in military service were evoked to debunk claims to misogyny, I followed the lead given by the funeral flowers delivered to Gangnam Station. The Social Networking Site Ilbe arranged for funeral flowers to be delivered to the site. We know this because their name appeared on the ribbons tied to the flowers, along with a commemorative message for the men killed in 356

DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-33

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the Cheonan i­ncident. I try to unpack what Ilbe is saying through this seeming non sequitur which I  ­investigate through an analysis of posts related to the Gangnam Murder on the Ilbe site. In other words, my method is to follow the indicators put in place by Ilbe, at the ­memorial and online, to see what sense I can make of these seemingly disparate topics.

Gender-Based Violence The small colourful memos pasted to the station signal a need to examine gender-based violence in South Korea. Yet, the claims to misogyny were passionately contested on the internet and elsewhere. Ironically, the claims to misogyny were slapped down through the evocation of misogynistic rhetoric and through the incongruous evocation of men’s deaths in military service. In this chapter, I don’t seek to ‘get to the bottom’ of why this particular man killed this particular woman on that early morning in Seoul. Rather I take the public sentiments that arose in the wake of that killing, in particular those that discounted the claims of misogyny, as signalling distinct claims about gender-based violence. This chapter reflects on the counter-claims that arose in the wake of the murder and what they might reveal about how ­gender-based violence is contested and explained away in South Korea. For clarification, I use the term ‘gender-based violence’ following the United Nations Human Rights Council: Gender-based violence refers to harmful acts directed at an individual based on their gender. It is rooted in gender inequality, the abuse of power and harmful norms. Genderbased violence (GBV) is a serious violation of human rights and a life-threatening health and protection issue. (UNHCR: n.d.) The term is useful for capturing how heteropatriarchal norms determine the value of lives, male and female, which divert from those norms. Using the term ‘gender-based violence’ enables an escape from the assumption that violence always operates on a binary of men towards women, though this is often the case. It enables an exploration of how gender norms are policed within hyper-masculine as well as hyper-feminine spaces. This becomes ­particularly salient when we later explore how heteropatriarchy victimizes men in the military. The man who killed that woman on 17 May 2016 did so because, according to him, no women in his life behaved towards him according to the scripts of womanhood (obedient, subservient, fawning) that he had been promised by heteropatriarchal society. Unable or unwilling to recognize women as autonomous, he killed a woman to satisfy his anger towards all women. In a police interview, the killer said: ‘I have no antipathy towards ordinary women and I am not a misogynist. There were times when I was popular with women and there were women who liked me. I committed the crime because of actual damage that women have done to me.’ When the police inquired as to what damage women had inflicted, he answered: Women beat me on the shoulder in the subway, they were deliberately blocking my way and walking slowly to make me late. And a woman threw a cigarette butt on me. I’ve endured all these trivial but unpleasant things, and I felt I couldn’t stand them any longer because they had bothered me even at my work place. I thought I’d die if this continued, so I decided to kill first. 357

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The police stated that the man ‘firmly believes … he has been victimized by women’ (Yoon 2016).

The Gangnam Station Memorial The fact that women, who were the majority of mourners, commemorated the killing by writing on sticky-notes about their own experiences of gender-based violence indicates that women identified with the murdered woman. Their personalized notes were a commemoration of their own traumatic memories: ‘It could have been me, I’m sorry it was you,’ many proclaimed. The notes commemorate that being a female in South Korea means being at risk of male violence. The murder happened in an affluent area of Seoul that many women deemed safe, until the murder. In the aftermath, they posted thousands of hand-written messages on colourful small sticky-notes at the metro station, with quotations like these (Arirang News 2016): ‘It could have been me.’ ‘I’m still alive because I didn’t go to that restroom that day.’ ‘It’s great that we’re mourning together, but it’s important to go further and take a broader perspective and ponder how our society came to this point.’ For visitors to the site, the sticky-notes aroused powerful emotions and painful memories. In her fieldwork into the social phenomena of the sticky-notes, one of Jinsook Kim’s interviewees reported that the experience evoked: … the feeling of an intense collective sense of unity during a religious ritual. Gangnam Station Exit No. 10 was a place where women’s anger and screaming burst out and exploded in the raw, so women who had the same experience would have felt a hot and intense explosion, catharsis, and unity, in the magnetic field of this resonance. (Kim 2021, 50) For a time, exit 10 became a sort of pilgrimage site to acknowledge South Korea’s misogyny. Kim’s extensive research into this case shows that many women identified with the young woman who was killed, feeling that it easily could have been them, not only because they were the same age but also because they are women. ‘The sticky-notes played an important role offline by occupying the physical, public space of the scene of the crime’ (2021, 46). The space around Gangnam Station also became a social space occupied by those who were speaking out—a ‘free speech podium’ was set up for people to voice their experience to the gathered crowd—about misogyny and gender-based violence in South Korea. Speakers came to the site for eight days and covered topics related to ‘sexual harassment, dating and domestic violence, and gender discrimination’ (Kim 2021, 46). In the sticky-notes and speeches, women were telling of their experiences of gender-based violence in Korea, breaking the silence that protects abusers and sustains these abuses. These testimonies revealed that ‘misogynistic rape culture is endemic throughout Korean society’ (2021, 505), while the backlash highlights that ‘challenges to the dominant structure of misogyny remain constrained by conservative social contexts that defend and normalize male dominance.’ That the majority of notes and speeches described personal experiences of gender-based violence indicates that there is a need to proclaim misogyny—objectively, performatively, 358

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loudly—as a fatal afront to life for South Koreans. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr had tens of thousands of posts about the murder and related topics of sexual harassment and sexual violence. These were posted and reposted, leading people offline to the station to add their own notes.

Contesting Misogyny On other platforms, arguments discounting claims of misogyny were erupting. Counter protests against man bashing were organized including one on 21 May, with men marching alongside a procession of mourners. Hostile messages cascaded over social media such as: ‘Ugly Korean women can relax… No one’s going to touch you so stop worrying and use the public bathrooms as much as you need’ (Lee 2016). Two days after the killing, five-foot-tall funeral flower arrangements were delivered at the Gangnam Station makeshift memorial. Such offerings are customary in Korea, as a demonstration of respect, including the sender’s and receiver’s names and condolences. Incongruously, however, the attached message read: ‘Let’s not forget the Cheonan soldiers who died because they were men.’ The funeral flowers were from Ilbe, a conservative right-wing website known for its misogyny. The Cheonan incident refers to the sinking of a naval ship of that name on 26 March 2010 that killed forty-six seamen. North Korea is the presumed belligerent. Two of the men who died were conscripts fulfilling their legal obligation as young Korean males. A permanent memorial was set up to commemorate the deaths and thousands attend annual memorial gatherings to pay respect to the fallen sailors (Associated Press 2010). Thus, the Cheonan incident is hardly a forgotten tragedy so it is odd that Ilbe activists invoked this tragedy in response to the Gangnam murder. The question raised is simply this: what is being contested by evoking the Cheonan incident?

Ilbe on the Gangnam Murder Ilbe is a one-stop archive for all things: alt-right, anti-feminist, anti-immigrant and ­anti-LGBT. It is an internet forum that caters to rancour and delusion. It is like a Korean language 4chan. As an example of the particular cruelty expressed online and offline by Ilbe users consider: in September 2014 parents of children who drowned in the Sewol ferry disaster were protesting. They went on a hunger strike to gain more public attention for their protest. Over one hundred Ilbe users went to the location of the protest to binge eat in front of these parents. This was Ilbe’s first online-to-real-world event (Lee 2014). Ilbe’s site brings together patriarchal discrimination and one of the most active online communities in the world, a cyberspace where hate discourse towards women is amplified in an echo chamber of escalating denunciations, likes and shares (Kim 2021, 151). Although it might seem that an extreme-conservative website is not suitable for gauging average sentiments towards women in Korea, Kim notes a phenomenon whereby terms which get popularized in the Ilbe community slip into wider public circulation (Kim 2021, 152). The sexist term kimchi-nyeo meaning ‘kimchi girl’ or ‘kimchi bitch’ is an example of such a crossover slur. There is a link between the ‘real’ world and this SNS world, but furthermore the fact that the community sent funeral flowers in an effort to convey a message is something I seek to investigate. Following Jinsook Kim’s lead, I explore how the Gangnam Station Murder was discussed on Ilbe. How did this community view the murder and to what do they attribute the killing? If they do not see misogyny, what is it that they do see? On Ilbe I found: 359

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I’m so angry about the YouTube videos covering the Gangnam Station Murder. It was just one mentally ill man who killed someone and people should blame him. Why the hell are women saying bullshit like the victim was killed because she was a woman? I applaud the Ilbe members who did the counter-protest in Gangnam Station. People who commemorate the Gangnam Station Murder victim have double standards. Did they also commemorate the poor metro worker who was killed? Isn’t that guy more pitiable? (Ilbe 9 October 2017) One ill man. That is what is seen instead of misogyny. They dispute the wider implications and claims by women at the memorial site that this is a widespread problem highlighting a toxic culture of patriarchal excess. As to the subway worker, the claim to double standards rings hollow. The subway worker mentioned in the above passage was a young underpaid overworked man who secured safety doors at Guui Metro Station. He died while working on 28 May one day before his twentieth birthday and only a few days after the young woman was murdered at Gangnam Station. Interestingly, citizens paid tribute to this man’s death with a memorial of sticky-notes inside the station. These notes lamented that the man died in the name of ‘efficiency.’ One visitor to the memorial said, ‘I’m angry about the government and companies putting workers in danger only to save costs. I feel that I cannot be safe anymore in society’ (Ock 2016). Many of the notes expressed remorse that he had to die due to overwork. It was noted with sadness that he had only cup noodles in his bag because he didn’t have time during his work schedule for a proper meal. The social response to this death was directed at Korea’ neo-liberal capitalism. For Ilbe it seems what resonated was the difficult life of the young, overworked man, crushed by an uncaring society, but there was no bandwidth to extend any sympathy to a murdered woman; oddly she was transformed into a symbol of women’s empowerment run amok. Another post on the Ilbe site read: If a man was the victim of the Gangnam Station incident, no one would have cared, don’t you think? If men don’t want to be screwed in Korea they should be women, or leave the country. (Ilbe 28 September 2017) Here, they claim that men’s suffering is often ignored and overlooked, asserting that women in Korea have it good. This grievance draws on male-only military conscription in South Korea and the disruption this causes to men’s lives and careers. Strangely, the post suggests that if men don’t want to get screwed they should be women, but in the Gangnam murder case a woman’s life was ‘screwed’ and women who posted notes testified how so many are being ‘screwed’ by a patriarchal society that stifles their dreams and subjects them to systemic sexual harassment and abuse. Why is this cancelled or justified by men’s suffering? Another page on the website read: Why do feminists say the Gangnam Station Murder happened because of misogyny? Do Koreans not allow women to go to school, unlike the Taliban? Here women are set apart from Korean society, outside of it, ‘allowed’ to study. Here we see women described as ungrateful for the rights they are granted. Here they cite how bad things are for women elsewhere, and ask what more do you want? By using the Taliban as 360

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the benchmark for gauging women’s empowerment in South Korea this posting reveals a stunning complacency about gender discrimination. It is also suggested that sympathizing with the Gangnam murder victim is an example of radical feminism that: should be criminalized and punished, it is as bad as illegal drugs and communism. They are ruining the whole country. (Ilbe July 31 2021) The Ilbe website shows us what happens to women who speak out about misogyny. Personal attacks are common on the website, with names and photos (Ilbe 5 February 2021). Professor Na Young Lee, a sociologist at Chung-Ang University who published an article examining the connections between culture, gender violence and femicide in light of the Gangnam Station Murder, is singled out for cyber harassment. In her article she suggests methods to reduce gender inequality in Korea through new feminism (Lee 2016). On the Ilbe site there is a baseless allegation that she is making Korea’s surviving comfort women ‘beg for money, while running the biggest human trafficking organization in the world.’ The money she allegedly steals, she spends in bars and restaurants. Another post is critical of the police for applying a property damage law to anyone who removes the post-it notes from the Gangnam Station memorial (Ilbe 5 March 2020). Here they see an example of the police kowtowing to the wishes of feminists. Ilbe activists were angry with the focus on the gender of the victim and sought to attack those who ascribe the murder to misogyny. They also attacked those who expressed sympathy for the murdered woman and shared their stories of abuse. Apparently, Professor Na Young Lee represented a grave threat because she advocated policies to reduce gender ­d iscrimination against women. In the Ilbe universe it is men who are the victims of discrimination and gender empowerment initiatives. Collective grieving over her death is somehow twisted into a failure to recognize the sacrifice of male citizens, and served as an opportunity to air the grievances of some men worried that gender equality policies are eroding their privileges. By invoking the tragedy of the sailors killed on the Cheonan they tried to make the woman’s murder insignificant. Ilbe activists were angry with the focus on the gender of the victim and sought to attack those who saw the murder as motivated by misogyny.

Meaningful Life, Meaningful Death Everyone in South Korea, man or woman, has some experience with the male-only conscription system. Male-only military conscription in South Korea is the one area where men are certain to be singled out for their maleness. This alone signals a hyper-vulnerability assigned to gender, almost a feminizing degree of vulnerability. Insook Kwon’s research on male-only military conscription found that it is ‘the only time men want to be women or have some kind of disability’ (Kwon 2001, 42). If he is healthy in body and mind, into the military industrial complex he goes. This is a defining moment in a young man’s life, but also a (de)formative one. The three years he spends in the military will integrate him into the collective nationhood of men: body and mind are transformed into self-sacrificing, ­impersonal, indistinct, defenders of the nation. As a mother, a brother, a sister, a father, a lover, a friend, a prostitute, a former or current conscripted soldier, a draft evader, and an exempt, South Koreans have accumulated collective or individual experiences, images, opinions, and memories of conscription. 361

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Furthermore, most men in South Korea have had practically the same experiences regarding nationalism, anti-communism, militarism, and extreme masculine construction during their two or three years’ conscription time. (Kwon 2001, 49) Conscription is thus, inter alia, a hothouse for imbuing men with patriarchal values and inclinations and leaves men feeling that they are owed for their sacrifice. As Insook Kwon argues: …male military conscription lies at the core of what most members of society believe it means to be an ‘authentic’ South Korean in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries…. male military service has played a crucial role in constructing citizenship, nationhood, masculinity, femininity, motherhood and fatherhood and in creating the essential ‘glue’ that binds each of these… to the concept of nation-state. (Kwon 2001, 26) According to Kwon, because defence was a national priority in the wake of the Korean War, conscription was seen as necessary. However, ‘The apparent uncontroversial and unbreakable South Korean public consensus on the necessity of male conscription’ also nurtured resentments among male conscripts due to a ‘popular taken-for-grantedness about the ­ ­existence of conscription and its social effects’ (ibid., 28). How are the topics of women in military and male-conscription discussed on Ilbe? A common theme is hostility to women joining this male-only bastion. A typical comment includes: ‘Why do people say women should go to the army too? For 70 years it was only men who had to serve in the army. Now it is time for only women to serve in the army’ (Ilbe 15 January 2021). Others complained that it was illogical and unfair for women to be excluded from military duties when they claimed equality: Women can be professional soldiers, police officers, firefighters, but they are not conscripted for mandatory service because of physical differences. What kind of contradictory logic is that (Ilbe 17 April 2022)? Only people who have served in the army should get the right to vote. Women too, they should serve at least one year in order to vote (Ilbe 16 March 2022). Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, women don’t have to take care of kids, so women should go to the army (Ilbe 1 October 2020). Korean women should go to army, because men learn manners and other things from the army but women don’t (Ilbe 21 January 2020). Since women are exempted from conscription, it seems some men believe they should not enjoy full rights as citizens (Enloe 2000, 246). Previously, military service conferred some privileges on conscripts in the form of getting extra points on public employment tests for government and state-sponsored organizations. However, this was ruled unconstitutional in 1999 when it was found that this system violated the Constitution’s equality provision. Men were incensed by this decision and vented their anger online (Kwon 2001, 35). According to Ilbe activists, conscription evasion, which is women’s fate by default, is among the most grievous acts one can commit. Given how central male-only military conscription is to South Korean society, the evasion of this duty—unless explicitly warranted by 362

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disability or illness—renders a man emasculated. According to some SNS posters, women are also ‘evaders’ and equally odious. Consider the following for context: in the summer of 1997, when the two sons of Hoechang Yi [a political candidate for the New Korean Party] were exempted from military duty on grounds of poor health, it sparked resentment among the public because it was assumed that the two men had deliberately lost an extreme amount of weight in order to be rendered exempt (Kwon 2001, 28–29). It is expected that a young man will serve his military duty as an expression of his loyalty to South Korean national defence. It is generally accepted, however, that influential people pull strings to ensure their sons get relatively good postings but they still serve. Thus, the dubious exemptions for Yi’s sons crossed the line and drew widespread condemnation (ibid., 31). This is because evading conscription ‘has been one of the most hated crimes in Korean society and the hatred has consistently become stronger’ (Kwon 2001, 226). Perhaps an equally despised group of conscription evaders are conscientious objectors. Here we see criticism that focuses on assumptions about Korean masculinity. Kwon found that critics of the conscientious objector movement ‘uncritically expect a certain sort of masculinity of Korean men’ and that ‘attacks made against conscientious objectors are related to masculinity’ (Kwon 2013, 224). Conscientious objectors are deemed deviant because: Masculinity is an important motivator for compliance with conscription and therefore an important element of national security. For these reasons, the rupture of ­uniformity is greatly feared and avoided. Accepting differences is sometimes understood to be extremely dangerous… based on the fear that national security will collapse if any male citizen seeks difference and prioritizes his own interests. (Kwon 2013, 225) From this it follows that such a system would require strict adherence to heteropatriarchal norms of masculinity. The system of conscription seeks heterosexually oriented men, constituting the only masculinity acceptable to the military. Men’s sexual desire must be oriented outwards from the military, towards females who are an accessory to the military apparatus. According to Bong (2008, 90), the Regulations on Physical Examinations of Recruits (Department of Defence Order No. 556) defined ‘homosexual orientation as a form of disease and mental disturbance.’ The presence of non-heterosexual men in the military was deemed a risk that would ‘cause humiliation and discomfort among servicemen and undermine morale’ (ibid.). While he is in his military service, a man who engages in gay consensual sex behaves in a criminal manner, according to South Korean law (Han 2016). To ‘ward away the gay,’ this law is ‘applied broadly not only to criminalise homosexual acts but also to pathologize conduct, appearance and identities that are perceived to be non-normative’ (Han 2016, 6). It goes without saying that gay men in South Korea must closet their identity to safely survive their conscription with dignity. There are informal ways that this norm is policed, including violence between soldiers. ‘Several South Korean men have even successfully gained political asylum status in Canada and France, where their fear of homophobic violence and human rights violations during military service were determined to be credible and probable’ (Han 2016, 6). The soldier, fallen or survived, plays a role in the creation of the nation. Kwon (2001) draws on the work of Benedict Anderson (1991) and Jill Steans (1998) to link the commemoration of soldiers’ deaths to the creation of the nation-state. Now, reflecting on the funeral flowers sent to Gangnam station, it seems the senders were belittling her death in 363

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comparison to the sacrifice men make for the nation; male warriors lay down their lives in self-sacrifice for the nation. This perspective reflects a society that is imbued with patriarchal militarism.

Women Conscripts Ilbe activists are considerably less concerned about the traumatic experiences of women ­‘conscripted’ into the wartime comfort women system under Japanese colonial rule. Here too misogyny prevails, and women’s suffering is downplayed, dismissed and mocked in a space where only men’s sacrifice is honoured. This is bitterly contested history between South Korea and Japan and within each country (Soh 2008, Morris-Suzuki 2021). Curiously, Ilbe activists position themselves as nationalists and yet align with Japanese right-wing revisionists and endorse their exculpatory narrative of denial and impugning the comfort women survivors as fabulists and opportunists. The term ‘comfort women’ is used interchangeably with ‘prostitute’ [ch’angnyeo]. Similar to Japanese revisionists, members of the Ilbe community allege that comfort women are ‘lying frauds’ and ‘professional prostitutes’ (Ilbe 22 May 2020). Rights movements appearing over the last few decades aimed at seeking accountability for Imperial Japan’s system of sexual slavery are described as ‘one of several lies of the Korean government’ and an ‘obstacle blocking the positive development of Korea-Japan relations’ (Ilbe 10 April 2022). Online users deny claims by scholars that Korean comfort women were underage ‘little girls’ [sonyeo] and on the site’s webpage, dubious historical sources are cited to support these claims. Furthermore, surviving comfort women are identified as an ‘obstacle’ to Korea-Japan relations requiring extreme measures: ‘We should massacre the remaining ones’ (Ilbe 12 May 2022). Ilbe members also praise colonial Japan for mentoring Korea and explain that Japan’s occupation of Korea was good for women’s rights, taking underage girls who ‘used to be raped’ and who ‘couldn’t get an education’ and, by educating them, ‘really saved Korean women’ (Ilbe 10 April 2022). Instead of expressing sympathy for the comfort women, or condemning the outrages perpetrated on them, the misogynistic Ilbe-verse blames them for causing tensions with Japan. The long arc of patriarchal oppression awkwardly links contemporary denialism about misogyny and the Gangnam murder with apologism for Japan’s system of sexual slavery.

Conclusion The above analysis leads me to ask, is male-only conscription not also a matter of g­ enderbased violence, in this case performed by the state towards male citizens? Is military ­conscription a distinct feature of South Korean life, for men, such that it is their time of vulnerability? Their time of being subservient? Their time of obedience? Indeed, conscription does this to them. They are separated from their former life both literarily and ­figuratively and pressed into a new masculinity that is imposed by the state. This masculinity is hyper-masculine, patriarchal, non-inclusive, a defender, a warrior, a killer—ah, we arrive back at the bathroom in Gangnam Station! I hear two voices emerging out of the death at Gangnam Station, and though one speaks with venom and hate, and embodies the very complaint of the other, I recognize that each makes a claim that speaks its own truth. One voice calls out about the misogyny in South 364

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Korea—and as it shouts a critique that very same misogyny comes back like a demonic echo. Indeed, such misogynistic vitriol continuously proved the need for the memorial and the complaints. But even as it is noxious, offensive and, at times, ridiculous, there is a claim worth hearing: that everyone suffers under the demands of heteropatriarchal norms in South Korea—as anywhere—and the overarching military structure that prevails in South Korea demands reflection on how it has shaped a gender-pained society that violently insists on its norms.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and Spread of nationalism. Verso, London Arirang News, May 20 (2016). ‘Post-it’s to stop hate crimes, Koreans respond to Gangnam murder case.’ Online. Available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA_qVfZ18r4 (Accessed June 15 2022). Associated Press (2010). ‘South Korea bids final farewell to 46 navy sailors,’ 28 April. Available https:// www.ctvnews.ca/south-korea-bids-final-farewell-to-46-navy-sailors-1.506764 (Accessed June 15 2022). Bong, Youngshik D. (2008). ‘The Gay Rights Movement in Democratizing Korea.’ Korean Studies 32: 86–103. Enloe, Cynthia (2000). Manoeuvres: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. London: University of California Press. Han, Ju Hui Judy (2016). ‘The Politics of Homophobia in South Korea.’ East Asia Forum Quarterly 8, no. 2: 6–7. Ilbe (2017). ‘Are the ones who mourned at Gangnam Station mourning now?’ 9 October. Online. Available https://www.ilbe.com/view/10070128930 (Accessed June 15 2022). Ilbe (2017). ‘Gangnam Station Murder Wouldn’t have been covered, if it was a man.’ 28 September. Online. Available https://www.ilbe.com/view/10051084161 (Accessed June 15 2022). Ilbe (2020). ‘Women should be sent to the military so that they can learn politeness and respect as men do in military service.’ 21 January Online. Available https://www.ilbe.com/view/11227847685 (Accessed June 15 2022). Ilbe (2020). ‘Not surprised to see police making arrests at Jamshil Station.’ 5 March Online. Available https://www.ilbe.com/view/11239093155 (Accessed June 15 2022). Ilbe (2020) ‘Reasons why women should join the military.’ 1 October Online. Available https://www. ilbe.com/view/11291868594 (Accessed June 15 2022). Ilbe (2021) ‘A new logic on ‘women should also go to the military.’ 15 January Online. Available https://www.ilbe.com/view/11317284641 (Accessed June 15 2022). Ilbe (2021) ‘The Feminist of Feminists.’ 5 February Online. Available https://www.ilbe.com/ view/11321922503 (Accessed June 15 2022). Ilbe (2021) ‘The problem with radical feminism is that it is unscientific and provocative.’ 31 July Online. Available https://www.ilbe.com/view/11357664576 (Accessed June 15 2022). Ilbe (2022) ‘Only those who have served in the military should get the right to vote.’ 16 March Online. Available https://www.ilbe.com/view/11402219567 (Accessed June 15 2022). Ilbe (2022) “Japan was the first country to pioneer women’s human rights in Joseon, a country of uncivilized Neo-Confucianism.” 10 April Online. Available https://www.ilbe.com/view/11407541551 (Accessed June 15 2022). Ilbe (2022) ‘Send Women to the army too, you contradictory bastard Korean republic.’ 17 April Online. Available https://www.ilbe.com/view/11409005317 (Accessed June 15 2022). Ilbe (2022) “There are only 11 comfort women left.” 12 May Online. Available: https://www.ilbe. com/view/11413941739 Ilbe (2022) “The comfort women grandmothers are a joke hahaha.” May 22 Online. Available: https:// www.ilbe.com/view/11415988479 (Accessed December 12 2022). Im Jong Yo (2016). ‘Pink elephant’s ‘Zootopia’ protest aggravates Gangnam murder controversy.’ The Korea Herald, 23 May, Online. Available http://www.koreaherald.com/view. php?ud=20160523000910 (Accessed June 15 2022).

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Sandra Fahy Kim, Jinsook (2021). ‘Sticky activism: The Gangnam Station murder case and new feminist practices against misogyny and femicide.’ JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 4: 37–60. Kwon, Insook (2001). ‘A feminist exploration of military conscription: The gendering of the connections between nationalism, militarism and citizenship in South Korea,’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3:1, 26–54. Kwon, Insook (2013). ‘Gender, Feminism and Masculinity in Anti-Militarism,’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15:2, 213-233. Lee, Claire (2016). ‘Korean women respond to Gangnam murder case.’ The Korea Herald, May 19 Online. Available http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20160519000691 Lee, Jae-Wook (2014). ‘Conservatives protest Sewol families by gorging on pizza and kimbap.’ Hankyoreh September 10 Online. Available http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_ national/654589.html Lee, Na-Young Lee (2016). ‘Misophobia, gender discrimination, and feminism: Focusing on ‘Gangnam Station Exit 10’. Culture and Society, 22: 147–186. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa (2021). ‘The ‘comfort women’ issue, freedom of speech, and academic integrity: A study aid,’ The Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Focus. 19, No. 5: 12. Article ID 5542. Online. Available https://apjjf.org/2021/5/MorrisSuzuki.html (Accessed June 15 2022). Ock, Hyun-Ju (2016). ‘Death of subway worker triggers wave of protests,’ Korea Herald, June 6 Online. Available http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20160605000257 (Accessed June 15 2022). Soh, C. Sarah (2008). The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Steans, Jill (1998). Gender and International Relations an Introduction. Rutgers University Press. UNHCR (United Nations Human Rights Council, United Nations Refugee Agency) (n.d.). ‘Genderbased violence,’ Online. Available https://www.unhcr.org/gender-based-violence.html (Accessed June 15 2022). Yeon Kyu-Wook (2016). ‘Murder at Gangnam Station’ Add profilers to the investigation… cherishing the memory of victims atmosphere continued,’ Maeil Business News, 20 May Online. Available https://www.mk.co.kr/news/society/view/2016/05/364215/ (Accessed June 15 2022). Yoon, Jung-Min (2016). ‘Police Say the Murder at Gangnam Station is a ‘motiveless crime caused by mental illness;’ Kim says he is not a misogynist.’ JoongAng Ilbo. 22 May. Online. Available https:// www.joongang.co.kr/article/20061620#home (Accessed June 15 2022).

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PART 5

Wider East Asia

30 PUTIN, POLITICS AND PROPAGANDISING MEMORIES OF WWII IN RUSSIA’S FAR EAST Tina Burrett

The memory of WWII—known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War—has become fetishised in contemporary Russian political and popular culture. Domestically, President Vladimir Putin has co-opted the memory of Soviet victory against fascism as a mechanism for unifying society and legitimising his rule (Laruelle 2021). Abroad, Russian state institutions instrumentalise war memories to spread Russia’s influence and to achieve its geopolitical aims (McGlynn 2021). This chapter investigates how and to what ends the Putin government uses WWII history to pursue its foreign policy ambitions in East Asia. Memory politics in post-Soviet Russia is a topic of growing interest, not least due to Russia’s conflict with Ukraine and recent propaganda wars with the West over the Soviet contribution to WWII. During the Putin era, Russia has developed a sophisticated history policy that uses the administrative and financial resources of the state to promote the interests of the governing elite (Miller 2012, 19). From the 2000s, Russian heroism and antifascism in WWII became the main pillars of a state-sanctioned nationalism aggressively promoted by the Kremlin (Laruelle 2021). In Putin’s version of the past, there is no mention of the unflattering or failed aspects of Soviet policy, such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the disastrous military retreat of 1941 or the terror of the Stalin years (McGlynn 2021). In 2014, disrespecting Russia’s ‘military glory’ in WWII became a punishable offense (Koposov 2017). In today’s Russia, there is no place for honest conversation about the cost of victory in WWII because it has been elevated to the status of a civil religion (Petrov 2021). As a result, Russia has been continually involved in ‘memory wars’ against other WWII protagonists with different national perspectives on the experience and legacies of the war. Conflict over competing narratives of the past features prominently in Russia’s relations with former Soviet and Warsaw Pact member states, i.e. the Russian government’s dispute with Poland over the causes of WWII (Applebaum 2020) or the Kremlin’s fury at Estonia over the removal of a Soviet war memorial in Tallinn (Myers 2007). From the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, Russia’s conflict with Ukraine has been about memory as well as territory. To justify Russia’s renewed invasion on 24 February 2022, Putin evoked the phantom of fascism within Kyiv’s current government, while alluding to Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis in WWII (Kuper 2022). Less well known is that memory politics are also a feature of Putin’s foreign policy ­strategy in East Asia. The Russian government exploits war memories and grievances in its DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-35

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territorial dispute with Japan over the Southern Kurils (that the Japanese call the Northern Territories), four islands that were seized by Russia at the end of WWII. Memory wars with Japan allow Putin to brandish his nationalist credentials with voters at home, while strengthening Russia’s ‘memory alliances’ with Asian states such as China that experienced Japanese invasion and occupation. In recent years, the Putin administration has stepped up its efforts to propagandise Japan’s alleged war crimes and unprovoked aggression during WWII. Russian propaganda has focused on two key incidents: first, the 1939 Battles of Khalkhin Gol, a border conflict involving the Soviet Union and Mongolia against Japan; and second, the war crimes trial of twelve members of the notorious Unit 731 in Japan’s imperial army accused of developing biological weapons that were held Khabarovsk in Russia’s Far East in 1949. These events and other WWII memories are kept alive for domestic and international audiences through celebrations, cultural events, academic conferences and diplomatic visits. Russia’s state-aligned media enthusiastically report on these heavily stage-managed events, bolstering patriotic pride around which Russians can unify, while also heightening hostility towards Japan and its current Western allies. Russia’s well-funded international media services—that are available in English and Chinese as well as several other languages—are used to reach foreign audiences (Nelson and Orttung 2015). The Russian state also employs an army of internet trolls and influencers, paid to spread its historical narratives around the world (Volchek 2021). This chapter argues that the Putin administration is utilising its own version of wartime events in East Asia to serve its current political agenda. Russia is simultaneously engaging historical narratives to deepen bilateral relations through commonalities of memory with some Asian states—especially China and Mongolia—while using the same narratives to undermine the reputation and influence of its geopolitical rivals. The sections that follow begin by exploring the concepts of memory wars and memory diplomacy—both methods employed by Russia to take memory politics international. The chapter then presents four case studies illustrating how Russia exports its own historical narratives and commemorations to further Moscow’s foreign and security policy objectives. These four cases are the Battles of Khalkhin Gol, the Khabarovsk trials, Moscow’s 2020 law changing the end date of the Pacific War and the instrumentalising of WWII in the Kuril Island dispute. Findings are derived from analysing Russian media and official state websites for references to WWII in connection to Japan, China and Mongolia published since 2000 (when Putin first became president).

Memory Wars and Memory Diplomacy From the very beginning of his presidency, Vladimir Putin associated his leadership with the glory of the nation in WWII. Campaigning for the presidency in 2000, Putin stopped in Volgograd (or Stalingrad as it was known in WWII) on the eve of the holiday known as Defender of the Fatherland Day. At home, his identification with the war creates an iconic persona for Putin: the nation is great because of its role in WWII, and Putin is great because of his association with the war (Wood 2021, 251). The cult of Putin and WWII, however, has negative repercussions for Russia’s relations with its neighbours. Russia’s mythologising of the war collides with the stories of neighbouring nations leading to memory wars—­ political disputes over interpretation or memorialisation of the past that engage state as well as national cultural institutions (Koposov 2017). Promoting certain historical episodes to sow enmity against Japan allows Russia to create memory alliances with other Asian states based on a perceived shared or common past 370

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(Burrett 2014). States seeking memory alliances not only export their own narratives and ­commemorative practices but also engage with and promote the positive historical narratives of a second country (McGlynn and Dureinović 2022). Since 2012, for example, Russia has forged a memory alliance with China, leading the two states to coproduce commemorative activities that reinforce their bilateral ties. WWII looms large in the public and political discourses of China as well as Russia, with narratives of wartime heroism and victory used by both governments to mythologise their nations as destined for global influence and leadership (Malinova 2017; Mitter 2020). The pursuit of memory alliances is part of a broader strategy of memory diplomacy that sees states identify, create and develop commonalities of memory with other nations (McGlynn and Dureinović 2022). As with public diplomacy, memory diplomacy involves efforts by the government of one state to influence public and/ or elite opinion in a second state for their own advantage (Becker 2020). Through memory diplomacy activities, states aim to build a positive image that enhances their soft power. According to Joseph Nye (2008), the chief proponent of soft power, its attractiveness derives from three sources—culture (where it is perceived positively), values (if a state adheres to them both within and outside its borders) and foreign policy (if it is considered legitimate and morally grounded). Soft power, contrary to its ‘hard’ variety, stimulates other governments to share a state’s aims and attitudes without coercion. Rather than seeking universal soft power, however, Russia follows a niche strategy targeting specific states and audiences. Moscow positions itself as the answer to Western liberalism, crafting an image rooted in a statist, conservative nationalism designed to appeal to those disappointed or resentful towards the US-led world order (Laruelle 2021). A narrative of Soviet leadership and victory in WWII is central to Russia’s current attempts to build a coalition against US dominance in Asia and beyond.

The Battles of Khalkhin Gol The 1939 Battles of Khalkhin Gol (known as the Nomonhan Incident in Japan) arose over the disputed border between Japanese-occupied Manchuria and Soviet-backed Mongolia and is named after the river running through the battlefield. The conflict that took place from May to September resulted in defeat for Japan’s Kwantung Army and the first victory for Soviet General Gregory Zhukov, who later led the Red Army in some of the most ­decisive battles of the European war. The outcome of the conflict had a major impact on international relations and military decision making at the time and continues to hold political significance in Russia’s relationships with Mongolia and Japan today. The Putin administration has co-opted the memory of Khalkhin Gol to serve two main functions: advancing its cooperation with Mongolia and pursuing its territorial dispute with Japan. Anniversaries of the conflict are used by Moscow to reinforce its traditional ties with Ulaanbaatar in the face of growing Chinese and Western interest in Mongolia. On the seventieth anniversary of the conflict in August 2009, then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited Ulaanbaatar, delivering a commemorative speech praising the brotherhood between Mongolian and Soviet forces, while condemning the ‘unacceptable attempts to falsify history and change this victory’s essence’ (Medvedev 2009). Although Medvedev did not name Japan, there is no doubt that Tokyo was his intended target. In July 2009, a month before Medvedev’s speech, the Japanese parliament had passed an amendment to a bill on the ‘Northern Territories’ that labelled the four disputed islands as ‘the historical territory of Japan’ (Borisov 2010). The amendment was just the latest salvo in a long-running memory war between Japan and Russia over the Kurils. For decades, Japanese conservatives 371

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have exploited Stalin’s seizure of the four islands after Tokyo’s informal surrender on 15 August 1945 to emphasise the nation’s wartime victimisation and to downplay the horrors it inflicted across the region. Conversely, Russian propaganda emphasises Japanese wartime atrocities and aggression to bolster domestic and international support for its claims over the islands (Burrett 2014). In the context of Russia’s worsening relations with the West and implicit regional rivalry with China, the eightieth anniversary of Khalkhin Gol in 2019 took on renewed significance for Moscow. The anniversary presented an opportunity not only to reaffirm bilateral relations with Mongolia but also to signal Russia’s ongoing influence in the former Soviet sphere to its would-be challengers. Commemorations went far beyond the scale of events held ten years before and included military as well as cultural displays of Russian power. Commemorations began with joint military exercises in Mongolia involving over a thousand Russian ­m ilitary personnel ( Jargalsaikhany, 2019). To further mark the occasion, President Putin visited Ulaanbaatar where he signed a Treaty of Friendship with his Mongolian ­counterpart President Khaltmaagiin Battulga. Thanking his hosts, Putin stated that ‘Russia treasures the memory of Mongolia’s priceless support which they gave to our people during the Great Patriotic War’ (Putin 2019). To coincide with Putin’s visit, the Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery in Ulaanbaatar opened an exhibition of photographs from the Khalkhin Gol battles entitled ‘Two Nations, One Victory’ that was cosponsored by Russia’s Sputnik News Agency and radio broadcaster Segodnya. An aerobatic demonstration by the Russian Air Force was also performed in the skies above Ulaanbaatar as part of the celebrations (Baljimaa 2019a,b). In Russia, an exhibition of paintings commemorating the conflict was held in Irkutsk (Anudari 2019), while a four-episode documentary about Khalkhin Gol was also coproduced by Zvezda, the television network of Russia’s Ministry of Defence, and the Mongolian National Broadcaster (Munkhzul 2019). On Putin’s watch, the Russian government has invested significantly in promoting patriotism as a means to bind the nation, a policy that includes standardising history education to ‘create a positive image of modern Russia in the world and among Russians themselves’ (Iunashev 2013). Alexander Chubarian, director of Russia’s Institute of World History, had no compunctions in revealing that ‘we have received a request from the president to intensify and broaden contacts with foreign scholars with the purpose of promoting historical truth and countering the attempts to distort Russia’s role’ (Subbotina 2016). The 2019 anniversary of Khalkhin Gol allowed Moscow to communicate its ideologically-tinted version of history to both Russian and Mongolian students. Youth exchanges were organised under the theme of ‘The Pathway of a Heroic Friendship’ (Anudari 2019). For those preferring patriotic education in the form of popular culture, in 2022 Russian heavy metal artist Radio Tapok released a song entitled ‘Khalkhin Gol’. The accompanying video features film footage from the battle as well as scenes of Soviet tanks gunning down Japanese imperial soldiers taken from the videogame ‘World of Tanks’ (Radio Tapok 2022). The popularity of films, television serials and other entertainment steeped in nostalgia for WWII demonstrates Putin’s success in mobilising memories of the war to rally large sections of Russian society behind his leadership against perceived external enemies.

Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials Khalkhin Gol is not the only incident of the war in East Asia propagandised by the Putin administration to advance its foreign policy. Since 2021, the memory of the 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials has been invoked to serve multiple political objectives. At the hearings held 372

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in Russia’s Far East, twelve Japanese Kwantung Army and medical officers were c­ onvicted of manufacturing and deploying biological weapons against Chinese civilians. The twelve were charged with being members of Unit 731, a covert corps within the Japanese imperial army that developed biological weapons and engaged in lethal human experiments (Williams 1989). In September 2021, the Russian government sponsored a two-day international conference to re-examine the 1949 trials. The conference organised by the Russian Historical Society, Federal Security Service (FSB) and Foreign Ministry was widely reported by Russian-state media. In a message to delegates, President Putin noted the conference’s importance ‘for preserving historical memory, so as to effectively counter attempts to distort WWII events and prevent their recurrence’ (TV1 2021a). Prior to the conference, in August, the FSB declassified a series of documents it alleged were the testimonies of Kwantung officers (RT 2021). The Russian media claimed that these documents revealed Japanese military preparations to invade the Soviet Union from 1938 and plans to conduct bacteriological experiments on Soviet citizens (TASS 2021; TV1 2021b). Bordering on the comic, reports further alleged that Japan planned to subvert the Soviet military by having saboteurs poison their pies and drinking wells (RT 2021). The Putin administration’s renewed interest in the Khabarovsk trials coincided with the election of Kishida Fumio as Japan’s new prime minister. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō (2012–2020), Tokyo had pursued economic and political engagement with Russia as a route to resolving the Kuril Islands dispute. Kishida, however, was known not to share Abe’s ardour for closer ties with Putin, favouring a tougher negotiating stance over the territorial issue (Kozinets and Brown 2021). In reviving memories of the Khabarovsk ­trials and Japan’s wartime atrocities, the Russian government aimed to enhance its claims to the Southern Kurils in the face of a less conciliatory administration in Tokyo. The Khabarovsk trials were back in the Russian media in April 2022, this time in connection to Russia’s self-proclaimed fight against the ‘revival of Nazism’ in Ukraine and other former-Soviet states (TV1 2022a). Reference to the trials was likely prompted by the tough Japanese sanctions that followed Russia’s renewed attack on Ukraine in February. In reporting on the sanctions, Russian-state media accused the Kishida government of launching ‘an unprecedented anti-Russia campaign’ that included ‘slander and direct threats against Russia’ (TV1 2022b). By positioning Russia as an anti-fascist force fighting for justice in the past, Moscow aimed to validate its present-day aggression in Ukraine to audiences at home and abroad. Memories of the trials were also used as ammunition in Russia’s information war against the United States. Washington was accused of covering up war crimes committed by Unit 731 and of using Japanese research to develop its own biological weapons, deployed during the Korean War (TASS 2021). The United States, as the main international target of Moscow’s propaganda machine, is portrayed as masterminding hostility towards Russia from Washington’s allies in Europe and Asia (EU 2021). For years, Russian government and media institutions have claimed that US pressure lay behind Japanese intransigence on the Kuril Islands. In Russia’s media wars, Japan is often a proxy target for attacking Washington. Russian media narratives around the Khabarovsk trials portray both Japan and the United States as historically untrustworthy and subverting justice, while celebrating Russia for revealing ‘historical truth’ and challenging American hegemony. In so doing, Moscow appeals to anti-American audiences across Asia, underlining the need for a strong Russia to counter US regional influence. 373

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Memory Diplomacy with China and the Date of the End of WWII Moscow has used narratives around Khalkhin Gol and the Khabarovsk trials to d­ emonstrate its historical commitment to defending China’s territory and people, thus deepening its memory alliance with Beijing. In bilateral relations, the shared experience of fighting Japanese imperial forces is an important bond. Although WWII has always been central to nationalist discourses in both countries, its prominence in memory politics and diplomacy has intensified over the past decade. In China, political appropriation of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) has intensified under the presidency of Xi Jinping from 2012. In the international sphere, Xi uses China’s 1945 victory over Japan to assert Beijing’s regional leadership and to challenge US primacy in the Asia-Pacific—nurturing common cause with Putin ( Joint Statement 2022). The memory alliance between China and Russia is constructed and reinforced via commemorative events, official visits and the exchange of invented traditions. The most visible examples are the victory day celebrations that take place in Russia on 9 May and in China on 3 September to mark the end of WWII in Europe and Asia respectively. Vladimir Putin has either been present at the commemorations in Beijing or sent an official celebratory message to China every year since 2015 with the Chinese president reciprocating on 9 May. At the parade held in Beijing in September 2015, marking the seventieth anniversary of the war ending, Putin was guest of honour, with Russian troops marching alongside Chinese soldiers for the first time (TV1 2015). In May 2015, Xi was the only great power leader to attend Moscow’s annual victory parade, providing Putin with a needed diplomatic boost after Russia’s annexation of Crimea the previous spring (Schiavenza 2015). Ignoring the often frosty relations between the Soviet Union and China in the post-war period, in a message  to  Putin on the seventy-fifth anniversary of victory over Japan, Xi extolled the ‘unbreakable great friendship’ between the Chinese and Russian people ‘forged in blood’ (Xinhua 2020). Perhaps in gratitude to Xi for his friendship in the face of Western-led sanctions against Russia over Crimea, in 2020 Putin announced plans to change the official date that Russia commemorates the end of WWII from 2 to 3 September, thus aligning with China. On 2 September 1945, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Japan signed an instrument of surrender prepared by the US War Department. But it was the next day, 3 September 1945, that the Japanese army in China formally surrendered to the Chinese government. For Putin, switching recognition of the end of the war to 3 September achieved multiple propaganda and diplomatic goals. First, in the immediate post-war period from 1945 to 1947, the Soviet Union had originally commemorated victory over Japan on 3 September, with Stalin declaring the date a national holiday. Attempting rapprochement with Japan, in 1947 the Soviets dropped the 3 September holiday, hoping to encourage Tokyo to remain neutral in the developing Cold War. Reviving the original commemorative date, therefore, is part of Putin’s wider strategy of appropriating the nostalgia and pride many Russians feel for the might of their lost Soviet empire. Victory in WWII and the expanding Soviet imperialism that followed, however, are inconveniently associated with Joseph Stalin. But the complications of Stalin’s repressions and terror are simply ignored by the Kremlin—and by Russia’s lapdog media—allowing Putin to adopt the dictator’s mantle of ‘father of the fatherland’ (Wood 2021, 252). His brutality aside, Stalin was a figure of immense power and standing. Invoking his war victory and the  national celebrations he decreed enables Putin to bask in his reflected glory (Petrov 2021). 374

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Second, reverting to the 3 September can also be interpreted as a snub to the West. When Russia initially revived commemorations in the mid-1990s, 2 September was listed as the end of WWII in the Russian law on memorial days—the same date recognised by Western nations and Japan. The choice was not a surprise, as at the time Russian President Boris Yeltsin was attempting to integrate Russia with the West. The pro-Americanism of 1990s Russia, however, has long since disappeared. Shifting away from the date commemorated by the West, therefore, is also about Putin dismantling the symbolic legacy of the 1990s, a period seen by many Russians as scarred by humiliation and weakness. Third, reopening debate about the end of the war was a way for Moscow to demonstrate its toughening stance on the Kuril Islands dispute with Tokyo (the Red Army offensive against the Kurils that began in August 1945 ended with the Soviets seizing the islands on 3 September, loading the date with significance). After Russia’s generous provision of emergency energy resources to Japan in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011, relations over the Kurils began to thaw. A year later, Prime Minister Abe came to office determined to resolve the territorial issue, identifying Putin (wrongly) as equally interested in improving bilateral relations as a route to countering China’s growing regional influence (Burrett 2019). After many exchanges between Russian and Japanese leaders, in November 2018 a breakthrough was reached on the territorial issue. Abe accepted the so-called ‘­two-island approach’, abandoning Japan’s claims to the two larger Southern Kuril islands contingent on Russia transferring sovereignty of the smaller two, even though this only represents seven per cent of the total disputed territory. But as Japan’s position on the islands softened, Russia’s hardened. In January 2019, Russia’s foreign ministry issued a statement demanding ‘Japan’s unconditional recognition of the results of WWII’ including Russian sovereignty over all four islands, before territorial negotiations could proceed (RT 2019). The same month, Russian parliamentarians tabled a bill that would void any territorial c­ oncessions granted by the federal government (ibid.). Changing the end date of WWII, therefore, was yet another indication that Putin had been leading Abe on a merry dance: Russia never intended to cede territory. In March 2022, Chairman of the Russian Security Council and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev admitted so, saying, ‘Obviously, we would never have found any consensus with Japan on the islands issue…. Negotiations about the Kurils always had a ritualistic character’ (Tsvetaev 2022). Abe had been duped. Finally, celebrating the end of the war on 3 September shows Russia’s desire for a closer memory alliance with China. Moving the date was not without costs for Putin. The third of September was already venerated in Russia as the Day of Solidarity in the Fight against Terrorism, honouring the 334 victims (among them 186 children) of the 2004 Beslan school siege. The Mothers of Beslan NGO and other human rights groups appealed to Putin not to change the war-end date. But their appeals went unheard, demonstrating the importance of deeper ties with Beijing for Putin (RFE/RL 2020). China and Russia have also merged their symbolic commemoration of WWII in other ways. The 2015 Victory Day celebrations in Russia saw the arrival of a new mass commemorative ritual. In the newly invented annual ‘Immortal Regiment’ parade, Russians march bearing photographs of ancestors who served in the Great Patriotic War. The parade is immensely popular, with twelve million marchers taking part in the first event, including President Putin bearing a photograph of his own father (Fedor 2017, 308). The Immortal Regiment offers the Russian state a powerful way to connect ordinary citizens and their private memories of wartime loss to the official cult of victory over fascism. It is also a way to assert a connection between Russia and the foreign lands saturated and sanctified by the blood of the Red Army, which includes many former Soviet states as well as China (Fedor 375

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2017, 311). This performance of memory is thus also directed towards an external audience. And the promotion is working. In 2016, Immortal Regiment processions took place in China for the first time and have since become a state-approved annual event (Lin 2021; MK 2016). The Immortal Regiment movement has also been used by the Putin administration to democratise the myth that the West has systematically denied the Soviet (and Chinese) role in defeating fascism. Often this is combined with claims that a wholesale whitewashing of the history of fascism is underway in both the West and Japan. The Immortal Regiment is cited by the Kremlin as evidence of popular domestic support for Putin’s claims to be leading the world against fascist forces (Fedor 2017). Chinese leaders too have long complained of Western and Japanese revisionism regarding WWII (TV1 2010a). Xi and Putin have channelled these shared grievances into an alliance that is paying diplomatic dividends. In February 2022, on the eve of the Beijing Winter Olympics and with 100,000 Russian troops poised to invade Ukraine, Putin and Xi issued a joint statement declaring aspirations to shape a new world order to replace the one fashioned by the United States and its partners after WWII. Meeting for the thirty-eighth time, the pair outlined a new de facto security alliance, with Xi joining Putin for the first time in opposing NATO enlargement in Europe (Kempe 2022). Putin returned the favour by opposing a recently announced AustraliaUK-US security agreement and endorsing Xi’s One China Policy. Although Ukraine is not mentioned by name in the statement, its tone indicated that China would not seek to dissuade Putin from invasion. Demonstrating that a shared understanding of the past underpins China and Russia’s current friendship with ‘no limits’, the statement condemned ‘actions aimed at denying the responsibility for atrocities of Nazi aggressors, militarist invaders and their accomplices [that] besmirch and tarnish the honour of the victorious countries’. Both leaders pledged to ‘resist attempts to deny, distort and falsify the history of WWII’ ( Joint Statement 2022).

Southern Kuril Islands Dispute As noted in the sections above, Russia has long utilised memories of WWII in its territorial dispute with Japan. The origins of the dispute allow both sides to play the victim and to invoke trauma to boost their territorial claims and wider political agendas. The Red Army’s invasion of the islands began on 18 August 1945, three days after Japan’s informal surrender. Stalin considered the February 1945 Allied Yalta Agreement as giving the green light for invasion, as it pledged the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan following the end of the war in Europe. The agreement further restored to the Soviets ‘the Kuril Islands’ and the southern half of Sakhalin, which were taken from Russia by a victorious Japan in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War. For the Soviets, seizing the Southern Kurils in 1945 was payback for the humiliation of losing territory to Japan at the start of the century. From Japan’s perspective, the Soviet invasion of the Kurils was illegal and a violation of the 1941 Soviet-Japan Neutrality Pact. Japan further maintains that the southern four islands have not historically been part of the Kuril Island Chain ceded to the Soviet Union by the 1951 San Francisco Pace Treaty (Cabinet Office 2022). Today, WWII rhetoric is dialled up and down by Moscow to serve its changing strategic aims vis-à-vis bilateral relations with Tokyo. References to the war in relation to the Kurils are also deployed to advance Putin’s domestic propaganda agenda. Most recently, patriotic feelings towards the Kurils were manipulated to gain support for constitutional amendments potentially extending Putin’s presidency to 2036. In short, the last decade has been 376

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a rollercoaster ride in Russo-Japanese relations, with the summoning of selective WWII memories creating some of the most intense nosedives. In November 2010, already cool relations plunged to sub-zero temperatures when then President Dmitry Medvedev became the first serving Russian (or Soviet) head of state to land on Kunashir, the second largest of the four disputed islands. Following in Medvedev’s footsteps, several other senior Russian officials also visited the disputed islands in 2010 and 2011, drawing diplomatic protests from Tokyo. Reporting on the islands issue in this period by Russia’s media made frequent references to WWII, accusing Japan of ‘never having come to terms with the outcome of the war’ and criticising Tokyo for ‘stubbornly calling the Kurils their islands’ (TV1 2010b). The Kurils were a convenient mechanism for stirring up patriotic sentiments ahead of parliamentary elections in Russia in December 2011. The dispute injected some much-needed drama into an election where victory for Putin’s preferred party was never in doubt. After more than a decade, voters needed a reason to reindorse Putinism and there was concern that low turnout would raise awkward questions about Putin’s legitimacy. Given this backdrop, it came as a surprise when just prior to presidential elections in March 2012, Putin offered to restart territorial negotiations with Japan. Using a term employed by judo referees to begin a match, Putin announced that if he was returned to the presidency, ‘we would give the order “Hajime”’ on negotiations (Burrett 2014). Abe Shinzō clearly took Putin at his word, investing heavily in his personal relationship with the Russian president after returning to the Japanese premiership in December 2012. From 2012 to 2018, Putin maintained the pretence of seeking a territorial settlement with Japan, during which time references to WWII in connection to the Kuril Islands largely disappeared from Russia’s media. Keeping Abe’s hopes alive encouraged Japanese economic investment in Russia and cost Putin little in return. From 2019, Russia’s public position on the islands again began to harden, with WWII rhetoric reappearing in statements by Russian officials. Hard-line Russian nationalists became enraged by a new agreement in November 2018 raising the prospect that Russia might return the two smaller disputed islands (Habomai and Shikotan) to Japan. Protestors gathered in Moscow to curse Putin and demand that Russia hang on to all its territorial gains from 1945. Demonstrating that there are more extreme nationalists in Russia than Putin, one protest placard equated surrender of the Kurils with treason, while another declared Hokkaido (an integral part of Japan) as Russian territory (Infox 2018). At a time of economic hardship and with regional elections looming, ultra-nationalists posed a potential threat to Putin’s carefully curated image as defender of Russia’s WWII legacy. To satisfy nationalist demands, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov quickly took to the airwaves to condemn Abe for overstating Russia’s territorial concessions. Abe’s remarks that Russian citizens could remain on Habomai and Shikotan ‘after they returned to Japan’ gave Lavrov a pretext to insist that Japan immediately recognise Russian sovereignty over all four disputed islands, ending any prospect of a deal. In reporting on Abe’s ‘outrageous’ statement, Russia’s media reminded audiences that Japan was ‘part of the Nazi coalition and defeated in WWII’ (TV1 2019a). The following month, Russian state authorities commissioned a survey seeking Kuril islanders’ views on the territorial issue. Unsurprisingly, 96 per cent of respondents were against ceding territory to Japan. Visiting the islands to cover the survey process, state television correspondents again referred to Japan as ‘allies of Nazi Germany’ and as ‘the only country in the world not recognising the results of WWII’ (TV1 2019b). In 2020, Putin mobilised memories of WWII and the Kurils dispute to rally voters behind constitutional changes that would allow him to run for two more six-year presidential terms. 377

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The referendum held from 25 June to 1 July 2020 also included a new clause banning ­territorial concessions (Article 67), along with more than 200 other amendments. The large number of amendments aimed to disguise the true intention of the plebiscite: to allow Putin to effectively become president for life. Against the backdrop of COVID-19—that had magnified the limitations of Putin’s authoritarian regime—the Kremlin had to think creatively to get voters to endorse Putin’s blatant power grab. A ban on territorial concessions was designed to appeal to nationalist voters, while conservatives were courted with a constitutional veto on same-sex marriage. The non-ideological were offered lottery tickets and other perks to get them to the polls (Antonenko 2020). Following the vote, in which 78 per cent approved Putin’s changes, media reports emphasised the new inviolability of Russia’s borders, while downplaying the president’s increased powers. Nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky appeared on Russia’s main broadcaster to declare, ‘Now no one has the right to even think about gaining even a centimetre of our territory…. The Japanese can forget about the Kurils forever’ (TV1 2020). It was further reported that jubilant residents on the Kuril Islands had immediately erected a plaque inscribed with the new territorial clause (RIA 2020). Once again, the Kuril Islands issue had helped to bolster Putin’s electoral performance. Russia’s constitutional changes, however, were yet more bad news for Japan. As stated by Russian parliamentarian Alexei Pushkov, the prospect of Russia giving up sovereignty over the Kurils was now ‘equal to zero’ (RIA 2020). Having finally revealed his hand, Putin doubled down on his memory war with Japan. Since 2020, Russia has accelerated its militarisation of the Southern Kurils ( Johnson 2022). Along with increased visits by high-ranking officials, government-organised protests against any surrender of national territory keep the Kurils dispute and its wartime origins in the public mind. Russia has also given names to several uninhabited and previously unnamed islands in the Habomai group. The chosen names were loaded with historical significance. One recalled General Kuzma Derevyanko, who signed the Japanese instrument of surrender ending WWII. Another commemorated General Alexei Gbechko, who led the Soviet occupation of the Kurils in 1945 ( Jozuka 2017). The political rebuff to Japan was loud and clear.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated that memories of WWII events in East Asia are key components of Vladimir Putin’s memory politics at home and abroad. Putin’s administration uses diplomatic and media channels to spread historical narratives that foster a positive image of Russia among its allies, while simultaneously undermining its geopolitical rivals. Discourses of Russia’s heroism and victory in WWII are deployed both aggressively and as a form of soft power, with the same narratives often serving multiple foreign policy functions. Putin promotes a selective history of WWII focusing on the Red Army’s role in securing victory over fascism as a reminder to the world that Russia earned its global power status with spilled blood. At home, this narrative helps to breed public resentment against Western governments that Putin portrays as belittling Russia’s WWII sacrifice for their own political ends. To build international support for its selective view of history, the Russian government adapts its narratives to local conditions: in Mongolia, focusing on the solidarity shown by the Soviets at Khalkhin Gol; and in China, playing on shared historical animosity towards Japan and its conservative leadership for failing to fully acknowledge the nation’s militarist past. Russia and China have strengthened their alliance with an increasing number of shared commemorative events and find common cause in opposing alleged Western and Japanese 378

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historical revisionism. For Putin, history is a key political and geopolitical battleground. The history of WWII is integral to the visions of Russian nationalism and identity that Putin has constructed to bind ordinary Russians to his leadership and to the state from which it has become inseparable. To attack history is to attack Russia itself. In this context, a territorial settlement over the Kuril Islands was always a Japanese fantasy. For Putin, any attempt to undo the legacy of WWII is an attempt to undermine Russia and its ability to oppose the US-led world order. Although it is difficult to assess the sincerity of Russia’s memory ­a lliance with China, shared commemorations show domestic audiences that Putin is ­w inning in global memory wars. As Russia’s economic and political power fades under the strain of sanctions and war, the battle for the past is perhaps the only one Putin can hope to win.

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31 TRAUMA – PROLONGED AND ACCUMULATIVE The Impact of Singapore Detention without Trial from the 1948 Malayan Emergency Ariel Yin Yee Yap

In the late 1980s, Catholic Seminarian Vincent Cheng was unjustly imprisoned for three years by an unrepentant Singaporean state. Speaking about his experiences, Cheng stated: People have advised me to let go, to forgive and forget, to move on with life. But I ask myself: Why should I? To close the issue is tantamount to condoning the injustice…. Victims of injustice must not give up the fight to regain their dignity. I believe that ­forgiveness and letting go is genuine and meaningful only when justice has been, or is seen to have been, done. And if justice cannot be done, then the forces of karma will take over. The law of nature will prevail. (quoted in Teo 2011) As Cheng outlines, the harms resulting from political detention continue to impact many former Singapore political detainees, their families and their communities, whether they live in Singapore or elsewhere in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, China or the United Kingdom. Notably, his statement explains the prolonged impact of political violence on the individual and collective memory of political detention. Importantly, their statements make plain the need for discussion, accountability and recompense for these lasting legacies of violence. The need to contemplate and address trauma and hardship is even more evident because the ruling political party in Singapore continues to police and punish individuals who are perceived as political opponents or critics of the state. Even though the last political prisoner was released in 1998, the Singaporean state continues to detain people suspected of ‘subversion’ or ‘organised violence’ under the Singapore Internal Security Act 1960 (referred to as the ISA hereinafter). Hence, in this chapter, I focus on the impact and implications of the state’s efforts to police and punish left-leaning individuals. The prolonged impact of political detention without trial occurring from 1948 to 1990 is reflected in my research findings. In this chapter, I demonstrate how a wide-ranging set of harms intersect with historical and contemporary modes of policing to entrench traumatic experiences and memory within individuals and groups in Singaporean communities. DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-36

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My  arguments draw on data generated during fieldwork on detention without trial in ­Singapore. My data consists of 135 oral history interviews conducted with former detainees, their families, colleagues, friends and other community members, many of whom shared their experiences for the first time. I open the chapter by presenting some key findings on trauma resulting from indefinite detention without trial. I further illustrate how the Singapore state has moved from administrative power to detain and suppress left-wing politics under emergency legislation (including the British Malaya Emergency Regulations of 1948, the Public Preservation of Security Ordinance 1955 (referred to as the PPSO hereinafter) and the ISA) towards contemporary, robust legislation (including the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019 and the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act 2021), policing and net-widening techniques that the state now uses to control activism, social movements, political opposition and counter-to-state narratives. My findings indicate that extensive long-term harms stem from these intersecting modes of policing and administrative power. Correspondingly, broader social, political and media discourse seeks to justify the policing and punishment of citizens deemed deviant and to legitimise their degrading treatment on domestic and international levels. I therefore argue that the existing hurt and trauma experienced by political prisoners, who were detained from 1948 to 1990, are prolonged by the state’s continual use of oppressive power. ­Importantly, the state’s impunity adds to the traumatic memory and culture of fear, which is also seen in the wider Singaporean community as residents are consistently reminded of the costs of stepping out of state-accepted boundaries for social and civil participation.

The Embeddedness of Colonial Penal Architecture in Singapore and Malaysia Singapore’s long history of political detention without trial began in 1948 when the British colonial administration declared a state of emergency in Malaya and passed ‘temporary’ measures to enable the indefinite detention and deportation of its residents in Malaysia and Singapore. The British Malaya Emergency Regulations of 1948 and its successors (the PPSO and the ISA) make up part of Singapore’s larger penal and social control institutions, which seek to silence, neutralise, criminalise and punish dissent, civil movements and social ­activism. The official state estimates of political detainees have been refuted by political detention networks, who claim, for example, that between 1959 and 1990 there were at least twice as many people detained as acknowledged in Parliament. This estimate is based on the ­a rgument that the official state-publicised figure (2,460 detainees) does not include persons who were deported and banished, or those who were detained for less than thirty days prior to being issued with an official state detention order (Poh, Tan and Hong 2013, 432–488). Archival records of British colonial state-issued banishment and detention orders ­provide a more accurate picture of Singapore’s extensive use of political detention and associated administrative power between 1948 and 1960. Researchers reported that 13,000 trade unionists, politicians, lawyers, union workers, journalists, academics, civil rights activists, student leaders, social workers and other individuals associated with left-wing movements were detained and banished during this period (Tremewan 1994), while 650,000–1,500,000 people were uprooted from their homes and placed in detention camps (commonly known as ‘New Villages’) during the Malayan Emergency (Munro-Kua 2017; Tan 2020). During this time Singapore state deemed individuals who were anti-colonial, pro-unionisation and socially equitable to be deviant and left-leaning. Even though these movements have palled,

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social activism and critical discourse –that will be discussed in the latter half of the ­chapter – continue. The PAP party construes these movements as left-leaning and ­a ntagonistic to its cause. The Singapore state continues to use its ‘inherited’ British colonial emergency powers (Rajah 2017, 370), despite attaining independence from colonial governance in 1963 and from Malaysia in 1965 (Drysdale 1984; Turnbull 2009). Although liberal ideas and political pluralism existed briefly during the post-World War II period (Hong and Huang 2008), liberalism was quickly replaced by a strict rule by law ethos that continues to be practised in Singapore (Rajah 2012). As Chua Beng Huat (2017) has recently argued, the nation’s historical development has entailed a kind of ‘disavowal’ and rejection of various supposedly ‘liberal’ values. The state’s repudiation of liberal values is evident in the extensive political domination of Singaporean media, as it continues to police, ban and criminalise any dissenting voices and left-leaning political thought. These actions need to be considered as part of wider punitive measures that aim to shore up the Singapore state’s legitimacy, which has allowed for the longevity of governmental rule under one-party leadership since 1959 (Rodan 2005). As the ruling political party for more than six decades, the People’s Action Party (PAP) continues to ‘maintain’ and ‘elaborate’ upon the Emergency Regulations and their accompanying colonial policies of control and oppression, even though the Emergency ended in 1960 (Thum 2019: 50–51). The appearance of legitimacy is also sustained by the state’s praetorian media management, and its ‘excessive insistence’ on the validity of Singapore ‘law’ (Rajah 2012, 114). The ruling party appeals to its legal authority in justifying illiberal social control, policing and administrative approaches, including its notable human rights breaches in the practice of preventive detention, political detention, corporal punishment and the death penalty (Peerenboom 2004; Rajah 2012). The state’s rule by law has also been invoked to restrict workers’ rights, the right to peaceful demonstration, freedom of the press (Peerenboom 2004), and to continue violent state measures including detention without trial, corporal punishment and the death penalty (Rajah 2012). This continuation of illiberal and authoritarian governance (Rahim and Barr 2019; Rajah 2011, 2012) makes plain that the Singapore state extends legacies of trauma from political detention, especially as it expands its legislative power to further the policing and punishment of individuals perceived to be associated with left-wing, critical and counterto-state movements.

Individual and Collective Suffering Resulting from Political Detention Critically, the practice of indefinite1 detention without trial resulted in significant suffering and hardship identified in the key stages of each former detainee’s life, from the moments of release, periods of transition and up to the point of research interviews that I conducted some twenty to seventy years after release. Detainee F,2 a student leader who was detained in the 1950s, and re-detained in the 1960s, described how these traumatic experiences impacted him, his family and his friends over more than five decades: [After all] these years … the impact is so deep that I can still feel the fear … It’s still in me … Perhaps also because it feels so real for many of us … This can lead to strife within the family. Not just within my family you know, there are so many others … [their suffering is] more tragic and drastic than [ours].

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Detainee F was only twenty years old when the police came for him. He was taken into custody at his workplace without warning, interrogated, tortured and held in indefinite detention for three years without trial. According to Detainee F, police officers alleged that his crime was: [A]ct(ing) in a manner prejudicial to the security of Singapore by knowingly assisting in the resurrection of the Communist United Front (CUF) and indulging in activities in furtherance of the communist cause. The state used this accusation to rationalise and legitimise Detainee F’ detention under the PPSO. Like many others, Detainee F was eventually released, without charge or any ­substantive evidence to support the state’s claims. When I interviewed Detainee F and his family in 2019, they discussed the legacy of detention that remained an essential part of their and their political and social communities’ identities. They also emphasised that traumatic memories of his detention, and knowing that the ISA endures, evoked fear, doubt and anxiety, which they grappled with as they strived to recuperate and recover the losses resulting from detention. Similar hardships were often endured by other former detainees, their families, members of affiliated social groups and the wider Singaporean community. These hardships endured long after periods of detention and often resulted in the forced migration, estrangement and suicides in family and affiliated social groups. The collective nature of the suffering experienced by Singapore detainees and their families also highlights the importance of further contemplating the suffering and hurt, the multiple layers and links that inform victimisation experienced by former detainees and those close to them, and how these pains continue to impact Singaporean communities at home and internationally. Even today, awareness of these ongoing practices and the stories of political prisoners reproduce a culture of deference to state authority, intolerance of political dissent and, ultimately, fear. Crucially, these far-reaching impacts have shrouded the truths about detention under a cloak of silence, as many former detainees, their families and friends remain unable to speak about their experiences. For example, two former political prisoners, Tan Jing Quee and Michael Fernandez, who were captured during Operation Coldstore in 1963, broke their silence and shared their experiences on 26 February 2006, at a public forum about their political detention that occurred forty-three years prior (The Necessary Stage 2006). More former detainees have come forward with written and interview accounts about their detention experiences since Tan and Fernandez broke their silence. The prolonged impact of harm resulting from Singapore’s practice of political ­detention has often led to the intergenerational transmission of pain and trauma. In this way, my findings are similar to international psychological research on the survivors of conflict, t­orture and political detention elsewhere, including in South Korea (Choi, Lee and Lee 2012) and South Africa (Kagee 2005). Many former detainees commonly presented c­o-occurring conditions including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, panic-­ adjustment issues, psychosis, substance-related issues and suicidal tendencies. These symptoms often persisted throughout survivors’ lives. Even though post-war and political conflict researchers have long emphasised the need to address the different layers that add to and prolong psychological pains (Butler 2004; Kagee 2005), the Singapore state has enjoyed impunity regarding its historically violent and illiberal practices. My research findings indicate that substantive physical and psychological injury resulting from political detention and its associated practices (e.g. physical and psychological torture, 386

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strip search, deportation) has required ongoing medical treatment and support. More ­i mportantly, these resultant traumas often impacted detainees’ family and friends. Similar to the experience of military veterans’ children (McCormack and Devine 2016), the children of Singapore’s political prisoners were also at high risk of transgenerational transmission of PTSD and co-occurring conditions, including secondary and vicarious traumatisation, negative attachment and communication issues, emotional and behavioural adjustment ­ issues, depression and anxiety. These key findings on the intergenerational transmission of pain in the Singaporean community also explain the manifestation of trauma in parent-child relationships through silence, avoidance, emotional hurt and domestic violence. Many research participants remaining in Singapore after their political detention also experienced significant social discrimination and faced challenges in education, employment and housing. This limiting of opportunities often restricted the level of support, thus making it harder to rebuild and reconcile the losses and harms resulting from detention. Critically, the inability to access social and financial support often resulted in coping mechanisms that were detrimental, especially when this resulted in suicide deaths and the untimely passing of former detainees, their parents and their spouses. These tragedies make plain that family members should also be viewed as victims of Singapore political detention, especially because the damage caused was often irreparable and unacknowledged by the state and Singaporean society.

State Impunity Informing Additional Emotional Damage Accumulatively, the political nature of state violence comes together with the lack of acknowledgement, compensation and state apology, to amplify emotional damage and other suffering of political prisoners. Similarly, South Korean researchers emphasise the isolating impact of complex post-traumatic stress. They highlight the importance of a state apology in facilitating healing, awareness and social support for the victims of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising (Choi et al. 2021). The complicating nature of state impunity also accentuates the trauma experienced by former political detainees in Singapore. My research participants were particularly concerned about the lack of accountability and response to the state violence they experienced. These pains intersect and accumulate each time the Singapore state attempts to police and restrict social activism and civil society engagement that it continues to perceive and construct as deviant. Moreover, the experience of emotional and psychological hurt is ­compounded each time the state politicises detention without trial and extols an associated narrative through legal and media discourses, which are used to justify and legitimise its historical and contemporary use of administrative power. In this broader cultural and political context, the victims of political detention feel they never fully achieved ‘release’. The lack of accountability, acknowledgement and state apology adds to continued suffering, as victims endure living in an oppressive state with constant reminders of its authoritarian – and at times violent – modes of governance. Denial is also an enduring feature of Singapore’s political and penal culture, as nearly all forms of commemoration for mass detention and deportation are still heavily restricted or banned in Singapore. The prevailing narrative of political detention continues to serve the interests of the ruling party-state elites. For many Singaporeans, these narratives and state efforts to silence political detainees come together with the ongoing policing and punishment of left-leaning individuals, as a constant reminder of the risks and consequences of civil participation outside the lines of state-mandated norms. The subtle and not-so-subtle modes 387

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of policing and social control are enhanced by an ever-growing array of administrative and legal powers (discussed below) that justify the performative degradation and punishment of citizens who have been construed and constructed as deviant. A widespread and long-lasting legacy of trauma continues to be prolonged by the Singapore state, mainly through its contemporary crime control and punishment approaches, and its lack of acknowledgement, apology, accountability and redress. Although the state stopped the practice of political detention after its last political prisoner (Dr Chia Thye Poh) was released in 1998, it has since shifted its approaches towards more extensive forms of policing, punishment and prosecution that are targeted at left-leaning individuals. These social controls are evident in recent cases witnessing the over-policing, interrogation, short-term custody, and criminal or legal prosecution of politicians, academics, journalists, artists and others – many of whom have been subject to the repeated use of police power, interrogation, custody and legal prosecution. The expansive imposition of police and administrative power is made possible by the state’s ‘considerable investment in (surveillance) video-camera technologies and lighting’ since the ‘Little India Riots’ in 2013 (Greener 2022, 56 paraphrased in brackets) and the COVID-19 pandemic (Liao 2020). Following 9/11 and COVID-19, the state expanded its ability to use administrative ­powers by adopting a wide range of criminal, preventive detention and police powers, in addition to surveillance technologies. Existing legislation that allows for detention without, or before, trial in Singapore includes, but is not limited to: • • • • • • • • • • • •

the Penal Code 1871, Sedition Act 1948, Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Act 1955, Internal Security Act 1960, Legal Profession Act 1966, Misuse of Drugs Act 1973, Newspaper and Printing Presses Act 1974, Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act 1990, Public Order Act 2009, Organised Crime Act 2015, Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019, and the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act 2021.

These penal instruments allow the state to ‘transform dissent into a security threat’, thereby enabling the removal of individuals – who the state deems problematic – from society into prisons and silencing any forms of possible oppositional social and political movement (Rajah 2012, 17). It is especially concerning that individuals from specific socio-economic, migratory and racial groups also appear caught within the state’s ‘long-lasting social control project involving surveillance, spatial control and police power’ (Greener 2022, 55). Legal scholars Jothie Rajah (2012) and Michael Hor (2005) detail the non-transparent, broad and uncertain nature of arrest and interrogation powers in everyday Singapore criminal investigation and legal procedure (Hor 2005; Rajah 2012). The continued and expansive use of emergency powers based on the British Malayan colonial template compounds the traumatic experiences of Singapore political detention victims and their communities. Although similar modes of repressive state response can be traced back to 1986, it is important to note that the

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cases presented below best exemplify the present trajectory of Singapore’s authoritarian and illiberal practices.

What Now? Trajectories from Fifty Years of Mass Political Detention The recent state charges – laid against Subhas Nair, Jolovan Wham, Terry Xu and Daniel De Costa – demonstrate how Singapore continues to punish its citizens, all the while prolonging and entrenching illiberal modes of control within civil society organisations, affiliated social groups and the wider Singaporean community. Correspondingly, the case of Dr Chee Soon Juan makes plain how the PAP government has shifted from using indefinite detention without trial, towards seemingly softer approaches aimed at curtailing political opposition. Although I focus on the impact and symbolism resulting from these four particular cases, it is important to note that the corresponding policing rationale and power, which were used to survey, interrogate, detain (under short-term custody) and punish political detainees, continue to be extolled by the state as legitimate and necessary. More importantly, the Singapore state’s prosecution of these cases makes plain that it has not moved away from its historical notions of policing, as it seeks to control and punish specific forms of social movement, thought and behaviour.

Subhas Nair’s Persecution: Artistic Freedoms and Social Commentary The Singapore state’s criminalisation of civil dissent is embodied in the case of Subhas Govin Prabhakar Nair (better known as Subhas), a musician, who was charged under the Penal Code 1871 in 2019 for allegedly ‘attempting to promote feelings of ill-will between different groups on grounds of religion or race’ by posting a video discussing racial inequality (Koh 2022; NDTV 2021). In the music video entitled, Buck It Up (available on YouTube), Subhas and his sister Preeti Nair (better known as Preetipls) aimed to expose the biased treatment of racial and ethnic minorities in Singapore. The video commented on the use of brownface to pervade stereotypes about racial minorities in Singapore. This electronic payment advertisement was publicised across online platforms and public transport stations. Notably, their video provided a commentary on the existing disproportionality in the treatment of racial groups in Singapore. Specifically, the power dynamics and inequality in social and structural systems that exist to subordinate racial and religious minorities in Singapore while propping up the privileges of the Chinese majority (Velayutham 2017). Although the Singapore police issued Subhas a two-year conditional warning in 2019 in response to Buck It Up, he now faces four additional charges for violating this police warning between July 2019 and March 2021. The following comment on Subhas’ personal social media account constitutes one example of a violation. He wrote on Instagram: ‘If two Malay Muslims made a video promoting Islam and saying the kind of hateful things these Chinese Christians said, ISD (Internal Security Department) would have been at the door before they even hit “upload”’ (date). The Singapore police justified their punitive actions, arguing that such social commentary has ‘the potential to damage religious and racial harmony in Singapore and erode public trust in our law enforcement agencies’ (NDTV 2021). The punitive approaches aimed at criminalising Subhas’ comments and video demonstrate how legislative and technological developments have allowed the state to expand its penal and social control apparatus. Similarly, legal, political and international studies scholars have stated their concern over Singapore’s expansive social control apparatus, mainly because

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it appears to be far-reaching, highly reactive and authoritarian (Hor 2005; Rajah 2012). Subhas’ case indicates that surveillance technologies are now being used to police and punish forms of expression on social media platforms, as the state seeks control of technological spaces that sit on the border between public and private.

The Maintenance of ‘Public Order’ in Response to One-Man Protests To add to the somewhat bizarre spectacle of the excessive state of criminalisation of citizens’ innocuous comments and actions, Jolovan Wham, an activist and social worker, was charged with two violations under the Public Order Act 2009 for holding a smiley face cardboard sign supporting the climate action movement outside a local police precinct in 2020. Jolovan stated that his one-person ‘public assembly (wa)s just to raise awareness for important national issues… I plead guilty but I believe my conscience is still clear’ (Tang 2021). Although the charges against Jolovan for ‘taking part in a public assembly without [a] permit’ were pending at the writing, he faces hefty fines that could total SGD$5,000 (about US$3,600). The Singapore courts subsequently charged him with a similar offence in early 2022 for ‘taking part in an unlawful assembly [and] for holding a sign outside the former State Courts building in 2018’ (Choo 2022). During this 2018 peaceful one-person assembly, Jolovan held an A4-sized sheet of paper that read: ‘Drop the charges against Terry Xu and Daniel De Costa’. The state’s decision to punish one-man protests such as Jolovan’s is part of a larger pattern aimed at suppressing freedom of speech and expression through intimidation. Notably, Seelan Palay, an artist, was sentenced to two weeks in jail in 2018 under the same statute, after he held a performance outside the Singapore parliament house commemorating the country’s longest-held political prisoner, Dr Chia Thye Poh (Benner 2018). While the state’s prosecution of Jolovan indicates how the legal system is harnessed to enact disproportionate and draconian responses to individual activism and civil dissent, Seelan’s jail sentence adds another chapter to the traumatic memory of political detention. The state’s penalisation of one-person commemorations of political detention adds to the suffering and sense of injustice experienced by Singapore’s political detainees. This d­ raconian state suppression of dissent also impedes recovery and healing in families and communities, reminding them of their own bitter experiences.

The Fight for Control over the Fourth Estate The prosecution of journalists Terry Xu and Daniel De Costa in 2022 further suffocates ­freedom of the press in Singapore and illustrates how freedom of information and media reporting on Singaporean issues is strictly monitored and circumscribed. Terry Xu, editor of the now-closed Singaporean state media platform, the Online Citizen, was convicted for publishing a letter on the news site. The letter said that there was ‘corruption at the highest echelons’ (The Online Citizen 2018). The Singapore court sentenced him to three weeks in prison, while the author of the letter, Daniel De Costa Augustin, was sentenced to three months and three weeks (Ratcliffe 2022). The Online Citizen has been closed since September 2021 and its licence was cancelled by the Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority in October 2021. Xu’s and De Costa’s convictions are directly related to the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019 and the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act 2021. This ­legislation is part of a larger mosaic of laws that enable the state to control the local media 390

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landscape and establish hegemony over what is reported and how it is reported (George 2012). This dominance of the media began in 1971 when repressive laws were enacted to shut down two newspapers, The Singapore Herald and The Eastern Sun, while the ownership of the third and most popular paper, Nanyang (南洋商報), was changed. State control was made possible by the accusation that these three newspapers were ‘fronts for hostile foreign interests intent on undermining the “nation”’, thus allowing the state to invoke a fabricated national security threat discourse to legitimise the media takeover (Rajah 2012, 123). In addition, the state made examples of four executives from Nanyang who were detained under the ISA. Subsequently, the 1974 Newspaper and Printing Presses Act (NPPA) was amended in 1986, allowing the state to regulate the flow of information across the domestic sphere, and also from abroad, effectively allowing it to expand control over public discourse, commentary and criticism (Thum 2019). The NPPA and its amendments ‘enables state surveillance and control of the ownership, management and funding of newspapers’ (Rajah 2012, 118). It  empowered the government ‘to determine the composition of a newspaper’s company board of directors’ by having a say in key appointments (Lee 2010, 131). Problematically, the repeated prosecution and control of journalism has enabled the PAP government to promote its ‘official’ narratives domestically and to snuff out any criticism. Media studies scholar Cherian George (2012, 94) stresses that the PAP’s modern-day management of its media involves a ‘calibrated coercion’, encouraging self-censorship to avoid the state’s draconian powers. This calibrated coercion relies on fear and intimidation to immobilise civil dissent and marginalise political opposition.

A Thousand Papercuts: Immobilising and Penalising Political Opposition The shrinking media space for the free press and freedom of expression was highlighted by prosecution of Xu and De Costa. The political arena has also suffered under the PAP’s obsessive concern about inklings of dissent or criticism. After the 2001 general elections in Singapore, then prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, and former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, filed a libel case against Dr Chee Soon Juan, a member of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party, for remarks he made during the elections, including an alleged loan to then Indonesian president, Suharto. The Singapore courts ruled in favour of the PAP leaders and ordered Chee to pay a total of damages SGD$500,000 (about US$360,000). The decision to sue Dr Chee follows a longer pattern of repressive control that can be traced back to 1986 when lawsuits were also filed against the previous leader of the opposition Workers’ Party Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam. The Singapore courts have consistently issued verdicts in favour of the PAP leaders and imposed significant monetary damages in these defamation lawsuits. In the case of Dr Chee and Jeyaretnam, the damages resulted in their bankruptcy (Amnesty International 2001; Reuters 2007). As a result of his bankruptcy, Jeyaretnam was expelled from parliament, barred from practising as a lawyer and prevented from standing as a political candidate in the 2001 elections or taking any active part in political campaigns. During this time, the opposition held two out of eighty-four parliamentary seats, with eighty-two held by the PAP. In the latest elections in 2020, the PAP won eighty-three seats, with members of the opposition winning a record high of ten out of ninety-three seats. Although this might be taken as a sign that Singapore’s democracy is getting more robust, and that popular frustration with the PAP is growing, the extensive administrative, policing and legislative powers remain embedded within the state’s social and criminal justice systems. 391

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More recently, in 2018, the current prime minister and PAP leader, Lee Hsien Loong, sued Leong Sze Hian, a financial adviser, after he reposted a Facebook post that linked the prime minister to a financial scandal at Malaysia’s state fund 1MDB (Al Jazeera 2021). The court awarded SGD$133,000 in damages to Lee. The prime minister was also awarded SGD$160,000 in damages in 2021 after he filed a lawsuit against Terry Xu, and Malaysian writer Rubaashini Shunmuganathan in 2019, for an allegedly defamatory article that included a reference to a Lee family inheritance disagreement following the death of Singapore’s first Prime Minister, Senior Minister and Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew (Chen and Petty 2021).

Intersecting Layers from Seventy-Four Years of Emergency(-Based?) Policing Together, the criminal, legal and financial charges outlined above illustrate how the state continues to police and punish forms of artistic expression, critical- or counter-to-state social commentary, one-person public protests and political opposition. This behaviour has become criminalised and portrayed as deviant in broader social, political and media d­ iscourse. Significantly, the evolution of this pattern of expansive control entrenches a ­culture of fear that impacts many Singaporeans. While continued policing and persecution hurts all citizens involved in civil society and activism in Singapore, these actions also compound the existing trauma experienced by many political prisoners, their families, members of affiliated social groups and the broader Singaporean community. Here, the historical occurrence of mass political detention intersects with contemporary punitive policies against politicians, academics, journalists, artists and any other individual or group that the PAP state views as a threat. For many Singaporeans, these expanded and continued forms of policing and punishment serve as a constant reminder of the risks of civil participation outside the lines of state-mandated norms. Thus, I argue the way in which traumatic experience, state power and politics intersect inform ongoing experiences and warrant further research into Singapore’s police and administrative powers. Correspondingly, a better understanding of the social reality and life course of political detainees and criminalised Singaporeans – such as Dr Chee, Xu, de Souza and Wham – offers an essential strategy for speaking truth to power and developing strategies to support people who are recovering from significant traumatic and violent ­exposure to administrative state power (Scraton 2004). It is my hope that this volume lays the ground for further work on state power and the experiences of the individual and trauma, mainly because my research highlights the critical need to consider the ways in which states reify punitiveness and hurt in the broader community through the relational exercise of power. Based on my research findings, I call for these practices to be abolished and accounted  for. These practices remain embedded in many structures of confinement elsewhere that can be readily identified in many other prison and detention facilities around the world.

Notes 1 Although detainees were technically subject to two-year detention orders, these orders were often renewed at the end of their two-year term. In the case of the longest detention in Singapore, they were renewed over ten times to allow for the detention of Dr Chia Thye Poh for thirty-two years from 1966 to 1989. For three years after his ‘release’, he was required to live on the island of Sentosa, off the coast of Singapore. He was placed under restriction orders curtailing his freedom of movement, expression and association. These orders expired in 1998. 2 Names of interviewees have been anonymised.

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Works Cited Al Jazeera (2021) ‘Blogger ordered to pay Singapore PM $99,000 in defamation case’. Online. (accessed 2 June 2022). Amnesty International (2001) ‘Singapore: Defamation suits threaten Chee Soon Juan and erode ­freedom of expression’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 1 June 2022). Benner, T. (2018) ‘Singaporean artist jailed after peaceful protest’, Al Jazeera. Online. Available HTTP:

(accessed 1 June 2022). Butler, J. (2004) Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence, London and New York: Verso. Chen, L. and Petty, M. (2021) ‘Singapore PM wins more defamation suits against bloggers’, Reuters. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 2 June 2022). Choi, H.J., Lee, H.Y. and Lee, H.J. (2012). ‘Psychiatric diagnoses of torture survivors’, Journal of Korean Neuropsychiatric Association. 51: 127. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 20 May 2022). Choi, H.J. & Lee, W.Y. and Hyland, P. (2021). ‘Factor structure and symptom classes of ICD-11 complex posttraumatic stress disorder in a South Korean general population sample with adverse childhood experiences’, Child Abuse & Neglect, 114: 104982, Available HTTP: (accessed 20 May 2022). Choo, D. (2022) ‘Jolovan Wham convicted of unlawful assembly for holding sign outside former State Courts building’, Today. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 14 March 2022). Chua, B.H. (2017) Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore. Singapore: NUS Press. Drysdale, J. (1984). Singapore: Struggle for Success. London: Allen and Unwin. George, C. (2012) Freedom from the Press: Journalism and State Power in Singapore. Singapore: NUS Press. Greener, J. (2022) ‘Moralising racial regimes: surveillance and control after Singapore’s “Little India riots”’, Race & Class, 64(1): 46–62. Hong, L., and Huang, J. (2008). The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and its Pasts. Singapore: NUS Press. Hor, M. (2005) ‘Law and terror: Singapore stories and Malaysian dilemmas’, in V.V. Ramraj, M. Hor and K. Roach (eds) Global Anti-Terrorism Law and Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 273–294. Kagee, A. (2005) ‘Symptoms of distress and posttraumatic stress among South African former political detainees’, Ethnicity and Health, 10(2): 169–179. Koh, W.T. (2022) ‘Subhas Nair to admit to charges of attempting to promote ill will between races’, Yahoo!News. Available HTTP: (accessed 1 June 2022). Lee, T. (2010) The Media, Cultural Control and Government in Singapore. New York: Routledge. Liao, F. (2020) ‘Singapore’s COVID-19 Catastrophe: Authoritarian bungling, an infectious election, and an international humanitarian crisis’, The Asia Pacific Journal, 18(15): 7. McCormack, L. and Devine, W. (2016). Childhood and the imposition of war: Self-blame, absolution/ nonabsolution, and vicarious growth in adult children of Vietnam veterans. Traumatology, 22(4): 278–287. Available HTTP: . Munro-Kua, A. (2017) Autocrats vs The People: Authoritarian Populism in Malaysia. Selangor: Suara Rakyat Malaysia (SUARAM) Inisitif. NDTV (2021) ‘Indian-origin rapper in Singapore accused of racism: Report’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 14 March 2022).

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32 EAST ASIA’S VIETNAM Trauma Returns and the Sub-Empire of Memory Long T. Bui

This chapter delves into the enduring legacy of the Vietnam-American War (1955–1975) for East Asian countries by focusing on the geo/politics of memory. Although the main focus is on South Korea, I also take aim at the failure of Japan, Taiwan and China to acknowledge their complicity in the messy conflagration and its impact on Vietnamese people. Deflecting attention away from the violence of the war and towards postwar economic integration demonstrates the ignorance and historical amnesia of these states. These powerful Asian countries have whitewashed their role in the brutal atrocities that took place during the war—actions that demand answers and prompt communal rage from Vietnamese and other Asian survivors. A trans-Pacific conception of the Vietnam War and its haunting afterlives challenges the spatialized notion of the Vietnam War as something that is localized (e.g., a civil war) and uproots the neoliberal demand to forget the temporal past for the sake of economic security and future prosperity. It does so by revealing the ways ‘development’ and ‘­progress’ ­throughout the Asia-Pacific region are undergirded by historical violence and memory gate-keeping (Kim 2019). Trauma—collective and personal—emerges in the legal limitations and knowledge gaps surrounding the geopolitics and political economy of memory. Asian studies scholars use the term sub-empire to describe the exercise of power by nations like Japan, South Korea and China, either by serving other bigger empires (like US or USSR) or asserting their powerful world status over smaller less wealthy countries through the economic sphere (Isaacs 1951, Ueno 1996, Lee 2009). Building on this, I posit a sub-empire of memory to suggest the ways that collective memory and memory work are subordinated to geopolitical economic interests. Former client states of the United States like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea engage in sub-imperialisms and surrogate militarisms that subjugate history and memory (Lee 2009). We can expand on this reality to think about how these hegemonic polities engage in what I have termed the ‘returns of war’—the process by which people, groups and nations economically profit from postwar memory gains or loss (Bui 2018). Here, I conceptualize the ways the temporal memory of war in Vietnam rubs up against the profit motive in the post-Cold War neoliberal era. Trauma, as a collective phenomenon, evinces what sociologist Yvonne Kwan (2020) calls trauma formation, asymmetrical relationships embedded within transgenerational psychosocial structures. I add to this framework by considering ‘trauma returns’ as the ways in DOI: 10.4324/9781003292661-37

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which trauma forms around political capitalist systems in which memory is manipulated or ­mobilized by powerful states. Taken in this way, trauma remains not ossified or sealed in time, but forever changing and evolving due to new circumstances and actors. Indeed, truth activists are shifting the conversation, pushing for greater political accountability in traumatized societies and for the decolonization of memory (Brewer 2006). Chronic denial of responsibility to the dead by East Asian political leaders has only resulted in a great eruption of memory and legal disputes. Here, the struggle continues to determine the salience of a “civil war” (and proxy war) that supposedly concluded in 1975 with the communist takeover of South Vietnam. An abiding commitment to silence in South Korea, Japan and other regional powers amounts to a sanctioning of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It disavows the experience of Vietnamese victims, both living and deceased. We can ask then how might this global-historical flashpoint affect East Asians, riveted to their own histories of war with one another and with the United States? What are  the  ­repercussions of not remembering history or properly dealing with the returns of trauma? In tackling the sub-imperial dimensions of multilateral relations, I identify attempts to rectify gross historical abuses made in the name of economic security, instilling forms of trauma defined as a deeply distressing or disturbing experience and the ensuing shock. After discussing war crimes committed by South Korea in Vietnam, I turn to the specific case of gender-based violence. This is followed by a discussion of Japan, Taiwan and China. What stitches these different nations together is the matted sense that the Vietnam War was not just a military venture but also an economic one. The desire by Asian states to forget their Vietnams lays the contested grounds for grappling with justice and potential paths towards reparative actions.

South Korea and the War in Vietnam In April 2021, Nguyen ThiThanh became the first Vietnamese citizen to sue the Government of South Korea for atrocities committed during the war. The sixty-year-old had travelled to the Republic of Korea to participate in a citizens’ peace tribunal with support from non-­ governmental organizations like the Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation. Along with over a hundred victims, Nguyen reported being shot near her village in 1968 with five members of her family murdered (Lee 2019). Today she endures major trauma from losing so many loved ones and pain from a severed intestine caused by the shooting. The tribunal proposed that the government make a formal apology to the plaintiffs and open a victims’ fund under the 2008 State Compensation Act after concluding that Korean troops had committed a massacre. Despite no support from the state, the tribunal called on the moral authority of justice for humanity to make this claim. Seoul never took an official stance on the matter, since doing so would amount to an admission of wrongdoing. Seeking terms of justice that exceed the normative bounds of the law, Nguyen’s lawyer argued that she was suing ‘regardless of the outcome, [because] getting a judicial decision will help trigger a public discussion about the anger and suffering of the victims of the civilian massacres’ (Lee 2019). The ROK’s statute of limitations remains five years, even though the UN General Assembly in 2005 affirmed the restriction does not apply to serious violations of international humanitarian law or to grave abuses of international human rights laws (General Assembly resolution 60/147). Seeking redress in the legal realm potentially ends up re-traumatizing victims, but for Nguyen and those who have come forward, their acts posit a form of ‘trauma bonding’ within a shared moral community (Yang 2021, 4). Repeating the 396

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facts before an official body re-externalizes the trauma of victims by putting the burden of proof and responsibility on the latter to respond (Feldman and Laub 1992, 69). The lawsuit urged the South Korean government to organize an investigation of civilian massacres. Subsequently, a task force for the Presidential Commission on Policy Planning submitted a report in 2018 to the president calling for an investigation into civilian suffering caused by Korean troops during the Vietnam War (Lee 2019). The committee found that ignoring the victims’ requests for an apology and compensation contradicts South Korea’s official position on ‘comfort women’ (Korean women forced to serve as sex slaves for the imperial Japanese army). The report concluded that denying the trauma of human rights violations against Vietnamese civilians would be similar to denying Korean women’s trauma at the hands of Japanese soldiers. While South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not favour an official ­investigation, uncovering war’s misdeeds remains of interest to South Korean veterans who had also ­suffered from the war. Former soldiers experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (and Agent Orange side effects) are suffering in silence (Do 2020). During the war, other than the United States, South Korea sent the most troops to Vietnam. Korean soldiers committed eighty massacres causing an estimated 9,000 civilian casualties, which were never reported under free speech restrictions imposed by President Park Chung-hee, who seized power in a coup in 1961 (Park and Clayton 2003). The former army general turned president ordered a cover-up of the massacres. Conservatives honour Korean troops as heroes and blocked liberal leaders like President Moon Jae-in from offering a full apology to Vietnam. In 2017, Moon made a controversial remark about Korean expeditionary forces in Vietnam, saying simply that his country ‘has a debt of heart’ without directly invoking the massacres. Vietnam responded to Moon’s apology by saying that South Korea should avoid actions that might ‘negatively’ affect bilateral cooperation (Do 2020). For its part, the current Vietnamese ­government commemorates North Vietnamese soldiers as its war heroes, while the opposing southern troops are relegated to the margins, regarded as ghosts not worthy of public dignity. In this context abuses and atrocities committed by Korean troops in South Vietnam are officially ignored. The social wounds of civilians frequently become pushed aside by demands to move on for the sake of national development and economic progress, but Vietnamese villagers are unrelenting in creating informal rituals dedicated to victims of massacres and ‘grievous death’ (see Kwon 2006, chp 6). This local ‘embedded memory’ makes it hard for the state to annihilate their memory of trauma. Their commemorative work and forms of enshrinement honour both dead Vietnamese children and Korean soldiers. As political ­scientist ­Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo (2005, 168) suggests, commemoration is not ‘a symptom of an incessant, pathological return to be cured with assimilationist remedies’, but a way in which people can recover their histories as they rub up against nationalist agendas. Idealized notions of restorative healing, which focus only on victims, should be redirected to culpable agents and oppressive social systems. In the early 2000s, officers of the ROK military, stricken with guilt, spoke to newspapers about cutting off the ears of Vietnamese prisoners, a practice learned from the Japanese (Le 2021, 25). South Koreans’ traumatic experience under decades of US bombing, Japanese colonialism and anti-communist counterinsurgency instilled a culture of violence in which killers and victims are both made invisible. In the United States, the Korean War is dubbed the ‘forgotten war’; likewise, the Vietnam War remains the forgotten war in South Korea. The lack of truth commissions and the will to forget threaten to undermine East Asian peace by encouraging mistrust between states and individuals (Guthrey 2015). 397

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Given no official recognition of their pain, veterans and victims are forced to relive their traumas every time textbooks ignore them, museum exhibits diminish the severity or ­existence of the problem, or governments place blame on the United States for everything that happened in Vietnam. The sensational, unseen and mundane ramifications of war open towards an apprehension of structural issues and the political economy of memory. Former war-devastated countries like South Korea would not have advanced had it not been for the largesse of the US military-industrial complex and Asian co-conspirators. Whereas today Vietnam is a rising ‘tiger’ economy, it was for many decades associated only with war, loss and ruin. The country’s ascent on the international stage and growing stature, h ­ owever, has not deterred efforts by Vietnamese individuals and groups to remember slights and abuses. Foreign investment by South Korea in Vietnam’s economy cannot adequately offset the lack of reparations for war crimes. While Vietnam lacks a free press, South Korea has many independent media sources and civil society organizations that include groups like the Committee for Finding the Truth about Vietnam, Below the Lotus Flower and the KoreaVietnam Peace Foundation—organizations that conduct mock trials and submit petitions. They are seeking lasting justice over empty prosperity.

Korea-Vietnam Economic Relations Sub-empire of memory explains why there is slow progress on this matter as the ROK’s wealth and modernity enable it to gloss over its past crimes in poorer nations. South Korea is Vietnam’s largest foreign direct investor, a strategic relationship that is all the more important given Vietnam’s territorial disputes with neighbouring China. South Korea’s economic modernity, funded by Japanese reparations in 1965 ($800 million in loans and grants) and by the United States (which paid more than $2 billion to South Korean mercenary soldiers), looms large over Vietnam as it competes for foreign investments. Due to the bilateral state commitment to improving relations, Vietnam and South Korea push historical grievances to the side. Vietnam never pressured the South Korean government for an investigation, reparations or an apology, as it did with the United States. This approach reflected Vietnam’s strategy of diversifying relations and promoting economic integration in the Asian region. Once South Korea became one of the world’s leading economies, and millions of South Koreans were able to overcome their wartime trauma of starvation and poverty through a new higher standard of living, a general sense of ‘moving on’ was enabled by militarized ­developmentalism. At the same time, the ROK’s deep economic ties with Vietnam today give room for consideration of what might be rectified in the shared past of Asian societies. At stake in citizen-driven initiatives for justice is a question of history and memory as well as the normalization of trauma as relegated to the past or oblivion. Challenging neoliberal futures and cultural amnesia, everyday people negotiate the psychic symptoms of traumatic events with powerful reverberations, according to visual studies scholar Viet Le (2021). Observes Le, ‘These ‘untranslatable’ temporalities are inherently tied to shifting geopolitics and the politics of translation. The legacies of such traumas have yet to be understood beyond uplifting narratives of socioeconomic reconstruction’ (2021, 32). Vietnamese and Korean contemporary artists’ attempts to represent war trauma become a ‘trauma of modernity’, due to the overwhelming need to respect the booming trade and bilateral relations between Vietnam and South Korea. Given the image of South Korea as a positive investor and benefactor of Vietnam, Le asks how we can reconcile this orchestrated amnesia with the historic fact that Korean soldiers in Vietnam ‘were brutal, slicing off ears, echoing earlier Japanese 398

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occupation in Korea’ (25). Under the traumatic fallout from wars of aggression, it is here that the sub-empire memory continues to block efforts to address horrendous wartime atrocities. In 1968 in the Vietnamese villages of Phong Nhi and Phong Nhat sixty-nine people were killed by South Korean soldiers, according to a declassified US investigation report kept secret for decades (Griffiths 2018). South Korea’s legacy of involvement in Vietnam remains under wraps, since it remains focused on the legacies of its own civil war (1950–1953) and Japanese colonial rule. Embracing narratives of victimization, South Korea has not reckoned with its role as perpetrator.

Remembering Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Civilian massacres went hand in hand with rape as weapons of war. Wartime military rape and sexual violence are difficult to separate, as recounted in testimonies from both veterans and sexual survivors. There are little to no statistics on the scale of sexual violence compared to murders, which remain undercounted. The My Lai massacre by US Marines overshadowed atrocities committed by Korean troops against villagers in a ‘forgotten’ My Lai (Griffiths 2021). The Phong Nhi and Phong Nhat murders and rapes committed by South Korean soldiers remained largely unknown until the early 2000s, when revelations sparked widespread condemnation. After sifting through US government cables and reports, Korean researchers and media identified a clear pattern of criminal action that was never reported. Whereas some veterans mobilized to defend their honour, other Korean ex-combatants shared their trauma narratives with the public and ‘re-militarized’ themselves in the process by going to ideological war with their own government (Guichard 2019). Many South Koreans remember the ROK as part of the losing side in the Vietnam War, and there is a reticence to label soldiers as violators rather than victims. Public forgetting is enforced despite a years-long effort by international peace campaigners, Vietnamese survivors, Korean journalists and US veterans testifying about the conduct of Korean soldiers. A witness during the ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings in the United States testified about handing over captured female North Vietnamese army nurses to ROK Marines who raped the prisoners. Only 800 rape survivors out of thousands of victims remain alive to recount their traumatic stories (Griffin 2022). As one survivor named Tran Thi Ngai writes, ‘I lost everything after I was raped. I was imprisoned, I lost my home and my children lost their future. Any apology will probably come when I am dead. But I will accept it, even in the afterlife’. Tran’s three children were conceived through rape, and a group called Justice for Lai Dai Han ( JLDH), whose name translates into mixed-race children of Koreans, advocates for such youth. The organization’s founder grew up in Vietnam as a child of rape. A large number of Korean soldiers left behind thousands of children, leaving them to deal with discrimination and poverty in Vietnam. The United States offered to bring over these mixed-race offspring to start a new life through the 1982 Amerasia Act. The original Senate proposal included children born in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan. In the final version of the bill, however, the Philippines, Japan and Taiwan were excluded, since they were not ‘combat zones’ during the Vietnam War, thus artificially limiting war trauma although they hosted US troops and military facilities (Reyes 2020). With South Korea remaining in the bill, the United States contributes to the differential and gendered forgetting of East Asia’s Vietnam. Every year, Korean businessmen and tourists flock to Vietnam, taking advantage of the services of local spas, an industry that emerged out of ‘rest and relaxation’ zones installed by the militaries of Japan and the United States (Kay Hoang 2015). With the Vietnamese state 399

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accommodating this illicit sexual economy, global traffic in desire conjures up m ­ emories of the war and how Southeast Asian women’s bodies then and now are used as proxy ­battlefields. The politics of subversion, ambiguity and legitimation by patriarchal governments stage an ‘empire of trauma’ in which trauma is colonized, racialized and gendered (Edmondson 2018). I also wish to discuss trauma in gendered terms, since what is ‘public’ is normalized or found worthy of commemoration is typically masculine (and militarized) while the ­feminine is consigned to the private secrets, a place where women must suffer as private martyrs (Gasviani 2022). Let us consider the sub-empire of memory as a contested site where war trauma is both maintained and repressed under commodified gender relations. Within this inter-imperial formation, wealthy influential men write or speak history from above and women are tasked with the role of ‘memory keepers’, building an intimate archive of ­k nowledge (Fujita-Rony 2020). Colonized women occupy the gendered intimate, their memory work occurring within and between empires. Women whose lives have been shaped and disrupted by wars resist the historical amnesia of male-dominated states by suing in courts and demanding a public forum to air these matters. Despite deploying over 300,000 soldiers to Vietnam, South Korea’s role in the conflict is little known or accorded a minor role in South Korean media and textbooks (Moon 2007). To bolster their country’s militarized modernity, South Korean male generals deny any wrongdoing, even though Vietnam was Seoul’s largest overseas military operation (Lee 2009). The Park government welcomed participation in America’s war because it was paid in coveted US dollars and strengthened the alliance. In Korean popular memory, the Vietnam War is an event primarily yoked to the Americans and the Vietnamese and not something that centrally involved South Korea. Nonetheless, the ‘just memory’ of those Vietnamese women sexually violated by South Korean soldiers lingers; their accounts expose the sins and indignities of history and the ethics of remembrance (Nguyen 2013). Despite the assumption that Vietnam as a country has ‘moved on’ from its terrible past, survivors’ embodied trauma surfaces in translocal contexts. Literary scholar Cathy Caruth (2016, 24) observes that ‘history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s trauma’. More Korean movies are being made about the war, frequently as co-productions between Vietnamese and Korean companies, documenting wartime ROK involvement in Vietnam and breaking the public’s silence on the matter. Critically acclaimed films like The Classic (2003), R-Point/Ghosts of War (2004), Sunny (2008) and Ode to My Father (2014) convey the message that war is always fought on politically disputed grounds. At times reviled as no more than a celebration of Korean masculinity (and government-authorized prostitution), ‘Korea’s Vietnam’ offers an intertext to the trauma of America’s Vietnam (Ryu 2009). Korean artist Kim Seo-kyung said that she designed a statue ‘to apologize in our way’ to Vietnam (Griffiths 2021). However, her plans to unveil statues in Vietnam and South Korea collapsed under bureaucracy and red tape. The artist had been inspired to make the piece, after noticing Japanese people coming to rallies to apologize for that country’s treatment of Korea and she wanted something to give to the Vietnamese people on behalf of Koreans. A sculptor couple had built statues dedicated to Vietnamese women throughout South Korea, after being disappointed by President Moon Jae-in when he lauded Korean veterans who fought in Vietnam. Despite the marginality of these statues in South Korea at large, in the political arena the artist believes South Korea’s status would be elevated over Japan in the international community by accepting its horrid past. With public statues being erected around the world for Korean comfort women incensing the Japanese government, 400

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this  ­ongoing controversy intensifies conflict over the remembrance of Vietnamese rape survivors.

Japan and the Indochina War During the First Indochina War (1946–1954), Japan seized control of Vietnam, after France had been taken over by Nazi Germany in 1940. With French colonizers temporarily ­subordinated under Japan, the Japanese military terrorized and looted the Vietnamese countryside, and a famine ensued when rice was hoarded for export to Japan for the war effort. An estimated two million northern Vietnamese peasants starved to death and thousands more were displaced from their villages (Dung 1995). Those internally displaced people began telling their stories to newspapers before they died. Japanese occupation and the famine of 1945 left a permanent mark upon survivors, whose experiences are still being told. Much like the British colonizers with a hand in the Bengal famine of 1943 in India, Japan does not acknowledge these people’s famine trauma as their own. Such trauma does not dissipate with the elderly war generation and survives among descendants who bear the burdens of intergenerational trauma. The wartime myth of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Japan promised to bring material benefits to its colonized neighbours submerges everything to the economic sphere. Alongside South Korea, Japan is today a major investor in Vietnam’s economy and the possibility that Japan’s government will apologize for its war crimes seems unlikely, since foreign aid serves as an informal ‘bribe’ to overcome past war crimes. How then is justice for humanity to be achieved? Japan provided goods, including napalm, to the US war effort in Vietnam, and American military forces relied on bases located in Okinawa, a part of Japan that the United States ­controlled between 1945 and 1972, for rear area support and R&R. This war procurement bolstered Japan’s ‘economic miracle’ and export-oriented industries much like the Korean War that helped the country recover from WWII and pull out of an economic slump. As a silent partner in the American war in Vietnam, Japanese firms earned at least $1 billion a year between 1965 and 1972 in selling goods and services to US and South Vietnamese forces (Havens 1990). The maturation of Japan and its export markets in Southeast Asia therefore relied heavily on military-enabled regional connections (Stubbs 1999), providing a boon for not only Japan but other East Asian economies like South Korea to ramp up their industrial capacities. But failing to wrestle with this fact in favour of inter-state neutrality and a new Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere led by Japan consigns Vietnamese survivors of the war to the un-honoured dead. Nodding to the source of that trauma remains a sensitive subject for Japan, since doing so means recognizing how military ventures greased the wheels of its capitalist globalization (Kim 1907; Naya 1971; Park and Clayton 2003). Intensified economic activity however inadvertently breaks open more social-regional connections that could then invite legal action by survivors. As memory studies scholar Cathy Schlund-Vials (2012, 15) posits, mass-scale war shapes a legalized public sphere. State-authorized silence represents trauma as predicated on claims of factual authenticity by plaintiffs; refugees and other displaced figures use those same legal avenues to seek asylum, infusing them with moral and political dimensions. Popular texts, people’s tribunals and other modes of remembrance motion towards alternative routes for engaging with ‘the ability of the nation-state to negotiate such trauma’. She argues that public remembrance of wartime famine installs a traumatized interpretation of history and national ruin ‘epitomized by a sense of left-behindedness, silence and chance’ (Schlund-Vials 2012, 101). Other imperial states have not handled this any better, as illustrated by Britain 401

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and the Bengal famine. Japan is thus not an outlier to a general phenomenon in which wealthy Global Northern countries brush aside evidence of their criminal interactions with the Global South. A gap is evident in the ways Vietnamese victims can only speak about their experiences as a form of silence or shame in the face of powerful governments that accuse them of reviving the ugly past for financial gain (Su 2017). The consequence of this gap is the sense that trauma can only be atomized to individuals or groups, rather than taken to a larger structural level that involves nation-states or regions as a whole. The tumult and aftermath of the Vietnam-American War induced an exodus of people to other Asian countries. Many of these political exiles were thrown back into the sea with estimates that up to 400,000 perished in the ocean according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (Nguyen 2022). Forced migrants were spurned or mishandled by border patrols; their mistreatment remains a stain upon the international community. Almost half a million Vietnamese took to the seas to escape the communists, but as more so-called ‘boat people’ from Vietnam fled to neighbouring Asian countries, this influx of refugees put pressure on them to deal with its postwar mess, which was seen as the fault of the US (Sahara 2012). There are Vietnamese refugee communities in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, but their numbers are small compared to populations resettled in North America. This lack of critical mass makes it appear that East Asian countries had little to do with the war at all, which is not the case. Southeast Asian countries near Vietnam like Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines offered temporary refuge to these refugees (Espiritu and RuantoRamirez 2020). Thousands were forcibly returned/repatriated, and once back in communist territory, they were consigned to imprisonment, torture, miserable living conditions and often early death. Anti-migrant sentiment and restrictions on foreign entry of ‘unwanted’ ethnic groups derive from the racialized sense that East Asian nations are ethnically homogenous and should remain pure. Japan enforces one of the strictest laws for immigration but it grudgingly took in an unprecedented 13,000 Indochinese refugees in 1980–1981 under US pressure despite a history of exclusionist sentiments (Havens 1990). Since then Japan has accepted just a total of 915 refugees from all countries (Asahi 2022). Vietnamese today send the largest number of temporary migrants to Japan on special working visas, another strand in the economic web of bilateral relations (Tran 2020). While Japan does not view the Vietnamese as undesirable then or now, the question remains if Japan will publicly apologize for its colonial history in the country of Vietnam, when Japanese military commanders held the power behind a French-controlled client state. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese anti-war activists criticized Tokyo’s complicity in the American war effort and invoked Japan’s wartime (1931–1945) depredations against fellow Asians, including Vietnam, to spur a collective sense of guilt, but that sense of responsibility has faded (Havens 1987). Japan’s economic investments and official development assistance (ODA) in Vietnam give it the power to camouflage its imperial history towards Vietnam. Japanese and Vietnamese activists have put a spotlight on that history for decades but the Japanese government does not dare to address it (Bui and Sahara 2002). We must recognize but not reinforce stereotypes of Vietnamese refugee passivity or ­v ictimhood but attend to ‘the contingencies and varied, often conflicting desires’ found in refugee encounters (Nguyen 2018, 19). We can recognize the commemoration of trauma in memorials erected by Vietnamese camp inhabitants in Malaysia and Indonesia. Through sub-empire of memory, I take up the challenge of discussing trauma which ‘has been claimed and named by the global structures of command’ (Nguyen 2020, 221).

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Some scholars still wonder if Northeast Asian allies were a clear oppressive force in Vietnam or merely complicit with the US empire. They point to Japan being restricted to offering mostly logistical support, although it also produced the napalm and stored the Agent Orange used by the United States in Vietnam, while South Korea was a developing country and junior alliance partner that supplied ground troops for the US war in South Vietnam. The ambiguous status of the US client states obfuscates war responsibility and postwar memory. Ethnic studies scholar Yen Le Espiritu (2006) calls this obfuscation the ‘we-wineven-when-we-lose syndrome’. While Espiritu ascribes this syndrome to the United States, I extend her analysis to countries like Japan and South Korea, but also China and Taiwan, which I turn to in the next section. By “winning” in the economic sphere, the high-income Asian nations have been able to bury their past military actions and sidestep atonement for historical sins.

The Involvement of Taiwan and China Taiwan exploited the Cold War to build its industries and economy—neo-colonial l­inkages with Vietnam that persist today. Vietnam remains highly dependent on Taiwanese ­companies to expand its developing economy, despite the resulting environmental damage and health risks to the Vietnamese people. Postwar Vietnam in the years after 1975 remained utterly devastated, while South Korea, Japan and Taiwan became exemplars of the ‘East Asian economic miracle’. International state relations and political economy cannot entirely obscure trauma returns, despite those factors undergirding it. The multiplex interpretation of war trauma constitutes a ‘heteroglossia of history’ with multiple competing voices and viewpoints. This contestation puts different parties in contention with one another over who can represent history as well as the future (Bui 2019). As a material and logistical support base, East Asian countries like Taiwan supplied maintenance and resource assistance for US operations in Vietnam. For the CIA, it covertly helped transport and air drop American agents into North Vietnam and Laos, before the United States took over such operations (Leary 2006). Taiwan’s anti-communist leader Chiang Kai-shek sent advisors to South Vietnam, which worried the United States about agitating Chinese/Vietnamese communists further (Trevithick 2014). Ethnic Chinese refugees and other migrants pushed out by the victorious communist regime of Vietnam were accepted by Taiwan after Saigon’s fall. The emerging ‘Asian Tiger’ provided temporary refuge for South Vietnam’s fleeing president before being transferred to the United States. This military-­ diplomatic alliance enabled Taiwan to build up its manufacturing capacities and globalize its foreign capital (Hsu, Gimm & Glassman, 2018). Taiwan’s ongoing “civil” war with China conceals the fact that it was a participant in the Vietnamese civil war. While Taiwan might not have sent armed troops, it participated as a base for secret bilateral missions. The possibility of open conflict remains ever present for Taiwan as well as for Vietnam, as China continues to advance its interests in the Spratly Islands, also claimed by Vietnam (Mearsheimer 2014). When Vietnamese are asked about their country’s history of war, they do not necessarily just bring up the United States, but rather they raise the spectre of China, which last invaded in 1979 and is resented for centuries-long colonial history of subordination and abusive labour practices in China’s many factories in present-day Vietnam (Sullivan 2015). Despite Vietnamese communists repelling US and French forces, China went to war with Vietnam over border conflicts that resulted in almost 40,000 Chinese and Vietnamese dead

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(Zhai 2000). In 1979, Chinese troops crossed the border to invade the country, w ­ aging a bloody scorched-earth strategy understood as Beijing’s response to Hanoi’s alliance with the Soviet Union and its invasion of Chinese ally Cambodia under Khmer Rouge rule. Thousands died in this border war also known as the Third Indochina War. China and Vietnam claimed victory in the skirmish, but the people who fought or perished in it are remembered by the occasional demonstrators in the street and social media users who talk about this border war. In 2013, retired general Le Van Cuong said it was time for official commemorations of this brief war in school textbooks. ‘Thousands of people have lost their lives to protect the land in the north. Why do we have no words for them? It’s late and can’t be later… We cannot have a vague view or ignore this historic issue’ (Nguyen 2017). Despite their shared communist ideology, bad blood continues and both the governments of Vietnam and China avoid discussion of this sensitive topic so as not to inflame public ­opinion. Trauma’s return invites both nations to enforce silence and repress unruly protest. The lingering hurt and pain of the Indochina Wars form the basis for a critique of power. Such critique emanates from the work of humanitarian organizations and citizens’ efforts for memorialization, despite how ‘non-political’ something like Taiwan’s logistics support might look. As social theorist Lauren Berlant (2007, 759) reminds us, trauma and its ‘slow death’ prosper not in ‘discrete time-framed phenomena like military encounters and genocides [but]… in temporal environments whose qualities and whose contours in time and space are often identified with the presentness of ordinariness itself, that domain of living on. The corporate-military lines of collusion/cooperation ­e stablished during the war continue to haunt the contemporary social scene, where Chinese and Taiwanese companies are polluting towns in Vietnam, essentially engaging in an environmental war on the poor. According to critical logistics scholar Wesley Attewell (2020), the multinational sources of labour used to undergird Vietnam War supply chains laid down the roots for corporate hegemony in the trans-Pacific region. Today, villagers in Vietnam are protesting the toxic intrusion of foreign companies, whose export-driven capitalist accumulation and militarized development are life-constricting and killing people. Protestors assert that no amount of money is worth sacrificing public health as they seek to assert a post-Cold War national sovereignty.

Conclusion While Western countries like the United States, New Zealand, Canada and Australia have barely started to address their role in Vietnam, East Asian territories like China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have not done so at all or with much earnest. As shown in this chapter, their state-level denial of active involvement has resulted in the eruption of memory struggles in the media, the law and civil society. Crucial matters of collective history are reflected (and deflected) in matters of economic development, foreign aid, tourism, bilateral relations and legal redress. This is the sub-empire of memory. Indifference by hegemonic East Asian powers hinders any hope for healing the traumas of war. Survivors’ accusations of genocide, rape and desertion are real moments of grief and rage against a neoliberal ‘peace’ undergirded by trade and investment flows, representing what I call ‘trauma returns’. By not addressing these issues head-on, either through official apology or public memorialization, this apathy furthers victimization of war subjects as they attempt to make their cases heard, in public discourse and in the courts. We can accept that no form of rectification is adequate to wrestle with military violence, but the path of healing

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must begin somewhere. The continued repression of this circle of trauma is the quandary of what I termed East Asia’s Vietnam. Contemporary Vietnam as a site of high financial investment for East Asian countries ­conceals how commercial relations are erected upon multiple war traumas and multiple sub-empires of memory. Vietnam’s government however is no innocent victim of this ­geopolitics, especially as it gains increased power in the economic sphere and uses it to block UN action on the 2020 military coup and 2017 genocide of ethnic minorities in Burma (Aggarwal 2021). As war continues to maim and mutilate lives, the endurance of this menacing spectre raises the issue of historical commemoration, and the question of who is answerable to the grief-stricken not only in current wars but previous ones as well.

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33 WOUNDS TO THE SOUL A View from Vietnam Heonik Kwon

Concerns about the effects of war, especially how modern warfare induces lasting wounds to the human body and soul, were part of early anthropology. Notably, W. H. R. Rivers, known for his 1898 expedition to the Torres Strait Islands and as a pioneer in c­ omparative kinship terminology studies, during WWI, worked at a war hospital as a resident psychopathologist. His encounter with the renowned English poet Siegfried Sassoon at the Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers, near Edinburgh, came to be widely known, in part, thanks to Pat Barker’s fictional history of this era, the Regeneration trilogy (1991). It is in a large measure through Rivers’ clinical engagement with Sassoon and other British officers who were deeply troubled by their experience of the dreadful trench warfare that the idea of shell shock later became publicly acknowledged. Rivers considered shell shock as a real illness and that the driving force behind this war neurosis was the instinct of self-preservation, thereby departing from the then prevailing theory of neurosis that concentrated on infantile experiences of a sexual nature. Rivers’ understanding of war neurosis focused on the experience of combatants has had a lasting legacy. The Vietnam War looms large in this story. According to Allan Young (1995), it was after the Vietnam War (1961–1975) that the phenomenon we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) became embedded in public knowledge and institutional practice, first in the United States and later much more widely. Initially, the clinical symptoms were identified principally with the lives of American veterans of the Vietnam War, whose combat experience in a distant foreign war was presumed to constitute the etiological event. Indeed, American accounts of the war in Vietnam abound with stories of destructive personal wounds—wounds that continued to trouble the bodies and minds of those who experienced the protracted war long after it was over. In Philip Caputo’s celebrated autobiographical account The Rumour of War (1977), for instance, the protagonist and Vietnam War veteran is haunted by the deaths of his fellow soldiers and his Vietnamese acquaintances. These accounts often show that the Vietnam War left scars not only in individual bodies but also in the collective body. Hence, the widely mentioned idea of the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ which refers to the Vietnam War’s enduring, haunting effects on America’s collective consciousness and its body politic. Young’s research concentrated on the second half of the 1970s, the immediate post-­ Vietnam War era. Since then, there have been notable changes in war trauma research and 408

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clinical diagnosis and treatment. Bracken and Petty (1998) trace this change to the early 1990s during which what they call the ‘trauma project’— work on the psychological wounds of war and psychotherapeutic counselling—expanded in scale and became highly visible in international humanitarian engagement with the effects of war in the developing world. The era’s trauma project parted from that of the previous eras, according to them, not merely with its widening international and transnational scope but also in that its focus was increasingly on the plight of non-combatants, especially children and other vulnerable civilian victims of violent conflicts. The cases Bracken and Parry introduce in their report are mostly as part of broader humanitarian interventions by international agencies in conflict zones of the global South, which involve not only urgent material assistance but also a sustained engagement with local societies for community repair and intercommunal reconciliation. They argue that these community-focused projects, unlike the previous combatant-focused interventions, require an awareness of local cultural traditions—that is, attention to the fact that although modern warfare’s destructive consequences have many similar features across societies, effective ways to attend to these wounds may vary significantly among them. Despite this diversity, Bracken and Parry argue that the existing international humanitarian provision of psychiatric care varied little across the diverse geographic locations where they were implemented. Calling this the homogenization of psychiatry, the authors express concerns with the trend they observed in the international humanitarian field in which the so-called homogenization process affected local practices to the extent that health experts in the South increasingly ‘looked to the West for its conceptual foundations and for ideas about innovation and progress’ (Bracken and Petty 1998, 2). The above point about locally variant configurations raised by Bracken and Parry merits careful consideration. It is also relevant for analysing the Vietnam War and its important place in the genealogy of the contemporary trauma concept. The Vietnam War was a turbulent and agonizing experience for many in the United States, but it was surely a much more destructive and violent event for Vietnamese people. In post-war Vietnam, there was a widely held notion that is akin to the idea of trauma or traumatic memory familiar to us (Gustafsson 2009; Kwon 2008a; Nguyen 2016; Tai 2001). In recent decades and since the mid-1990s, this notion has been forcefully empowered and manifested in a myriad of forms, and there has been a sudden eruption of powerful communal interest in the lingering wounds of war. This process involved the recognition that the violence of war can cause enduring wounds to the human soul. Interestingly, however, the wounds of war revealed in Vietnam typically, although not exclusively, concerned the sufferings that are believed to be endured by the dead victims of war. In this chapter, we look into this locally specific way to come to terms with the enduring wounds of war as manifested in post-war Vietnamese society.

The Crying Whale In the dry season of 1977, a modest-sized young whale was found beached on the seafront of Cam Re, a fishing village south of Da Nang, the commercial and administrative centre of central Vietnam. Following a long tradition in the region, the villagers understood the incident as the visit of a new Ca Ong, a messenger from the undersea and a guardian spirit of fishermen. According to this tradition, the whale arriving in the terrestrial world in this way requires a ritualized burial and, eventually, being placed at the community’s Whale Temple, a site of great communal importance for fishing villages. This time, however, the new Ca Ong behaved somewhat unusually compared to when dealing with 409

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previous visitors from the sea. This whale kept crying with tears until it ran out of breath. Perplexed and also alarmed, ­several village elders, including a retired fisherman who acted as the keeper of the ­settlement’s Whale Temple, hurriedly called in a village spirit medium. What ensued is briefly that: the Whale Spirit conveyed to the Cam Re villagers, through the spirit medium, how very much it was saddened by what it had undergone in the sea in recent times. There were too many innocent people, many children included, lost in the sea, according to the Whale, and their cries tormented and broke its soul. Ca Ong couldn’t bear the sadness of these lost souls and the weight their sufferings had left on it anymore, and so it decided to bring them to the village, although it knew that the time was not yet ripe for its visit. Cam Re villagers understood these unfortunate souls as those of the boat people, the exodus of refugees from Vietnam after the war, who fell victim to sea storms and piracy. Although a crying whale was an unusual occurrence, most villagers did not consider the message conveyed by the whale extraordinary. Whales were known to be kind creatures for fishermen and their communities, and people believed that Ca Ong was able to bring the souls of fishermen who were lost at sea back to their terrestrial homes. The villagers understood the whale’s carrying of the victims of sea piracy (known to originate from a different coastal area in the north, near Hue) in a similar light, and later held small rites of spirit consolation on their behalf. This was undertaken at a small shrine on the community’s seafront that is located on the opposite side of the village’s Whale Temple. The crying whale was buried nearby; four years later, its remains were reburied and its spirit was formally introduced to the Whale Temple following a modest rite. (These rites were traditionally much more elaborate and festive occasions; however, the time was a difficult one for such activities due to the revolutionary social reform politics waged after the war in the former territory of South Vietnam that included a rather strong anti-religion, anti-superstition campaign.) Following the reburial, the lost souls that had come with the whale became part of Cam Re’s ‘invisible neighbours.’ Cam Re has many other invisible neighbours (Kwon 2008a, 83–102). Although some of the stories about them might come across as unsettling or even creepy, most typically sound much like any other mundane neighbourly gossip that the people in this small semi-­ fishing and semi-farming community exchange on a daily basis. Others can even generate ­laughter—such as the stories about the spirit of a one-legged soldier. His apparition was almost always along the bifurcated point of a narrow footpath that connects the village’s two main residential clusters; the footpaths also lead to the ruins of an old ancestral temple and those of a former French garrison, favourite hangout places for children. The soldier ghost hops around on his left leg, having lost his right one to a landmine, and the children invented a play in which they competed to see who could best imitate the soldier’s unusual mode of mobility, eliciting gales of laughter. Cam Re’s invisible residents are diverse in their historical origins and, if seen as a whole, even demonstrate a cosmopolitan outlook (Kwon 2008b). There are many Vietnamese spirits: the apparition by a young mother with two small children is familiar to the villagers living near a small enclave of bamboo trees, the site of a tragic village massacre in 1967 at the height of violence perpetrated during the Vietnam War in the area. The villagers living along the dirt road that leads to the sand dunes spoke of a middle-aged ghost they called ‘head-down, feet-up.’ This spirit is often spotted standing and moving on its head, and the locals associate its highly unusual pattern of mobility with the unconventional condition of its burial. It is believed in Cam Re and its environs that this spirit is of a man who was (wrongly) accused of treason and who was subsequently buried (alive) upside down by a communist hit squad 410

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in the wet season of 1966. Many other non-Vietnamese, foreigner ghosts dwell in Cam Re. These include the spirit of a non-Vietnamese-looking Asian man dressed in American combat uniform. The locals speculate that this is the spirit of a South Korean soldier killed in a bomb crater, now used as a fishpond. Another well-known foreigner ghost is that of a nonFrench–looking man dressed in a French army uniform. Cam Re’s elders share the view that this spirit originates from the village’s old French garrison, which, at the height of what the Vietnamese call the War Against France, consisted of more than 200 colonial conscripts from North Africa. In a hamlet west of Cam Re that is cut into two by the paved road to Da Nang, built originally by the French during the French War (1945–1954) and later improved by the South Korean engineering corps during the American War (1961–1975), residents are aware of an ancien combattant, an oversized and intimidating spirit of a former French officer. Also known are the two extremely timid and perpetually hungry spirits of American servicemen. These two American spirits are always together and are rather fearful of the villagers. They also make curious jingling noises, which the locals speculate emanate from spoons in empty army ration cans. The people of Cam Re interact with these hidden neighbours of their community on a daily basis, laying incense sticks on the apparition sites and occasionally providing more substantial hospitality with offerings of food and drink. Most villagers take it for granted that the living should share their lived world with beings on the other side of the ontological threshold. This is despite the fact that they sometimes have to act against certain invisible neighbours if the latter happen to be the cause of excessive troubles—troubles that are judged to violate the customary norms of communal coexistence. On one occasion, a few villagers teamed up with the village’s Daoist master in an effort to calm a North African ghost from the time of the resistance war against France. The foreigner spirit had the naughty habit of touching, from behind, the shoulders and necks of young village women while they were returning from the marketplace. These were not the only dwellers of the otherworld sharing the village environment with the people of Cam Re. Ritual interactions with invisible neighbours coexist with those with family and village ancestors. These two categories, ancestors and ghosts, are inseparable, in fact, mirroring each other in a host of ways, just as are the am (the world of the dead) and duong (the world of the living), which are considered interactive and mutually constitutive. The picture is basically a concentric duality consisting of two groups of spirits (ancestral spirits kept inside a house versus displaced, placeless spirits outside the house), existing as part of a larger dualist world scheme composed of the living and the dead. In the tradition of central Vietnam, this house-centred, dual conception of death and the afterlife places the ritual act of commemoration between two different surfaces of ­memory—between the ancestral shrine placed in the interior of the house and the milieu of the street—wandering, displaced spirits of the dead. The typical way in which people in this region conduct their regular ancestral rites is to kowtow to the ancestors and then to walk to the outside and repeat the action towards the imaginary world of wandering souls. This ­two-sided commemorative practice is also found in wider community affairs, such as the whale temple mentioned above or the opening ceremony of a village communal house or a lineage ancestral temple. The street-side worship is formally on behalf of the unknown and unrelated souls of the dead that exist in the neighbourhood or that are assumed to have gathered for the occasion from more distant locations. It is structurally similar to the act of ­d istributing small offerings to the unknown graves found in the vicinity of the ­a ncestral tombs after giving offerings of incense and flowers to ancestors. Offerings to ancestors acknowledge the exclusive ties of kinship between the donor and the recipient; the 411

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distribution of offerings to other graves recognizes the inclusive ties of residence between ancestral identities and non-ancestral beings. In this structurally dualist, practically two-way system, two distinctive ways of imagining social solidarity emerge. On the house side, we may say, following Émile Durkheim (1991), that the commemorative act affirms the ties between the living and the dead, thereby generating a sense of mutual belonging as well as that of a coherent social whole, which can be called genealogical unity or the lineage paradigm. This affirmation is particularly evident in the regular ceremonies held at the communal house, which are dedicated to the founding ancestors of the village. All family and lineage groups of the village are expected to take part in these occasions or to at least make contributions to them, including people from the village who have relocated to faraway places. The participants listen to speeches about the founding ancestors’ legendary history of migration and settlement and then make gestures and offerings of tribute to their memory, which are ordered according to seniority and ­lineage statuses. The organization of this village-wide ancestral rite also includes ritualized interactions with placeless spirits. Following the house-side worship, the participants turn in the opposite direction and bestow prayers and offerings on behalf of the displaced spirits. These spirits, unlike ancestors who are believed to be settled within the temple, do not have the privilege of having a home. The street-side worship does not follow a strict order of seniority such as that in the house-side worship and, hence, can appear quite chaotic. On certain occasions, the prayer activity for invisible neighbours may also be accompanied by a traditional prayer of spirit invitation and consolation, calling in all tragic or displaced deaths and urging the spirits to receive the villagers’ gestures of sympathy and hospitality. Today, these prayers are often improvised versions of the famous classical poem Van te co hon (‘Calling the Wandering Souls’) composed by Nguyen Du, an eminent literary scholar of the eighteenth century (Kwon 2008b, 27–28). The concept of xac is instructive for starting a conversation on the phenomenon of afterlife displacement. This concept is special among the several Vietnamese terms that refer to the human body. The word means ‘corpse’; however, the term’s meaning incorporates not only the material condition of a body that is lifeless and immobile but also the related yet opposite condition of a soul that is free and full of life. When the body dies, according to a common popular Vietnamese belief, the soul becomes free and can move between the place of death and burial as well as among other places with historical attachment and where the soul’s historical identity is remembered—such as the family’s domestic ancestral altar. The mobile soul of the dead may appear in different places simultaneously, which is recognized as a sign of the soul’s power and vigour. The Vietnamese describe this condition with the concept of linh, meaning ‘vital’ or ‘efficacious.’ When a spirit intrudes someone’s body in what is commonly referred to as spirit possession, this mode of communication is also called xac (or nhap xac), which, in this context, entails that ‘the spirit enters the body.’ In central Vietnamese regions, the term is also a colloquial reference to spirit mediums, meaning ‘­people who are capable of inviting spirits to their bodies.’ Just as there are two opposite conditions of xac, so are there two different ways to relate to death in Vietnamese mortuary culture. On one end of the spectrum is the elaborate tradition of dealing with the lifeless body. In this tradition, the corporeal integrity of the deceased is of great importance, and the proper ritual preparation of the body for internment is considered of supreme importance for the welfare of the deceased person and for a harmonious relationship between the dead and the living. This explains why people who went missing during the war are the object of pity and concern and why different institutions, from the 412

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family to the state, sought to find the remains of these missing individuals after the war was over (Malarney 2001). At the other end of the spectrum, the idea of xac indicates that the presence of the dead can be permeable, unmarked and unspecified and that it may be widely diffused within the place of the living. It is believed that the spirits of the dead may wander freely about the village: in the ditches and sand dunes, old prison camps and police stations, school buildings and household kitchen areas, particularly at dusk. On the fifteenth day of each lunar month, the number and intensity of travelling spirits is thought to increase ­d ramatically. In popular conceptualization, the dead who are properly entombed at an appropriate site according to ritual propriety are less inclined to roam the streets than those who are not properly buried and remembered. These un-mourned, hungry and unclothed spirits make up the majority of the lost and wandering spirits believed to exist in ­contemporary Vietnamese communities.

Afterlife Traumas The concept of xac denotes both a particular condition of the body, which is immobile and lifeless, and a related, specific condition of the soul, which is mobile and vital. It is unquestionable that the ritual intimacy with the lost souls is grounded in the region’s long cultural tradition. However, it is also unquestionable that the phenomenon today is intimately related to the recent historical experience of war and revolution, which resulted in a mass destruction and dislocation of human life. The Vietnam War was astonishingly violent and painfully chaotic, resulting in countless missing persons and deaths away from home villages. When the war was over, the physically and spiritually exhausted survivors returned to begin a new life with what little remained, only to encounter a situation that greatly challenged their ability to start over. Their ­homeland was dotted not only with deadly weaponry but also with the remains of the unknown dead buried in shallow graves. The intrusion of the foreign dead, both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese, on the village lands was accompanied by another crisis in the villages’ moral landscape—the bodies of numerous close kin were missing for burial in their home villages. This war-induced displacement of human lives long haunted post-war Vietnamese villages, particularly in the south, which were never the same as before despite the recovery of some normality encouraged by the national, post-war reconstruction efforts. The surviving families faced the reality of missing persons and missing bodies with great anxiety and pain despite the post-war state’s efforts to motivate the people to look forward with hope rather than look back at the ruins of history. In the part of Quang Ngai Province that came to be known by the international community as My Lai during the Vietnam War, after a tragic mass killing of civilians in March 1968, the residents told many stories of the spirits of the dead in pain. Some of the villagers vividly recalled the lamentations of village ghosts and the cries they had heard coming from the killing sites. Residents in one particular settlement graphically described seeing the apparitions of young women, each walking with a small child in her arms and lamenting over the child’s lifeless body. The villagers explained that the mother ghosts were grieving for their dead children (Kwon 2006, 120–136). According to the old village undertaker, the village’s invisible neighbours could lament their own physical pain or feel pain when their loved ones suffered pain; they might have grievous feelings about their own tragic, unjust death or they might cry over their children’s deaths as if they, themselves, were not yet dead. Their moods and sentiments—and even their forms—fluctuated with the circumstances. The child ghosts appeared dead in their 413

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grieving mothers’ arms on a moonless night during the rainy season, and yet, these same children could be seen playfully running after their mothers on a pleasant evening before the lunar New Year celebration. The My Lai villagers regularly held modest rituals at home and outside their homes on behalf of these hidden neighbours, and they explained the condition of these neighbours’ lives using the concept of ‘grievous death’ or ‘unjust death’ (chet oan). This concept connotes that the agony of a violent, unjust death and the memory of its terror entrap the soul in an agonizing afterlife. The human soul in this condition of postmortem incarceration does not remember the terror as we, the living, would; rather, the soul is believed to relive the violent event, perpetually re-experiencing the terror of violent death. The memory of death for the tragically dead, in other words, is a living memory in its most brutal sense. Trapped by the memory of its violent death, the soul experiencing grievous death is unable to depart to the other world until the situation is corrected by the intervention of an external power. This perpetual re-experience is described as ‘incarceration’ (nguc), which means that the souls of the dead are trapped in the mortal terror and traumatic experience of violent death. The grievance of oan and the self-imprisonment of nguc describe the same phenomenon—grievance creates the imaginary prison, whereas the prison captures the grievance and heightens its intensity. The My Lai villagers recalled the names of certain deceased villagers as the most aggrieved victims of the 1968 massacre, and these names belonged to families whose genealogy was decimated by the violence. This devastation provoked the strongest sense of injustice and moral indignation in other Vietnamese communities affected by ­civilian massacres. A grievous death, in this context, is not only the destruction of innocent lives but also a crisis in the social foundation of commemoration. According to this culturally specific conceptualization of human rights, the right of the dead to be liberated from the violent history and memory of death is inalienable, and the protection of this right depends on the secular institutions of commemoration. This work of memory is also a collaborative project between inhabitants of the living world and those of the otherworld, which involves not only acts of outside intervention in the form of death commemoration but also the soul’s strong will for freedom from history. Apparitions, such as those of the mother and child spirits, are commonly understood as a sign of the growth of self-­consciousness and self-­ determination on the part of the sufferers of grievous historical memory.

Conclusion I have no means to know whether human souls survive the event of death, not to mention if the agony of re-experiencing violent events of the past can torment these souls of the dead. What I do know is simply that this idea, the trauma in the afterlife, has helped shape how Vietnamese society came to terms with the destruction of war. The idea of grievous death is a deep-rooted cultural category in Vietnam; yet, the contemporary manifestation of this idea is a product of history, inseparable from the violent history of a long war. The concept of trauma that is manifested in this context is evidently not the same as that which developed in post-Vietnam War American society, as described by Young. It is not possible to put the trauma suffered by living bodies and those endured by the souls of the dead in the same category. Beyond the plurality of forms and even a categorical incompatibility between the concepts of trauma mentioned above, however, I am not inclined to think that these different conceptions of war traumas are entirely unrelated. I believe it is p­ ossible to think of these radically diverging conceptions of human trauma in ­relational terms, ­w ithout diminishing the authenticity of each. The traumatic memories of the Vietnam War 414

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among the American survivors of this war, and the memories of violent death among the Vietnamese victims of the war—these two different manifestations of trauma have their ­origins in a common tragedy of human suffering. It is true that they arose from variant historical circumstances and cultural backgrounds; however, it is also true that these divergent ways to express the ‘wounds to the soul’ (Hacking 1995, 4) have a shared origin of destruction that created these wounds in the first place. Perhaps it is this question of common origin that our concerns about the trauma of war, including those about their diverse manifestations, ultimately point to. For it is in the process of eliciting the shared background that we come to realize it is necessary to contextualize the trauma of war in its proper historical context and, accordingly, to recognize the plurality of human culture to express traumatic memories of war. Acknowledgements I thank Jeff Kingston and Tina Burrett for their kind interest and insightful comments. The research for this article is part of the Mega-Asia collaborative project in Seoul National University Asia Center, which experiments socio-historical comparison in a broad Asia, with support from the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A6A3A02065553).

Works Cited Bracken, P. J. and C. Petty. (eds). (1998). Rethinking the Trauma of War. London: Free Association Books. Gustafsson, M. L. (2009). War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Durkheim, É. (1991). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by K. E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Hacking, I. (1995). Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kwon, H. (2006). After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kwon, H. (2008a). Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kwon, H. (2008b). “The Ghosts of War and the Spirit of Cosmopolitanism.” History of Religions, Vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 22–42. Malarney, S. K. (2001). “The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice: Commemorating War Dead in North Vietnam.” In H. H. Tai (ed) The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, pp. 46–76. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nguyen, V. T. (2016). Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tai, H. H. (ed). (2001). The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press. Young, A. (1995). The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton, NJ: ­Princeton University Press.

415

INDEX

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aa Nomugi Toge 162–163 Abbas, A. 190 Abe, H. 106 Abe Shinzo 6, 67, 69, 100, 126, 158, 165, 169, 217–220, 373, 377 Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) 175 Ahn Jung-geun 231 Alexander, J. C. 2, 3, 25, 345 algorithm 252, 255, 257–259 Allan, J. 226, 227 American War 401–402, 411 Anderson, B. 75, 363 Anti-Japan War (AJW) 199, 203, 207, 209, 226, 374 apparition 353, 410–411, 413–414 Arakatsu Bunsaku 98 archives 49, 56, 153, 175–178, 180, 204–205, 239, 305, 318, 324, 327, 359, 400 Arikawa Hiro 105 artificial intelligence (AI) 251; achievement of human immortality 258; applications 251; on deep learning 251; erosion of human person and society 251; housekeeper 257–258; human distinctions 252, 255; humanoid 250, 251, 257, 259; limits and dehumanizing effects 251; mother, advent of 252–256; narratives 252; penetration into everyday life 251; recreation of life 256 Asahi Shimbun 105, 106 Asian-African Conference 28 Asia-Pacific War 52, 74, 75, 77, 80, 83, 89, 91, 93, 112 Asiatic backwardness 28 Attewell, W. 404

Augé, M. 84, 85 Bandung Conference see Asian-African Conference Ben-Asher, N. 122 Berger, Peter L. 11 Berlant, L. 404 Blackie, L. E. R. 25 Blanchot, Maurice 2 Blumenthal, M. 208 ‘boat people,’ Vietnam 402 Bong, Youngshik D. 363 Bracken, P. J. 409 Breslau, J. 124, 125 British National Party 68 Brody, Adrian 203 Brown, J. 196 BTS 326 Budokan 80 The Burmese Harp 100 Cai, Yuanpei 205 Callahan, William A. 217, 218 Candlelight Movement, 2016–2017 319–320 capitalism 5, 256; economy 258; export-driven 404; globalization 401; Japanese 31, 127; neo-liberal 360; production and consumption 258 Capitol (Washington, DC) 208 carrier groups 23 Carter, Jimmy 203 Caruth, C. 121, 348, 400 cemetery: in Cheju 352–353; family 352–353; Mangwol-dong 318–319, 332, 335–337, 341;

417

Index National (see National Cemetery); war 75, 82, 84 Chang, Iris 199, 202, 203 Chan Kin-man 193 Cheju April 3 Incident (1947–1954)/Cheju massacre/The Cheju Commission 344–353, 353n1 Chen Qiufan: Waste Tide 251 Chen Shui-bian 264, 273, 275, 282 Chen Wen-cheng 295 Cheonan incident 357, 359 Chiang Ching-kuo 263, 265, 272, 274, 281 Chiang Kai-shek 263, 264, 272, 274, 276, 280, 282, 403 Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery 73, 74, 77–77, 79, 81, 81, 83–84 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 28, 199, 224, 230, 263, 280–281, 291; brutality 192; China’s postwar development 208; cultural and territorial claims 285; ethnic minorities 200; history and historical sites 234; KMT’s adversary 298, 299; narratives 224, 234; Patriotic Education Base 226; rule at home 199; SJRM 206, 208; victory of 28 Chinese stagnation 28 Chinese Zhigong Party 240 Chow, Alex 192 Chow, Thomas 11 Chua, B. H. 385 Chubarian, Alexander 372 Chun Doo Hwan 318, 321, 322, 325, 332, 333 Citizens’ Army 318, 322 City of Life and Death (movie) 215–217 City of Protest 194 civilized West 27 Civil War (Chinese) 5, 208, 209, 237, 263, 269, 292, 403 Claims Agreement between Japan and the ROK, 1965 306 Clinton, Bill 127 cognitive mechanisms 309 Cold War 224, 228, 233, 238; Cheju massacre 344–345; Chinese Communist invasion 274; in East Asia 326; end of 5; Taiwan 403; US 133 comfort station 245–248, 310 comfort women 31, 50, 303; criminality of Nanjing Massacre 67; enslavement of 239; forced recruitment 53, 110, 247; history of 53, 54, 106; issue 4, 6, 62, 66–69, 219; Korean 55, 154–155, 306, 312, 361, 397; memorials 248; military 37–39, 41; monetary payments 247; MOW inscription of 204; ‘notice of concern’ 58; Ramseyer 56 commemoration 2, 340, 344; of AJW 203; on Cheju Island 347; ‘Gangnam Station Murder’ 356; of Gwangju Uprising 318; of Hiroshima bombing 202; Holocaust 199–200, 209; of 4.3

Incident 346; of massacre 227; May 18 324; of Nazi atrocities 202; of nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 62; of Okinawa’s wartime trauma 140; rites and sites of 1, 74, 82, 138–139, 189, 221, 346; of soldiers’ deaths 363; state-funded 266; Taiwan’s 267; Tiananmen 187, 190; of trauma in memorials 400, 402; of victims of war crimes 63, 73–78, 80, 82–84, 218, 273; of White Terror 292–293, 296–297; of WWII 375 compensation, legal 306, 325 Connerton, P. 331 conscription (military) 303, 360–362, 364 Copeland, R. 37, 38, 40 Council for Cultural Affairs (Taiwan) 263, 266 COVID-19 69, 79, 126, 193, 196, 220, 264, 378, 388 Creelman, J. 227 cultural trauma 2–5, 25, 88, 90, 95, 122, 143, 154–155, 344–345 cyber harassment 361 ‘Day to Commemorate the End of the War’ (Shūsen kinen no hi) 79 de-Asianization 27 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women 63 defeated soldiers 89–92, 95 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) 264, 272–275, 278, 282–284, 287, 291–292, 295–296, 299 Deng Xiaoping 203 Derevyanko, Kuzma 378 Devils on the Doorstep (movie) 212–214, 216–217, 219–221 diasporic memory/diasporic returning 346, 348, 352–353 Drumbl, M. A. 110 Dudden, A. 67 Durkheim, É. 412 Dutch 63, 69, 114, 147, 150, 288, 303 East Asia: Cold War 326; collective trauma 2; colonial rule 23; cultural trauma 2–3; growth of nationalism 69; Khalkhin Gol 372; Putin’s foreign policy strategy 369–370; trauma narratives 5–7; WWII events 378 Eien no Zero (Forever Zero) 101, 102 Einstein, Albert 98 Eldridge, R. 137 Elley, D. 220 embodied memory 345 emotion(al) 258–259; collective trauma 2, 3; damage 387–389; deficiency 253–255; of fear and empathy 91; human 250, 270; in international relations 121; negative 91, 274; pain 40; in politics 121; recovery of victims

418

Index 45; threats 123; trauma 256, 352; well-being 35–36, 128 Enshia Li 253 Espiritu, Y. 403 Eternal Hospital 250–252, 258 ethnic responsibility 26, 28–30 Evans, Richard J. 51, 52 exhume 1, 29, 75, 336, 345, 346, 351, 353, 354n4 Falleti, T. G. 304 Fassin, D. 121 Federal Security Service (FSB) 373 feminist(s) 3, 40, 273, 360–361 Feng Xiaogang 203 Figal, G. 138, 139, 234 film censorship in China 221, 321 The Fires in the Plain (Ōoka) 90 The Flowers of War (movie) 215–217 forced labor/mobilization 144, 146, 152, 155 Foreign Ministry 373 forgetting 26, 33, 138, 234; Asia 27–28; Asian Culture Centre 337; Manchuria’s Base Town 234–235; May 18 Democratic Uprising 332–333, 334; and place-of-memory unmaking 330; politics of 330–332, 335–340; prescriptive 336–341; Sewol Ferry Disaster 333–334, 335, 340 Frank, Anne 200, 203 French War 411 Fukushima: court challenges 173–174; Daiichi’s tsunami defences 170, 172; duelling museums 174–181; 2011 nuclear disaster 4, 47, 127, 170, 173, 174, 180, 375; nuclear refugees 171, 171–172; Prefectural Disaster Response Headquarters 178; reactors 170; resilient 171, 172; TEPCO 176, 179 Fukuzawa Yukichi 32 Futaba 171, 172, 177–178, 179, 180 Futenma 136–137 Galanter, M. 304, 306, 307 Galschiot, Jens 187 Gangnam Station Murder 356, 358–361, 363–364 Gbechko, Alexei 378 Genda Yūji 127 gender-based violence 1, 356, 357, 396, 399–401 George, C. 391 Gerow, A. 102, 103 ghosts: ‘ancestors’ 351, 353, 411; of dead victims 345; foreigner 411; middle-aged (‘headdown, feet-up’) 410; political 353; stories (Kitarō) 92; in Vietnam 4; village 413; of violent events 353 Ghoya ( Japanese officer in occupied Hong) 207 girls 19, 38, 63, 69, 138, 161, 163, 165, 207, 215, 245–247, 256, 310, 359, 364

global far-right 69 Glover, Thomas 150 Goh Chok Tong 391 Goldberg, A. 209 Gordon, A. 161 Granovetter, Mark 127 Great East Japan Earthquake 174, 176, 180 Great Patriotic War 369, 372, 375 grievous death 397, 414 Gunkanjima - Battleship Island, Hashima coal mine, island, tourism 149–150, 152 Gwangju: ‘Gwangju in 1980’ 319, 323, 326–327, 387; Gwangju Video 322; massacre 325–326, 333; May 18th Gwangju Democratization Movement 320; period of ‘liberated Gwangju’ 322; 2018 public screening 327; ‘Remember Gwangju’rally 319; South Korea’s May 18 Democratization Movement 318–320, 323–327, 330–332, 338, 349 Hagel, Chuck 78 Han, Byung-Chul 259 Hao Jingfang 250–259 Haruko (Chung Pyung-Chun) 348, 352–353 Hasegawa, S. 247 Hatoyama Yukio 219 Hayakawa, T. 106 Hazama, H. 162 Hazan, Haim 209 He, Fengshan 201 Henoko project 131, 134, 136, 136–137 heteropatriarchy/heteropatriarchal 357, 363–364 Hevia, J. 225 hibakusha (Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors) 13, 19–20, 20n1 Hirohito 19, 79, 84, 103 Hiroshima: atomic bombings of 3, 20, 62, 90, 98, 101–103, 105, 202; neighbourhood of Danbara 13; Ōiwa Kōhei 13–15; Ōtemachi and Jisenji-no-hana sites 16; survivors (hibakusha) 13, 20, 20n1; Tominaga Chieko 17–20; Tsuchiya Keiji 15–17; Ujina waterfront district of 14; Zhen Su Bing 15–17; zone of total destruction (ZTD) 13, 15 Hirsch, Marianne 346 historical distortion 319, 326–327 historical revisionism 57–58, 379; Internationalization (kokusaika) Policy 64–66; Japanese 62–70, 80; narratives of 95 Hitler, Adolf 49–52 Hollywood 99, 104, 215–217, 220, 294 Holocaust: commemoration 199, 200, 209; denialism 49–53, 67; history 58, 122; horrors of 205; memory 202, 204; Nazi 12, 199–200, 203 Holzmeyer, C. 312 homogenization process 409 homosexual 363

419

Index Hong Kong: armed police 194; 4 June Massacre 190–195; Pillar of Shame 187–190, 188, 189; trauma of suppression 195–197; Umbrella Movement 191, 191–192 Hongkou (district of Shanghai) 202–203, 206–207 Hongkou Ghetto 207 Horiba, M. 165 Horiuchi, M. 81, 84 Hor, M. 388 Huffman, J. 161 human: culture 251, 415; identity 250; life 11, 57, 89, 251–252, 258–259, 413; mind and body 11, 250–252, 257–258, 408, 412; qualities 255, 258–259; rights 5, 25–26, 69, 122, 137, 264, 266–268, 271–275, 279, 283, 284, 287–28, 307, 319, 340, 357, 363, 414; soul 409, 414; suffering 25, 248, 267, 415 The Human Condition 90, 100 humanist 217, 251–252, 255 Hyakuta, N. 101, 102, 105 identity: Chinese 199, 201–202, 204, 210, 218, 284, 286, 292; collective 2–4, 42, 122, 132, 140, 218; cultural 282, 293–294, 345; double 225; ethnic 46, 202, 210; individual 2, 37, 39; KMT’s 281; narrative 36–37, 39–40, 42–43, 45; national 4–5, 202, 218, 220, 272, 276, 279–280, 283–285, 349; new identity, formation of 331, 336–338, 341, 349; as peace state 84; political 196–197, 202, 284, 296–298; self 83, 95; Taiwanese 280, 282–283, 293, 296, 299; of victims and perpetrators 4, 20 Ienaga, S. 30, 63 ‘Ilbe’ 338 imaginative witnessing 39–41, 43, 45 Imas, Sara 207 Immortal Regiment 375–376 Imperial Japan 92, 159, 219, 229, 240, 280 Imperial Japanese Military 41–42, 101, 212, 214, 239–240, 397 Indochina War 401, 404 industrialization: coal mines 143–144, 146–147, 149–154, 154, 163; Japan 144, 146–147, 149–151, 155, 163; shipbuilding 143–144, 146–147, 149, 151, 163; steel and iron 143–144, 146–147, 149, 151–152, 163 Institute for Historical Review 50 Internal Security Act 1960 383 Inuzuka Koreshige 201, 207 invisible neighbours 410–413 Irving, D. 49–52, 55, 57, 59 Ishihara Shintaro 102, 103 Ishimoda, S. 27, 28 Ishinomori Shōtarō 93 Israel 56, 111, 200, 203, 206–210 Ito Takeshi 19

Japan: annexation of Korea 231; capitalism 31, 127; conceptual terrain 25–26; detention camps 110–117; Hiroshima and Nagasaki 98–99; historical revisionism 62–70, 80; history on trial 49–50; Industrialization 144, 146–147, 149–151, 155, 163; involvement in Vietnam War 26; Koreans in 54–59, 153–154; Lipstadt-Irving Trial 50–51; lobby groups 52– 54; National Cemetery 78, 80, 82; Nazism influence 201; pop-culture 104–105 (see also manga); posttraumatic growth 26–32; pride 100–103; Ramseyer Papers 54–58; trauma in 120–129; use and misuse of historical source material 51–52; war dead 76–77, 83 Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho-o Tsukuru Kai) 66 Japan First Party (Nihon Daiittō) 57 Japan National Party (Nihon Kokumintō) 53–54 Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation 66 Japan Volunteer Center ( JVC) 31 Jeju 4.3 Incident 56 Jennison, R. 41 Jews: Austrian 206; Chinese 201, 206–207, 209; culture 206; European 12, 201–202, 209; history 209; massacred 207; power 201; racial extinction 200–201; refugees 199–202, 204–205, 208–209 (see also Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (SJRM)); virtue 206; as ‘wealthy people’ 201 Jiang Wen 212, 213, 215, 216, 219, 220 Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park 263–265, 267–268, 268, 270–272, 276n1 Jinhee Lee 58 Johnsen, N. 146, 152, 153 Johnson, C. 133 Joko Aishi 161 Jolovan Wham 389, 390. 392 Junpiao (military currency) 239, 244, 247 Justice for Lai Dai Han ( JLDH) 399 Kaba, T. 239, 240, 245 Kadena 137, 138 Kaifeng 201, 204 Kang Sang-jung 32 Kȃnoǧlu, U. 170 Kaohsiung Incident 263–265, 269, 273 Kawashima, T. 28 Kōdachi, N. 99 Keck, M. E. 311 kenchū-zōkan (‘dislike China, hate South Korea’) 105 Kerry, John 78 Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials 372–373 Khalkhin Gol, Battle of 370, 371–372 Kibōgaku (Social Sciences of Hope) 127 Kim Dae-jung 323, 324, 345 Kim Seok-pom 348, 350–351 Kim Shi-jong 347–350; Horizon (1957) 349

420

Index Kim, Y. 124, 125 Kim Young Sam 320, 324, 332, 336 Kinoshita Junji 29 Kisaeng tourism 31 Kishida Fumio 78, 373 Kobayashi Yumi 120, 121, 125 Koga, Y. 313 Koizumi Junichiro 6, 66, 81, 218 kokusaika (internationalization) 64–67 Komatsugawa Incident 28–30 Korea: North 27, 63, 131, 135, 279, 325–326, 332, 335, 339–341, 347–349, 359; South (see South Korea) Koreans in Japan 54–59, 153–154 Korean War 28, 228, 233, 305, 344–345, 347, 362, 373, 397, 401 Korean Women’s Volunteer Labour Corps 310 Kristallnacht (anti-Jewish pogrom) 51 Kuomintang (KMT): authorities 201; identity 281; leaders of 263; legacy of 267, 284–286; martial law 271; ‘One China’ principle 285; politicians 273; rule 274, 278, 280–281, 287, 291, 296; state tyranny in Taiwan 269; state violence 270; transitional justice 275–276; violence 281; White Terror 294, 297–298 Kuril Islands 6, 370, 373, 375–379; see also Northern Territories Kurosawa Akira 215 Kwan, Y. 395 Kwon, H. 353 Kwon, I. 361–363 labourers, forced or wartime: Chinese 143, 151, 153, 230, 305, 310, 313; in Japan 152, 154, 165, 303; Korean 53, 143–144, 146–147, 149, 151–155, 305–306, 311–313; in Kyushu 143, 149; at Mitsubishi Shipbuilding 154 LaCapra, D. 121, 122, 129 Lambek, M. 351 Latour, Bruno 351 Lee Cheuk-yan 190, 193, 194 Lee Hsien Loong 392 Lee Kuan Yew 392 Lee, Martin 190 Lee Na Young 361 Lee Tae-ho 146 Lee Teng-hui 264, 272, 273, 281, 294 legal mobilization/litigation/lawsuits 304–307, 309, 311–312, 314; citizen’s 239; classaction 173; comfort women 306, 309, 313; forced labour 306; hibakusha 309; indirect or radiating effects 304, 306, 314; information transmission and subsidy 311; by Koreans 303, 305; leprosy survivors 309, 311, 313; mechanism of brokerage 309; postwar compensation 306–307, 310, 313–314; productive effects and mechanisms 308; proliferation of 305; to raise awareness of

issue 311; against ROK government 309; venue or scale shifts 312 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 65, 68 Leung Kai-ping (Brian) 195 Levin, Carl 137 LGBTQI+ movement 188 Liaodong Peninsula 224, 226–229, 232 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) 53, 80, 100, 103, 133, 219 Lifton, R. J. 19, 20 Lin Daozhi 206 Li Peng 192 Lipstadt, D. 49–53, 59 Liu, C. 250 Li Yixing 242 Lu Chuan 215, 216, 218 Luckmann, T. 11 Lushun: history of 226; Manchuria’s Base Town 234–235; map of 225; Massacre 226–229, 234; Mausoleum of Ten Thousand Martyrs 226–229; memory sites 224–225; RussoJapanese war sites 229–230; Sino-Soviet Memorials 232–234 Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison Museum 224, 230–232, 234 Lu, Xun 47, 205 Lynch, J. F. 304 MacArthur, Douglas 42, 115 manga 99, 105, 220; changing genre of 94–96; graphic novels 91–92; narratives of defeated soldiers 89–91; narratives of soldiers in Peleliu, Palau 93–94; narratives of soldiers in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea 92–93; war narratives 91–92; war trauma in 88–89 Mangwol-dong cemetery 318–319, 332, 335–337, 341 man-made disaster see Fukushima Mao Tse-Tung 202 Mao Zedong 47, 63, 231 Marcuse, H. 259 martial law 263–264, 271–272, 278, 281–282, 318, 321–323, 327, 332 Martin, B. K. 326 Maruyama, M. 24, 28 massacre 1, 3; Cheju 344–353; cruel 101; February 28 (Massacre) victims under Lee Teng-hui’s presidency 273; Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 53–55, 57; Gwangju 325–327, 332–333; Hong Kong’s 194; Jeju 56; Lushun 226, 230, 234; 1947 2–28 Massacre 270, 292–293, 295–296, 298; My Lai massacre 399, 414; Nanjing (Nanking) 30, 63–64, 67, 83, 106, 199–200, 202, 203, 208, 215–219, 217, 219, 227, 239–240; Sanzao 239, 242; Shanghai 298; in Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 224; 1989 Tiananmen 196;

421

Index visibility and commemoration of 227–229, 234 Matsui Yayori 31 May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement 318–320, 322–327, 330–333, 334, 335–339, 341 ‘May 18 National Cemetery’ 336 McAdams, D. P. 40 McCain, John 137 McDonald, K. 64 McLean, K. C. 40 mechanisms, causal 304, 306–307, 314 Medvedev, Dmitry 371, 375, 377 Meiji - Restoration, modernization 128, 147, 159–161, 165–166 meltdowns 169–170, 173–174 memorial(s)/memorial parks 339–340, 340, 345; comfort women 248; Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park 263–265, 267–268, 268, 270–272, 276n1; landscape 228–231, 234; multinational 82; new memorial 74, 76–77, 80, 82–83, 176; Peace Memorial Park 132; representations 339, 346, 348; Sino-Soviet Friendship 232–234; sites 224, 228–229, 232, 234, 272, 274, 360; war memorial 73, 75, 77–78, 82, 232, 234, 369 memory: alliance 370–371, 374–375, 379; collective 3, 23, 80, 84, 111, 117, 122, 176, 216, 279, 283–285, 331, 341, 346, 353, 383, 395; diasporic 346, 348, 353; difficult 348– 350; embedded 397; ethics of 353; historical 24, 149, 218–219, 285, 291–292, 324, 373, 414; Holocaust 202, 209; 4.3 memory 345– 346, 348; memory boom 224–225; place of 330, 339; politics 5, 340, 345, 353, 369–370, 374, 378; postwar 395, 403; public 111, 177, 212, 248, 303, 319; sub-empire of 395, 398, 400, 402, 404; traumatic 69, 340, 349, 384, 390, 409 memory classroom 333–335, 339, 341 memory diplomacy 370–371, 374 memory wars 6, 66, 69, 84, 369–371, 379, 395 mental illness 356 military (military service) 110, 356–357, 362–363 military comfort women 37–39, 41 military conscription, legal, forced 303, 360–362, 364 Miller, John 215 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 77 misogyny (misogynist) 43, 356–361, 364 Mitsubishi 18, 143, 149; A6M Zero 101; Hashima 151–153; Nagasaki Shipyard 144, 149–151; Shipbuilding 154 Mitsui 143–144, 149, 151–153, 155, 164 Miyaji Naoko 125 Miyazaki Hayao 101, 102

Mizuki Shigeru 91–93, 95 Moon Jae-in 155, 319, 320, 324, 334, 338, 397, 400 Morishima, M. 32 Morris-Suzuki, T. 67 Murakami Ryu 128 Murayama Tomiichi 64 museums 158; about Nanjing Massacre 63; commemoration 224, 264, 273; in Fukushima Prefecture 174; Hiroshima Peace Museum 122; Hong Kong’s 4 June Massacre 194; JingMei museum 267, 270–271; Lushun RussoJapanese Prison Museum 231–232, 234; Nanjing’s Comfort Women Museum 208; National Holocaust Memorial Museum 202; National Human Rights Museum 263, 264, 272–273; Oka Masaharu Peace Memorial Museum 154; Okinawan Prefectural Peace Museum 131, 132, 140; political prisoner’s farewell letter 269; Russia Prison Site Museum 2019 231; SJRM (see Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (SJRM)); Tagawa City Coal Mining Museum 151; Yushukan war museum 6, 94; Zhuhai Museum 239–240 My Lai massacre 399, 414 Nagasaki: atomic bombings of 3, 12, 19, 20, 62, 101, 105, 122, 154; Shipbuilding complex 143–144, 147, 148, 149–152; survivors (hibakusha) 13 Nakasone Yasuhiro 64, 65 Nakazawa, K. 93 Nanjing Massacre Memorial 200, 202–203, 208 Nanjing’s Comfort Women Museum 208 Nanking (Nanjing) Massacre 30, 63–64, 67, 83, 106, 199–200, 202, 203, 208, 215–219, 217, 219, 227, 239–240 narrative identity 36–37, 39–40, 42–43, 45 narrative, of war 89, 91–92, 237–239 National Cemetery 85n1; Chidorigafuchi 73, 74, 77–77, 79, 81, 81, 83–84; Japan’s 78, 80, 82; ‘May 18 National Cemetery’ 336; see also cemetery National Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC) 202 National Human Rights Museum (Taiwan) 263, 264, 272–273 national identity 4–5, 202, 218, 220, 272, 276, 279–280, 283–285, 349 nationalism: Asian 29; Chinese 82, 199–201, 228; rise of 64; Russian 379; victimhood 69 ‘National Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead’ 79 ‘natural independence’ generation 292 Nazi/Nazism: concentration camps 12, 205; Germany 153, 203; Holocaust 199–200, 203; influence on Japan 201

422

Index NeJaime, D. 307 Netanyahu, Benjamin 208 ‘New Southbound Policy’ 286 Nguyen, Du 412 Nguyen-Vo, T. 397 NIMBYism (not-in-my-backyard) 135 9/11 event 388 Nomugi Pass 162–163 Nora, P. 39, 346 Northern Territories 6, 370–371; see also Kuril Islands Nozoe Fumiaki 135 nuclear: accident 169–171, 173–178; disaster 122, 127, 171, 173–174, 176–180, 375; energy 169, 173–175, 178, 296; power 47, 169, 171–176, 178; reactors 127, 169–170, 172–173; refugees 170, 171–172, 175, 177; weapons 85, 98–99, 103, 105 Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum 174, 176, 180 Nye, J. 371 Obama, Barack 126 Oda, M. 30 Oka Masaharu Peace Memorial Museum 154 Okinawa: Battle of Okinawa 138; betrayals 131–134; burden sharing 134–136; commemoration of 138–140; Cornerstone of Peace, Itoman 139; and democracy 134; Henoko project 136, 136–137; military forces 401; Okinawan Prefectural Museum 132; second ‘National Cemetery’ 85n1; shared values and flawed strategy 134; Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) 133; US Civil Administration (USCA) military 133; war memorials 234–235 Okinawan Prefectural Peace Museum 131, 132, 140 Okuma Shigenobu 160 ‘One China’ principle 285 ‘One Country, Two Systems’ formula 189 Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (Sōin gyokusai seyo!) 92 Ooka, S. 29; The Fires in the Plain 90 Otsuka, H. 28 Oura Bay 136–137 Palmer, D. 166 Park Chung Hee 319, 320, 332, 340, 397 Park Geun-hye 311, 319, 320, 324, 331, 333, 336 Peace Memorial Park 132 Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise 93–94 People’s Action Party (PAP) 385 People’s Republic of China 28 performance principle 259 Petty, C. 409 PHD Association 31

photographs 172, 177, 205, 208, 311, 319, 322–323, 325, 327, 372, 375 The Pianist (movie) 203 place-making 331, 333, 335, 338–340 place-of-memory 330, 339 popular culture 5, 88–91, 95, 101, 103, 106, 203, 207, 292–295, 369, 372 popular manga 88, 90–92 Port Arthur 227, 229 postmemory 346, 348, 353 posttraumatic growth 23–33 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 20, 24, 123–125, 386–387, 397, 408 post-war economic miracle 161 postwar responsibility 26, 305 Pride (movie) 102 Princeton Institute for Asian Studies 68 prisoners-of-war 62, 113, 143, 147, 151, 153; allied forces 111, 143, 147, 151, 153, 237; American 115; Australian 116; British 103; Dutch 114 propaganda 67, 83, 155, 165, 205, 229, 233, 244, 270, 331, 341, 369; Chinese 101–102; Moscow’s 373; Russian 370, 372 punishment: of citizens 384; corporal 385; of individuals 385, 387–388; role of 45–46 Pushkov, Alexei 378 Putin, Vladimir 4, 369–379 Qian Rui 250, 252–258 Rabe, John 203 Rabin, Yitzhak 203, 208 radiating effects 304–307, 314 Rajah, J. 388 Ramseyer, J. M. 54–59, 68 rape 54, 63, 69, 134, 138, 215, 245, 358, 399, 401, 404 Reagan, Ronald 65 reconciliation 2, 6, 7, 23, 26, 30; between Chinese and Japanese people 216; crossborder 304, 308, 312–313; definition 35–36; vs. identification with traumatized individuals 44–45; intercommunal 409; narrative identities 42–43; punishment as 45–46; Reconciliation Room 219; and recovery from trauma 35, 40 Rees, A. 254, 255 referendum 131, 137, 378 Reischauer, E. 133 Renisch, George 209 Repeta, L. 137 Republic of China (ROC) 278–281, 283–286 Requiem for Battleship Yamato 90 Reynaud, B. 212

423

Index right-wing: activism 50, 52, 239; backlash movement in Japan 43; bloggers 56, 58; extremists 325–327; lobby group 53; ‘monolithic perceptions’ of 103; populism 220; youth organizations 344 Rivers, W. H. R. 408 Roh Moo-hyun 305, 324, 345 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 53 Rose, C. 218 Russia 1, 4; annexation of Crimea 374; constitutional changes 378; defeat in RussoJapanese War of 135, 229; Federal Security Service (FSB) and Foreign Ministry 373; Great Patriotic War 369; historical narratives 370; invasion of Ukraine 135, 369, 373; Japan’s annexation of Korea 231; Khabarovsk trials 373; memory alliances 370–371, 374; military aircraft 6; parliamentary elections 377; relationships with Mongolia and Japan 371; relations with former Soviet and Warsaw Pact member states 369; Sputnik News Agency 372; two-island approach 375; WWII legacy 369, 377, 378 Russia Prison Site Museum 2019 231 Russo-Japanese War 99, 155, 160, 224, 228–229, 229, 234, 376 Sakurai Makoto 57 San Francisco Peace Treaty 237, 376 Sanzao: comfort stations 245–248; comfort women 246–248; establishment of airbase 240, 244; Japanese occupation of 239; 1938 map 238; massacres 239–240, 242; military control and cultural domination 243–245; people’s wartime immigration 239; sexual violence 245–248; traumatic history of 239–240 Sasakawa Ryoichi 65–67 Sataki, Y. 164 Schilling, M. 102 Schindler’s List (movie) 203, 205, 216 Schlund-Vials, C. 401 Schnepp, Otto 206 Schulman, S. 44–47 science fiction 99, 250–251 Senaga Kamejiro 133, 137 Senjinkun (Field Service Code of the Imperial Japanese Military) 89, 93 Seoul 146, 158, 232, 326–327, 333, 338, 350, 356–358, 396, 400 Seraphim, F. 45, 47 settlements 29, 153, 201, 206, 237, 239, 307, 312–313, 347, 349, 377, 379, 410, 412–413 Sewol Ferry Disaster 330–334, 330–335, 333–334, 335, 338–341, 340, 359 sex tourism 31, 312

sexual slavery 3, 31, 62–64, 69, 154, 219, 303, 364 sexual violence 23, 125, 135, 138, 237, 245–246, 307, 312, 356, 359, 399 Shanghai: attitudes in coexistence 220; authorities 204; Chinese city 206; comfort stations 245; cosmopolitan 209; Massacre 298; unique humanitarian act 208 Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (SJRM): establishment of 199; experience of 201–202, 206; global significance 208–209; history of 199; Jewish presence in China 204–205; narrating story of 204; origins of 202–204; people’s diplomacy 204; Shanghai’s Huoshan Park 203 Shanghai Jewish Refugee Zone 202, 204, 207 Shapla Neer 31 shared values 134, 137, 140, 256 Shibusawa Eiichi 160 Shinto 41, 73, 75–77, 218 Shorrock, T. 325 Shunmuganathan, Rubaashini 392 Sikkink, K. 311 silk/silk mill: establishment of modern silk mills 158–160; European silk sector 159; in Japanese history 158–159, 163; Japanese silk 159, 163; production infrastructure 159; raw silk, production of 163; Tomioka Silk Mill 158–160, 163–166; trauma of young female workers 160–163, 165 Singapore: case of Subhas Govin Prabhakar Nair 389–390; Colonial Penal Architecture 384–385; emergency legislation 384; existing legislation 388; fight for control 390–391; Man Protests 390; PAP party 385; policing and punishment 392; political opposition 391–392; prolonged impact of political detention 383–388; ruling political party 383; state violence 387 Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 189 Sino-Japanese War 155, 160, 212, 224, 226–228, 230 sites of memory 255, 346 Slade, T. 159 Sleigh, C. 254, 255 Smelser, N. 3 social justice 46, 123, 205, 283, 327, 352 social media 4, 193, 220, 252, 295, 326, 340, 359, 389–390, 404 Social Networking Services (SNS) 356 soft power 221, 371, 378 Songhu (battle) 203 Soong, Ching-ling 205 South Korea: authoritarianism 5–6, 305, 331, 335; Cheju April 3 Incident/Cheju massacre/ Cheju Commission 344–353, 353n1; and China 100–101, 231; comfort women issue

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Index 69; criticisms 143, 146; democratization of 318–319, 324, 336, 351; and East Timor 285, 288; gender-based violence 1, 356, 357, 358, 396, 399–401; ‘Gwangju in 1980’ (see Gwangju); ideological censorship 347; JapanSouth Korea normalization treaty 29–31, 144, 146; male-only military conscription 361–362; May 18 Democratization Movement 318, 330, 332–333, 335; misogyny 358, 364; National Day 155; radiating effects 304–307, 314; Revised Romanization 328; rightwing extremists 325; Sewol Ferry Disaster 333–334; truth commission 279; US THAAD system 232; and war in Vietnam 396–399 South Korean Labor Party (SKLP) 344, 348 South Vietnam 396–397, 401, 403, 410 spirit possession 345–346, 348, 352–353, 412 spirits 351; American 411; ancestral 352, 353, 411; of dead 411, 413; displaced 412; nonaligned 353; placeless 411–412; sacred spirits (gunshin) 94; as social persons 352; Vietnamese 410 Sputnik News Agency 372 Stalin, Joseph 369, 372, 374, 376 State Shinto 73, 75–76 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) 133–134 Steans, J. 363 structural violence 35, 40–41, 43–47, 125 Sugihara, Chiune 203–205 Sunflower Movement 275, 282–284, 292, 296–297 Sun, Ke 201, 205 Sun Yat-sen 187, 201, 205 support groups (shien dantai) 309 Suzuki, M. 29 Sykora, J. 218 Synolakis, C. 170 System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) 177–178 Szechenyi, Nicholas 135 Tagawa City Coal Mining Museum 151 Taiwan: Cold War 403; commemoration 267; Council for Cultural Affairs 263, 266; identity 280, 282–283, 293, 296, 299; National Human Rights Museum 263, 264, 272–273; TJ (see transitional justice (TJ)); White Terror (see White Terror (Taiwan)) Takahashi, S. 246 Takeda, K. 91, 93, 95 Tamaki, Denny 133, 137 Tan, G. 241 Tedeschi, R. G. 24 textbooks (Chinese) 283 Tezuka Osamu 93 Third Indochina War 404

Thunberg, C. P. 159 thyroid 171, 173 Tilanqiao 203 Tilly, C. 309 Tojo Hideki 99, 102 Tokugawa: Bakumatsu period 144, 147, 149; Shogunate 144, 150, 159; World Heritage Industrial Sites 145 Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) 169–170, 172–176, 178–180 Tokyo Trials (1946–1948) 81 Tokyo War Crimes 101 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier 73, 74–76, 83 Tomioka Nikki 163, 164 Tomioka Silk Mill 158–160, 163–166 Tomiyama, T. 31, 35–47 Tong, Z. 238, 239 Torpey, J. C. 306 Toyonaga, K. 312 transitional justice (TJ) 1, 46, 264, 267, 269, 273–276; advocacy movements 345; and commemorations 323–325; distinction from China 285–286; domestic legitimation 283–285; early efforts at 281–282; history of 291; inauguration under Tsai 283; international legitimation 286; to legitimate new regimes 279–280; litigation on 325–327; outcomes and prospects 286–288; regional and international dimensions of 283–284; Taiwanization 282–283 Transitional Justice Commission (TJC) (Taiwan) 264, 271–272, 274–275, 278–280, 283–288, 291 trauma culture 88 trauma-informed approach to therapy 35 trauma project 409 trauma, repair of 35, 346 traumatic memory 5, 200, 237, 330, 340, 349, 358, 384, 386, 390, 409, 414–415 Treaty of Nanjing 201 Treaty of San Francisco 133 Treaty of Shimonoseki 228–229 Triple Intervention of 1895 228 truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC) 279–281, 283, 288 Tsai, Ing-wen 264, 275, 278, 287, 291, 297 Tsukuru-kai see Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho-o Tsukuru Kai) Tsukuru-kai ( Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform) 66 tsunami 11, 124, 127–128, 169–170, 174, 176–177, 179–180 Tsurumi, E. P. 161, 165 Tsurumi, S. 29 Tsurumi, Y. 31

425

Index Tsutsui, K. 122, 123, 126, 307 228 Incident, Tokyo firebombing 278, 280–282, 284–285 Umbrella Movement 191, 191–193, 298 Umehara Takeshi 82 UNESCO 6, 143–144, 146, 149, 155, 158, 163–166, 203–205, 324 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 287 USA (Holocaust commemoration in) 199–200, 209 US Civil Administration (USCA) military 133 US military 112, 115, 131, 133–134, 136–138, 140 US Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system 232 Uyghurs 200 victim consciousness 20 Vietnam War: afterlife traumas 413–414; Cam Re villagers 409–411; ‘combat zones’ 399; gender-based violence 399–400; Japan’s involvement in 26; overarching diagnostic approach 124; post-traumatic stress disorder 408; ROK government 309, 399; and South Korea 396–399; trans-Pacific conception 395; traumatic memories of 414–415; US involvement in 29, 395, 402; violence 410, 413 visual documentation 319, 322, 326–327 Vittorio Emanuele 75 Wada, Ei 163–165 Wada, H. 32 Wang Zheng 200 war atrocities/crimes 46, 63–66, 88, 101–102, 104–105, 110–117, 153, 231, 238, 312, 370, 372–373, 396, 398, 401 war cemeteries 75, 82 war dead: Allied Occupation of Japan 73; Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery 73; commemorating 74, 76, 81–83, 229; Japan’s 76–77, 83; national ceremonies for 78–81; in Vietnam 4; during WWI 74 ‘war of aggression’ 83 War of Resistance against Japan see Anti-Japan War (AJW) war responsibility (sensō sekinin) 26 war trauma genre 89, 95; see also manga Waste Tide (Chen) 251 Watanabe, N. 57 Webb, Jim 137 White Terror (Taiwan) 280–281, 285; artistic freedom vs. victim agency 267; cases 271; commemoration 297; commodification of trauma 295–296; history 264, 266, 271–274, 276, 291–292; in Hong Kong 298; and Indie Music 296–298; KMT’s 298, 299; narrative 270; in pop culture 291–295; trauma

267–272; victims 271, 273, 274, 293, 295, 297; Yu Wen-Fu controversy 264–267 woman/womanhood/women 357; comfort (see comfort women); commemorating 43, 356; conscripts 364; Dutch 63; empowerment 360–361; forced recruitment 49, 53; Japanese 31, 43, 49, 53, 161, 312; Korean 38–39, 55–56, 110, 154–155, 311, 359–360, 362, 397; lifetime trauma 69; murdered 28, 295, 357–358, 360–361; prostitution of 63, 161, 247; rape 63, 240; right-wing 53; Senji Josei magazine 165; in sexual slavery 63, 154; violence against 43, 63, 69, 125, 307 Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Sexual Slavery (Tokyo, December 2000) 94 World Heritage controversies, sites 145, 147, 148, 150, 153, 155, 163–164, 166 World War II 1, 4–6, 75, 83, 85, 131, 147, 149, 163, 165, 212, 215, 217–219, 221, 305, 344, 369–371, 373–379 Wu’er Kaixi 192 Xi Jinping 4, 200, 204, 205, 207, 220, 229, 232, 286, 287, 293, 374 Xinjiang 209–210 Yad Vashem 200, 206 Yamada Muneki 105 Yamada, S. 55 Yamaguchi, T. 43 Yamamoto, S. 160–162 Yamashiro Hiroji 137 Yang, F. 242 Yasue Norihiro 201 Yasukuni Shrine 64, 66, 73, 75–77, 80–83, 94, 218, 239 Yawata Steel Mill 144 Yoon Suk Yeol 341 Yoshida, T. 65 Yoshida, Y. 94 Yoshikawa Eiji 29 Yoshimi, Y. 63, 247 Young, A. 408, 414 Yushukan war museum 6, 94 Yu Wen-fu 264–267, 272, 275 zaibatsu 149 Zainichi: difficult memory 348–350; nihilism 348, 350–351; silence 348–350; spiritual bondage 348, 352–353 Zeng, D. 247 Zeng, T. 240, 241 Zhang, Y. 213, 215–219 Zhong, Q. 243, 246, 247 Zhuhai Museum 239–240 Zhukov, Gregory 371 zone of total destruction (ZTD) 13, 15

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